David Lehman Quotes

7 Sourced Quotes

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
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
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
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
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
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
If you have too good a time writing hostile reviews, you'll injure not only your sensibility but your soul.

David Lehman