Quote

I think you will agree that I am alive in every part of this book turn back twenty, thirty, one hundred pages - I am back there. That is why I hate the story characters are not snakes that they must shed their skins on every page - there can only be one action: what a man is. When you have understood this, you will be through with novels.

Kenneth Patchen

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Kenneth Patchen
Age: 60 †
Born: 1911
Born: December 13
Died: 1972
Died: January 8
Author
Painter
Poet
Writer
Niles
Ohio
Kenneth Patchen
Thinking
Character
Turn
Skins
Back
Alive
Twenties
Book
Turns
Pages
Snakes
Must
Story
Agree
Shed
Writing
Hate
Characters
Novels
Every
Action
Understood
Page
Men
Stories
Hundred
Thirty
Think
Part
Novel
Twenty

More quotes by Kenneth Patchen

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God must have loved the People in Power, for he made them so very like their own image of him.
Kenneth Patchen
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What is a 'thing'? All is movement, a flowing. How stupid it is to speak of the 'mind'. There is a body there is a mind: they are mixed up together. Shakespeare with a hole in his sock will not write the sonnet of a Shakespeare with socks intact.
Kenneth Patchen
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Everyman is me. I am his brother. No man is my enemy. I am Everyman and he is in and of me. This is my faith, my strength, my deepest hope, and my only belief.
Kenneth Patchen
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Caring is the only daring.
Kenneth Patchen
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'THIS ROOM HAS MYSTERY LIKE A TRANCE' This room has mystery like a trance Of wine forget-me-nots of you Are chair and couch, the books your Fingers touched. And now that you Are absent here the silence scrapes A secret rust from everything While sudden wreaths of sorrow's Dust uncover emptiness like halls To stumble through, and terror falls
Kenneth Patchen
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Dogs with broken legs are shot men with broken souls write through the night.
Kenneth Patchen
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Snow is the only one of us that leaves no tracks.
Kenneth Patchen
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I think people need a little joy and humor as well as commitment in their lives
Kenneth Patchen
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It is fully practical to create that which has form in the silence. The noise art makes is usually heard by those whose lives listen to god. It is not adviseable to cheat that which has no other stake than the deeps and brights of all man.
Kenneth Patchen
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O take heart, my brothers. Even now... with every leader & every resource & every strategy of every nation on Earth arrayed against Her - Even now, O even now, my brothers, Life is in no danger of losing the argument! - For after all .... (as will be shown) She has only to change the subject.
Kenneth Patchen
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In literature as in life, to conform to anything is to knuckle under to your inferiors.
Kenneth Patchen
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Now is then's only tomorrow.
Kenneth Patchen
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In the love of a man and a woman is the look of God looking.
Kenneth Patchen
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Think enough and you won't know anything.
Kenneth Patchen
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Law and order embrace on hate's border.
Kenneth Patchen
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That which is not daring is nothing.
Kenneth Patchen
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There are so many little dyings How do we know which one of them is death?
Kenneth Patchen
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For greatness is only the drayhorse that coaxes The built cart out and where we go is reason. But genius is an enormous littleness, a trickling Of heart that covers alike the hare and the hunter.
Kenneth Patchen
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The question is not: do we believe in God? but rather: does God believe in us? And the answer is: only an unbeliever could have created our image of God and only a false God could be satisfied with it.
Kenneth Patchen
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I don't consider myself to be a painter. I think of myself as someone who has used the medium of painting in an attempt to extend - give an extra dimension to - the medium of words. It happens very often my writing with a pen is interrupted with my writing with a brush - but I think of both as writing.
Kenneth Patchen