Archibald MacLeish Quotes

40 Sourced Quotes

There with vast wings across the canceled skies, There in the sudden blackness the black pall Of nothing, nothing, nothing—nothing at all.

Archibald MacLeish
We have learned the answers, all the answers:
It is the question that we do not know.

Archibald MacLeish
For the existence of a library, the fact of its existence, is, in itself and of itself, an assertion—a proposition nailed like Luther's to the door of time.

Archibald MacLeish
Poets, you see, are literal-minded men who will squeeze a word till it hurts.

Archibald MacLeish
What happened at Hiroshima was not only that a scientific breakthrough had occurred and that a great part of the population of a city had been burned to death, but that the problem of the relation of the triumphs of modern science to the human purposes of man had been explicitly defined.

Archibald MacLeish
America was promises...
It was Man who had been promised.

Archibald MacLeish
Beauty is that Medusa's head which men go armed to seek and sever, and dead will starve and sting forever.

Archibald MacLeish
Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, there is no reason either in football or in poetry why the two should not meet in a man's life if he has the weight and cares about the words.

Archibald MacLeish
To see the earth as we now see it, small and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the unending night – brothers who see now they are truly brothers.

Archibald MacLeish
There is no dusk to be, There is no dawn that was, Only there's now, and now, And the wind in the grass.

Archibald MacLeish