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History, like a badly constructed concert hall, has occasional dead spots where the music can't be heard.

Archibald MacLeish

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Archibald MacLeish
Age: 89 †
Born: 1892
Born: May 7
Died: 1982
Died: April 20
Lawyer
Librarian
Playwright
Poet
Poet Lawyer
University Teacher
Writer
Glencoe
Illinois
Badly
Spots
Dead
Constructed
Heard
Concert
History
Hall
Music
Occasional
Like
Concerts
Halls

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The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.
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Races didn't bother the Americans. They were something a lot better than any race. They were a People. They were the first self-constituted, self-declared, self-created People in the history of the world.
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The perversion of the mind is only possible when those who should be heard in its defence are silent.
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The one man who should never attempt an explanation of a poem is its author. If the poem can be improved by it's author's explanations it never should have been published, and if the poem cannot be improved by its author's explanations the explanations are scarcely worth reading.
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The American journey has not ended. America is always still to build ... West is a country in the mind, and so eternal.
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As things are now going the peace we make, what peace we seem to be making, will be a peace of oil, a peace of gold, a peace of shipping, a peace in brief.without moral purpose or human interest.
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Journalism is concerned with events, poetry with feelings. Journalism is concerned with the look of the world, poetry with the feel of the world.
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A poem should be wordless As the flight of birds.
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A Poem should be palpable and mute As a globed fruit.
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See the world as it truly is, small and blue, beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats.
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The map of America is a map of endlessness, of opening out, of forever and ever. No man's face would make you think of it but his hope might, his courage might.
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What is more important in a library than anything else-than everything else-is the fact that it exists.
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The roots of the grass strain, Tighten, the earth is rigid, waits-he is waiting- And suddenly, and all at once, the rain!
Archibald MacLeish
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Poets... are literal-minded men who will squeeze a word till it hurts.
Archibald MacLeish
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Young poets are advised by their elders to avoid the practice of journalism as they would wet socks and gin before breakfast.
Archibald MacLeish
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Writers . . . write to give reality to experience.
Archibald MacLeish
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The task of man is not to discover new worlds, but to discover his own world in terms of human comprehension and beauty.
Archibald MacLeish
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The infantile cowardice of our time which demands an external pattern, a nonhuman authority.
Archibald MacLeish
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Poetry is the art of understanding what it is to be alive.
Archibald MacLeish
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There are those, I know, who will say that the liberation of humanity, the freedom of man and mind, is nothing but a dream. They are right. It is the American dream.
Archibald MacLeish