Harry > Harry's Quotes

“Yes, my eyes are closed to your light. I am a beast, a nigger. But I can be saved. You are sham niggers, you, maniacs, fiends, misers. Merchant, you are a nigger; Judge, you are a nigger; General, you are a nigger; Emperor, old itch, you are a nigger: you have drank of the untaxed liquor of Satan’s still.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell and The Drunken Boat

“Perhaps the flowers appreciate the full significance of it. They are not cowards, like men. Some flowers glory in death--certainly the Japanese cherry blossoms do, as they freely surrender themselves to the winds. Anyone who has stood before the fragrant avalanche at Yoshino or Arashiyama must have realized this. For a moment they hover like bejewelled clouds and dance above the crystal streams; then, as they sail away on the laughing waters, they seem to say: "Farewell, O Spring! We are on to eternity.”
― Okakura Kakuzō, The Book of Tea

“A sceptic can no more be refuted than the Being of truth can be 'proved'. And if any sceptic of the kind who denies the truth, factically is, he does not even need to be refuted. In so far as he is, and has understood himself in this Being, he has obliterated Dasein in the desperation of suicide; and in doing so, he has also obliterated truth.”
― Heidegger, Martin

“You think I'm a sissy?
I will sodomize you and face-fuck you.”
― Catullus, The Complete Poems

“I believe in some parts of Nietzsche,
I prefer to read him in sections;
In my heart of hearts I suspect him
of being the one modern christian;
Take notice I never have read him
except in English selections.”
― Ezra Pound

“PARACELSUS IN EXCELSIS

Being no longer human, why should I
Pretend humanity or don the frail attire?
Men have I known and men, but never one
Was grown so free an essence, or become
So simply element as what I am.
The mist goes from the mirror and I see.
Behold! the world of forms is swept beneath-
Turmoil grown visible beneath our peace,
And we that are grown formless, rise above-
Fluids intangible that have been men,
We seem as statues round whose high-risen base
Some overflowing river is run mad,
In us alone the element of calm.”
― Ezra Pound, Personæ: The Shorter Poems

“Classical education" · what do people see in it? Something that is useless beyond rendering a period of
military service unnecessary and securing a degree!”
― Nietzsche

“It will be seen that Mr. Wyndham Lewis is right, I am an individual so lacking in personal character, principles, etc., that I am ready to take up with Arnaut Daniel, Arnold Dolmetsch, Propertius, or any photographer in search of abstract design, or a modus of presenting forms moving, and moreover, I remain unrepentant.”
― Ezra Pound, Machine Art and Other Writings: The Lost Thought of the Italian Years

“I believe I am in Hell, therefore I am.”
― Arthur Rimbaud

“I don’t remember well, and in fact I know nothing absolutely nothing at all, about the women I have loved.'

Papan answered: That simply means that you have never loved. You simply have no idea of love as an absolute concept. Loving is knowing. It is also like a crime since it involves death, burial, and resurrection. Love is something very serious. Today it is completely forgotten.

Love in fact is a strange and secret chemistry, in which the androgynous is born. This is true and complete love; everything else is different. Have you ever noticed how impossible it was to fuse yourself with the person you thought you loved, even though sleeping in the same bed? There is always something separating you, a thread of air, a different dream. Can the lovers be truly united if each one dreams a different dream? If you ever begin to dream the same dreams as your love, then you will be able to create the new star, the star of Him-Her, El-Ella.”
― Miguel Serrano, The Ultimate Flower

“This sextant consists of a list of books with brief indications of what he thought them good for. At the head were ‘the Four Books’ of Confucius and Mencius, these providing an all-sufficient guide, for ‘a man who really understands them’, ‘to all problems of conduct that can arise’. As ancillary to these he then named the Odyssey, for ‘intelligence set above brute force’; Greek tragedy for ‘rise of sense of civic responsibility’; and the Divina Commedia for ‘life of the spirit’. He also named Brooks Adams’s Law of Civilization and Decay as the ‘most recent summary of “where in a manner of speaking” we had got to half a century ago’.”
― A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume II: The Epic Years

“Those indications, taken together, provide an abstract of the major themes or preoccupations of the Cantos in general, and of A Draft of XXX Cantos in particular: – above all and through everything a preoccupation with ‘problems of conduct’, as in the Ta Hio (digested in Canto 13); – specifically, a concern for the ascendancy of intelligence over brute force; – then that the intelligent should develop the sense of civic responsibility; – and beyond that, the life of the spirit, or the divine states of mind which move men to benevolent and constructive action; – with a concern always with ‘where have we got to now?”
― A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume II: The Epic Years

