Delmore Schwartz

“Major writing is to say what has been seen, so that it need never be said again.”

“Existentialism means that no one else can take a bath for you.”

“Love is the most difficult and dangerous form of courage. Courage is the most desperate, admirable and noble kind of love.”

“Time is the school in which we learn, time is the fire in which we burn.”

“All literature is an effort at the formal character of the epigram.”

“Order and disorder, form and formless must have profound psychological roots, nervous roots.”

“To be the child of immigrants from Eastern Europe is in itself a special kind of experience; and an important one to an author. He has heard two languages through childhood, the one spoken with ease at home, and the other spoken with ease in the streets and at school, but spoken poorly at home.”

“All poets' wives have rotten lives Their husbands look at them like knives.”

“I am of Russian-Jewish distraction.”

“No," said Jacob, "I don't mean to say that this life is just a party, any kind of party. It is a wedding, the most important kind of party, full of joy, fear, hope, and ignorance. And at this party there are enough places and parts for everyone, and if no one can play every part, yet everyone can come to the party, everyone can come to the wedding feast, and anyone who does not know that he is at a wedding feast just does not see what is in front of him. He might as well be dead if he does not know that the world is a wedding.”

“Sometimes even paranoids have enemies.”

“I admired my father very much... at the age of sixteen. But now I see that he was a brutal and cruel man, - but not without remorse, and that was what tortured us, his alternations.”

“The Jew is at once alienated and indestructible; he is in exile from his own country and in exile even from himself, yet he survives the annihilating fury of history.”

“Time is the school in which we learn,Time is the fire in which we burn.”

“What was the freedom to which the adult human being rose in the morning, if each act was held back or inspired by the overpowering ghost of a little child?”

“In dreams begin responsibilities.”

“I always cause those who are near to me more suffering than pleasure.”