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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
Spots
Dead
Constructed
Heard
Concert
History
Hall
Music
Occasional
Like
Concerts
Halls
Badly

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If the poem can be improved by the author's explanations, it never should have been published.
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The business of the law is to make sense of the confusion of what we call human life - to reduce it to order but at the same time to give it possibility, scope, even dignity.
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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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Poets... are literal-minded men who will squeeze a word till it hurts.
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There is only one thing more painful than learning from experience and that is not learning from experience.
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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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Man can live his truth, his deepest truth, but cannot speak it.
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What is wrong is not the great discoveries of science—information is always better than ignorance, no matter what information or what ignorance. What is wrong is the belief behind the information, the belief that information will change the world. It won’t.
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Children know the grace of god better than most of us. They see the world the way the morning brings it back to them new and born and fresh and wonderful.
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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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Freedom is the right to one's dignity as a man.
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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.
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A poem should be wordless As the flight of birds.
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America is promises to take! America is promises to us to take them.
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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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The infantile cowardice of our time which demands an external pattern, a nonhuman authority.
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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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A real writer learns from earlier writers the way a boy learns from an apple orchard -- by stealing what he has a taste for, and can carry off
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There is no dusk to be, There is no dawn that was, Only there's now, and now, And the wind in the grass.
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To separate journalism and poetry, therefore-history and poetry-to set them up at opposite ends of the world of discourse, is to separate seeing from the feel of seeing, emotion from the acting of emotion, knowledge from the realization of knowledge.
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