“There are also of course the counter-themes: that there are muddy states of mind, irresponsible rulers, brutal wars; and that unenlightenment is the norm. The drama of this epic is the struggle of a few individuals throughout history to establish an enlightened order amidst and against blank apathy, malignant stupidity, rapacious greed, and jealous possessiveness, while (in Yeats’s words) ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst | Are full of passionate intensity’. The war at Troy lies behind the Cantos from the start as the archetypal instance of possessiveness leading to catastrophe.”
― A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume II: The Epic Years

“THE SANE METHOD OF STUDYING HISTORY consists (or wd. if it were ever practised, consist) in learning what certain great protagonists intended, and to what degree they failed in forcing their program on the mass. For example:…J. Q. Adams’ intention of conserving national wealth for purposes of national education and civilization… Jefferson’s continual struggle to import civilization from Europe (getting measurements of la Maison Carrée…)”
― A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume II: The Epic Years

“The democratic idea’, he had pointed out, ‘was not that legislative bodies shd. represent the momentary idiocy of the multitude.”
― A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume II: The Epic Years

“the democratic idea’ would not necessarily lead to the idea of ‘the great protagonist’ either; and further, that ‘the great protagonists’ in the 1930s would be, not a Jefferson or an Adams, but Mussolini, Stalin, and Hitler.”
― A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume II: The Epic Years

“An aristocracy often dictates, it rules as long as it is composed of the strongest elements i.e. as long as it maintains its sense of the present. One might almost say as long as it maintains its news sense. Both the communist party in Russia and the Fascist party in Italy are examples of aristocracy, active. They are the best, the pragmatical, the aware, the most thoughtful, the most wilful elements in their nations.”
― A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume II: The Epic Years

“When his association with L’Indice ended in December 1931—the paper apparently ‘went bust’—he intensified his effort to play an active part in the literary and cultural life of Italy by getting a local vortex going in Rapallo. With Gino Saviotti and half a dozen other collaborators, notably Basil Bunting, Pound organised a ‘Supplemento Letterario’ which appeared every other week as an insert in Rapallo’s weekly paper, Il Mare. For eight months, from August 1932 to March 1933, it was a two-page supplement, and then, from April to July 1933, was reduced to a single ‘Pagina Letteraria’. The promise that it would reappear in October 1933, after taking a summer holiday, ‘with, as always, the collaboration of the best Italian and foreign writers’, was not kept. In its first phase the ‘Supplemento’ was determinedly international, with contributions from and about Italian, French, Spanish, German, and American writers and writing, and could claim to be giving a local focus to the most innovative and avant-garde work of its time. Pound contributed occasional ‘Appunti’, and recycled his Little Review ‘Study of French Poets’ and his notes on Vorticism. In one of his ‘Appunti’ he asserted that Futurism, the best of which satisfied the demands of Vorticism, had to be the dominant art of ‘l’Italia Nuova’.”
― A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume II: The Epic Years

“He had recorded in canto 8 how Plato the Idealist ‘went to Dionysius of Syracuse | Because he had observed that tyrants | Were most efficient in all that they set their hands to’; but had he taken the point of the story, that Plato found ‘he was unable to persuade Dionysius to any amelioration’?”
― A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume II: The Epic Years

“Olga Rudge told a story about Wanda Landowska, the renowned harpsichordist. Landowska had been interrupted in mid-sentence by the arrival of friends and a fuss about tickets, and had come back after a quarter of an hour and continued her sentence from where she left off. ‘Is it the working with different voices in the fugues etc. makes her able to keep all the threads in her hand separate and distinct?’, Olga wondered, ‘like in a way the cantos?”
― A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume II: The Epic Years

“with large trunk full of highbrow books (Spengler etc.)’, and Pound read The Decline of the West ‘in return for tips on XV century’. He told his father that ‘As S. seems to mean by “The West” a lot of things I dislike, I shd. like to accept his infantine belief that they are “declining”’;”
― A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume II: The Epic Years

“He insisted on absolute silence, no sound being allowed in from the piazza outside, and if a fly buzzed he called for it to be swatted. It was into this room that Pound was brought for his audience with Mussolini at 17.30 on Monday, 30 January 1933. Pound presented to Mussolini a copy of the Hours Press A Draft of XXX Cantos and opened it to show him the Malatesta cantos. But, as Pound later told Mary de Rachewiltz, he ‘went poking around till he got to Trotsk and the zhamefull beace’ in canto 16, and said—he was learning English at the time—‘But this is not English’, and Pound said, ‘No, it’s my idea of the way a continental Jew would speak English’, and that led Mussolini to say, ‘How entertaining!’, ‘Ma qvesto è divertente’. Pound would put that remark into canto 41, and tell a correspondent that ‘One of [my] most valued readers seemed to find the Cantos entertaining; at least that’s what he said after 20 minutes, with accent of relieved surprise,”
― A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume II: The Epic Years

