Guy Davenport Quotes

8 Sourced Quotes

The birds suffer their suffering each in a lifetime, forgetting it as they go.

Guy Davenport
A work of art is a form that articulates forces, making them intelligible.

Guy Davenport
The poet is at the edge of our consciousness of the world, finding beyond the suspected nothingness which we imagine limits our perception another acre or so of being worth our venturing upon.

Guy Davenport
When Heraclitus said that everything passes steadily along, he was not inciting us to make the best of the moment, an idea unseemly to his placid mind, but to pay attention to the pace of things. Each has its own rhythm: the nap of a dog, the procession of the equinoxes, the dances of Lydia, the majestically slow beat of the drums at Dodona, the swift runners at Olympia.

Guy Davenport
Something of the previous state, however, survives every change. This is called in the language of cybernetics (which took it form the language of machines) feedback, the advantages of learning from experience and of having developed reflexes.

Guy Davenport
Imagination is like the drunk man who lost his watch and must get drunk again to find it.

Guy Davenport
We will always return to the private and inviolable act of reading as our culture's way of developing an individual.

Guy Davenport
Originality houses many rooms, and the views from the windows are all different.

Guy Davenport