Charles Reznikoff Quotes

7 Sourced Quotes

Among the heaps of brick and plaster lies/ a girder, still itself among the rubbish

Charles Reznikoff

The street curves in and out, up and down in great waves of asphalt; at night the granite tomb is noisy with starlings like the creaking of many axles; only the tired walker know how much there is to climb, how the sidewalk curves into the cold wind.

Charles Reznikoff

I will walk by myself
and cure myself
in the sunshine and the wind.

Charles Reznikoff

I have learnt the Hebrew blessing before eating bread; is there no blessing before reading Hebrew?

Charles Reznikoff

The miracle, of course, was not that the oil for the sacred light - in a little cruse - lasted as long as they say; but that the courage of the Maccabees lasted to this day: let that nourish my flickering spirit.

Charles Reznikoff

I like the streets of New York City, where I was born, better than these streets of palms. No doubt, my father liked his village in Ukraine better than the streets of New York City; and my grandfather the city and its synagogue, where he once read aloud the holy books, better than the village in which he dickered in the market-place.

Charles Reznikoff

How shall we mourn you who are killed and wasted, sure that you would not die with your work unended, as if the iron scythe in the grass stops for a flower?

Charles Reznikoff

Charles Reznikoff

Charles Reznikoff

Born: August 31, 1894

Died: January 22, 1976 (aged 81)

Bio: Charles Reznikoff was an American poet best known for his long work, Testimony: The United States, Recitative. The term Objectivist was coined for him.

Known for:

By the Waters of Manhattan (1930)
Holocaust (1975)
Family chronicle (1963)
Poems 1918-1975

Charles Reznikoff on Wikipedia

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