“Deeper than his rage there was his hatred, a murderous hatred, as he himself declared, for a murdering capitalism. ‘What causes the ferocity and bad manners of revolutionaries?’, he asked rhetorically in an essay in Eliot’s Criterion in July 1933, ‘Why should a peace-loving writer of Quaker descent be quite ready to shoot certain persons whom he never laid eyes on?…What has capital done that I should hate Andy Mellon as a symbol or as a reality?’ The direct answer was this, ‘I have blood lust because of what I have seen done to, and attempted against, the arts in my time.”
― A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume II: The Epic Years

“said, ‘They tried to break me and didn’t or couldn’t.’ But ‘hatred can be bred in the mind’, and ‘head-born hatred is possibly the most virulent’. He had come to understand that the source of the harm done to the arts was the unjust distribution of credit at the heart of the capitalist economic system. And that, evidently, was why he nursed his virulent hatred of the bankers and plutocrats and politicians whom he held responsible for obstructing the flow of creative intelligence in England and France and America.”
― A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume II: The Epic Years

“Never has been a LONG hortatory poem’, Pound advised John Hargrave, the leader of the Green Shirts, a militant wing of Social Credit: ‘Epic…is not incitement to IMMEDIATE act/ you tell the tale to direct the auditor toward admiration of certain nobilities, courage etc.’ Or, putting it another way, this time to Basil Bunting as a fellow poet, ‘The poet’s job is to define and yet again define till the detail of surface is in accord with the root in justice.”
― A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume II: The Epic Years

“Never has been a LONG hortatory poem’, Pound advised John Hargrave, the leader of the Green Shirts, a militant wing of Social Credit: ‘Epic…is not incitement to IMMEDIATE act/ you tell the tale to direct the auditor toward admiration of certain nobilities, courage etc.’ Or, putting it another way, this time to Basil Bunting as a fellow poet, ‘The poet’s job is to define and yet again define till the detail of surface is in accord with the root in justice.’ Behind that lies the principle of le mot juste;”
― A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume II: The Epic Years

“Never has been a LONG hortatory poem’, Pound advised John Hargrave, the leader of the Green Shirts, a militant wing of Social Credit: ‘Epic…is not incitement to IMMEDIATE act/ you tell the tale to direct the auditor toward admiration of certain nobilities, courage etc.’ Or, putting it another way, this time to Basil Bunting as a fellow poet, ‘The poet’s job is to define and yet again define till the detail of surface is in accord with the root in justice.’ Behind that lies the principle of le mot juste; but for the poet there is more to it than the accurate word; there must be justice also in the arrangement of the words and in their tones and rhythms. That sort of justice, the natural justice of language, does not come naturally. It was as much as he could do, it was like forging pokers, Pound told another young poet, Mary Barnard, ‘to get economic good and evil into verbal manifestation, not abstract, but so that the monetary system is as concrete as fate and not an abstraction’.”
― A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume II: The Epic Years

“Said Mr Jefferson: ‘It wd. have given us time.’ ‘modern dress for your statue… ‘I remember having written you while Congress sat at Annapolis, ‘on water communication between ours and the western country, ‘particularly the information…of the plain between ‘Big Beaver and Cuyahoga, which made me hope that a canal ‘…navigation of Lake Erie and the Ohio. You must have had ‘occasion of getting better information on this subject ‘and if you wd. oblige me ‘by a communication of it. I consider this canal, ‘if practicable, as a very important work. T. J. to General Washington, 1787 …no slaves north of Maryland district… …flower found in Connecticut that vegetates when suspended in air…. …screw more effectual if placed below surface of water. Those details at the opening of canto 31 are all, apart from the Latin lines, from the historical record, mostly from the ‘ten fat volumes’ of The Writings of Thomas Jefferson which Eliot had been given by his father and had passed on to Pound.”
― A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume II: The Epic Years

“They are composed of what Jefferson actually said and wrote, and of what his friends and fellow founders of the United States of North America, Madison and John Adams and John Quincy Adams and the rest, actually said and wrote. Pound invented nothing, put no words into their mouths. What he did was to select passages, or, more often, phrases, from their correspondence with each other and from their journals or state records, and set them down item by item. Sometimes the source and context is indicated, but often not; and how one item might relate to another is left to the reader to fathom.”
― A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume II: The Epic Years

“An early reviewer of Cantos XXXI–XLI in the New York Nation amused himself with the conceit of Mr Pound taking correspondence courses in such subjects as ‘History of the U.S. Treasury from the Revolution to the Civil War (from the Original Documents)’ and making notes diligently on small pieces of paper which a gust of wind scattered over the hills about Rapallo, and which he then picked up and sent to the printer as he found them.”
― A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume II: The Epic Years