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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
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Writer
Hailey
Idaho
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound
Ezra Loomis Pound
Ability
Vacuum
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Definite
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Exist
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Literature
Vacuums

More quotes by Ezra Pound

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In case I conk out, this is provisionally what I have to do: I must clarify obscurities I must make clearer definite ideas or dissociations. I must find a verbal formula to combat the rise of brutality--the principle of order versus the split atom.
Ezra Pound
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See, they return ah, see the tentative Movements, and the slow feet, The trouble in the pace and the uncertain Wavering! See, they return, one, and by one, With fear, as half-awakened As if the snow should hesitate And murmur in the wind, and half turn back.
Ezra Pound
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It is better to present one image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous work. Image...that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.
Ezra Pound
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I dunno what my 23 infantile years in America signify. I left as soon as motion was autarchic -- I mean my motion.
Ezra Pound
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Be not cheap or mediocre in desiring.
Ezra Pound
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The serious artist must be as open as nature. Nature does not give all of herself in a paragraph. She is rugged and not set apart into discreet categories.
Ezra Pound
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To say that a state cannot pursue its aims because there is no money, is like saying that an engineer cannot build roads, because there are no kilometers.
Ezra Pound
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The technique of infamy is to start two lies at once and get people arguing heatedly over which is the truth.
Ezra Pound
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install me in any profession Save this damn'd profession of writing, where one needs one's brains all the time.
Ezra Pound
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What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage
Ezra Pound
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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.
Ezra Pound
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A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression.
Ezra Pound
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I would hold the rosy, slender fingers of the dawn for you.
Ezra Pound
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I think an alliance with Stalin's Russia is rotten.
Ezra Pound
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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.
Ezra Pound
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Wars in old times were made to get slaves. The modern implement of imposing slavery is debt.
Ezra Pound
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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.
Ezra Pound
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The Image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy.
Ezra Pound
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There is natural ignorance and there is artificial ignorance. I should say at the present moment the artificial ignorance is about eighty-five per cent.
Ezra Pound
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The intellect is a very nice whirligig toy, but how people take it seriously is more than I can understand.
Ezra Pound