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Literature does not exist in a vacuum. Writers as such have a definite social function exactly proportional to their ability as writers. This is their main use.

Ezra Pound

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Ezra Pound
Age: 87 †
Born: 1885
Born: October 30
Died: 1972
Died: November 1
Autobiographer
Composer
Economist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Poet
Radio Personality
Translator
Writer
Hailey
Idaho
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound
Ezra Loomis Pound
Doe
Writers
Exactly
Function
Exist
Proportional
Literature
Vacuums
Ability
Vacuum
Use
Definite
Social
Main

More quotes by Ezra Pound

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Bureaucrats are a pox. They are supposed to be necessary. Certain chemicals in the body are supposed to be necessary to life, but cause death the moment they increase beyond a suitable limit
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Poetry is a very complex art.... It is an art of pure sound bound in through an art of arbitrary and conventional symbols.
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Genius... is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one.
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Take the serious side of Disney, the Confucian side of Disney. It's in having taken an ethoswhere you have the values of courage and tenderness asserted in a way that everybody can understand. You have got an absolute genius there. You have got a greater correlation of nature than you have had since the time of Alexander the Great.
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The eyes of this dead lady speak to me For here was love, was not to be drowned out. And here desire, not to be kissed away. The eyes of this dead lady speak to me.
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Science is unpoetic only to minds jaundiced with sentiment and romanticism . . . the great masters of the past boasted all they could of it and found it magical.
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Speak against unconscious oppression, Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative, Speak against bonds.
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If the individual, or heretic, gets hold of some essential truth, or sees some error in the system being practiced, he commits so many marginal errors himself that he is worn out before he can establish his point.
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Learn of the green world what can be thy place In scaled invention or true artistry
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Pay no attention to the criticism of men who have never themselves written a notable work.
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A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.
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We do NOT know the past in chronological sequence. It may be convenient to lay it out anesthetized on the table with dates pasted on here and there, but what we know we know by ripples and spirals eddying out from us and from our own time.
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A general loathing of a gang or sect usually has some sound basis in instinct.
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In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries.
Ezra Pound
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What thou lovest well remains.
Ezra Pound
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Yet the companions of the Muses will keep their collective nose in my books And weary with historical data, they will turn to my dance tune.
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It doesn't matter which leg of your table you make first, so long as the table has four legs and will stand up solidly when you have finished it.
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Good art however 'immoral' is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.
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Liberty is not a right but a duty.
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Either move or be moved.
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