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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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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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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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The task of man is not to discover new worlds, but to discover his own world in terms of human comprehension and beauty.
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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 perversion of the mind is only possible when those who should be heard in its defence are silent.
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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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Poetry is the art of understanding what it is to be alive.
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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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Poets... are literal-minded men who will squeeze a word till it hurts.
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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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Freedom is the right to one's dignity as a man.
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Love becomes the ultimate answer to the ultimate human question.
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Writers . . . write to give reality to experience.
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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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If the poem can be improved by the author's explanations, it never should have been published.
Archibald MacLeish
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It is not in the world of ideas that life is lived. Life is lived for better or worse in life, and to a man in life, his life can be no more absurd than it can be the opposite of absurd, whatever that opposite may be.
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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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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
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A poem should not mean but be.
Archibald MacLeish
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A poem should be wordless As the flight of birds.
Archibald MacLeish