The Gift Quotes

“when an image changes, it undergoes metamorphosis: body changes into body without any intervening abstraction—without, that is, the gap which is both the freedom and the alienation of symbol-thought and symbol-change.”
― W.Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World

“Yeats’s shopworn formula—that “rhetoric is the will doing the work of the imagination”—refers to such a state, for when the will works in isolation, it turns of necessity to dictionary studies, syntactical tricks, intellectual formulae, memory, history, and convention—any source of material, that is, which can imitate the fruits of imagination without actually allowing them to emerge. Just as there are limits to the power of the erotic, so there are limits to the power of the will. The will knows about survival and endurance; it can direct attention and energy; it can finish things. But we cannot remember a tune or a dream on willpower. We cannot stay awake on willpower. Will may direct virtù but it cannot bring it into the world. The will by itself cannot heal the soul. And it cannot create.”
― W.Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World

“An abiding sense of gratitude moves a person to labor in the service of his daemon. The opposite is properly called narcissism. The narcissist feels his gifts come from himself. He works to display himself, not to suffer change. An age in which no one sacrifices to his genius or daemon is an age of narcissism.”
― W.Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World

“When I speak of a labor, then, I intend to refer to something dictated by the course of life rather than by society, something that is often urgent but that nevertheless has its own interior rhythm, something more bound up with feeling, more interior, than work.”
― W.Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World

“labor has its own schedule. Things get done, but we often have the odd sense that we didn’t do them. Paul Goodman wrote in a journal once, “I have recently written a few good poems. But I have no feeling that I wrote them.” That is the declaration of a laborer.”
― W.Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World

“a work of art can survive without the market, but where there is no gift there is no art.”
― W.Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World

“The artist appeals to that part of our being…which is a gift and not an acquisition—and, therefore, more permanently enduring. JOSEPH CONRAD”
― W.Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World