Authors
Topics
Lists
Pictures
Resources
More about David Lehman
David Lehman Quotes
7 Sourced Quotes
Source
Report...
Words can have no single fixed meaning. Like wayward electrons, they can spin away from their initial orbit and enter a wider magnetic field. No one owns them or has a proprietary right to dictate how they will be used.
David Lehman
Source
Report...
Obscurantism is the academic theorist's revenge on society for having consigned him or her to relative obscurity – a way of proclaiming one's superiority in the face of one's diminished influence.
David Lehman
Source
Report...
Jargon is the verbal sleight of hand that makes the old hat seem newly fashionable. It gives an air of novelty and specious profundity to ideas that, if stated directly, would seem superficial, stale, frivolous, or false. The line between serious and spurious scholarship is an easy one to blur, with jargon on your side.
David Lehman
Source
Report...
There is an air of last things, a brooding sense of impending annihilation, about so much deconstructive activity, in so many of its guises; it is not merely postmodernist but preapocalyptic.
David Lehman
Source
Report...
The World Trade center was an example of what was wrong with American architecture, and it stayed that way for twenty-five years until that Friday afternoon in February when the bomb went off and the buildings became a great symbol of America, like the Statue of Liberty at the end of Hitchcock's Saboteur. My whole attitude toward the World Trade Center changed overnight.
David Lehman
Source
Report...
Poetry criticism at its worst today is mean in spirit and spiteful in intent, as if determined to inflict the wound that will spur the artist to new heights if it does not cripple him or her.
David Lehman
Source
Report...
If you have too good a time writing hostile reviews, you'll injure not only your sensibility but your soul.
David Lehman
Quote of the day
Alfred Nobel stipulated that no distinction of race or colour will determine who received of his generosity.
Abdus Salam
David Lehman
Born:
June 11, 1948
(age 76)
Bio:
David Lehman is a poet and the series editor for The Best American Poetry. He teaches at The New School in New York City.
Known for:
The Best American Poetry 1996 (1996)
Great American Prose Poems (2003)
David Lehman on Wikipedia
Suggest an edit or a new quote
American Poet Quotes
Poet Quotes
20th-century Poet Quotes
Related Authors
John Ashbery
American Poet
Jorie Graham
American Poet
Robert Pinsky
American Academic
Billy Collins
American Poet
Featured Authors
Lists
Predictions that didn't happen
If it's on the Internet it must be true
Remarkable Last Words (or Near-Last Words)
Picture Quotes
Confucius
Philip James Bailey
Eleanor Roosevelt
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Popular Topics
life
love
nature
time
god
power
human
mind
work
art
heart
thought
men
day
×
Lib Quotes