John Berryman Quotes

30 Sourced Quotes

I do strongly feel that among the greatest pieces of luck for high achievement is ordeal. Certain great artists can make out without it, Titian and others, but mostly you need ordeal. My idea is this: the artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business: Beethoven's deafness, Goya's deafness, Milton's blindness, that kind of thing.

John Berryman
We must travel in the direction of our fear.

John Berryman
Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so…
And moreover my mother taught me as a boy
(repeatingly) 'Ever to confess you're bored
means you have no
Inner Resources.' I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.

John Berryman
The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business.

John Berryman
I always wanted to be old, I wanted to say "O I haven't read that for fifteen years."

John Berryman
I don't see how Henry, pried
open for all the world to see, survived.

John Berryman
There is no such thing as Freedom (though it is the most important condition of human life, after Humility, -which does not exist either). There is only Slavery (walls around one) and absence-of-Slavery (ability to walk in any direction, or to remain still).

John Berryman
What was it missing, then, at the man's heart so that he does not wound?

John Berryman
Perhaps God resembles one of the last etchings of Goya & not Velasquez, never Rembrandt no.

John Berryman
I saw in my dream
the great lost cities, Machu Picchu, Cambridge Mass., Angkor.

John Berryman
Collating bones: I would have liked to do. Henry would have been hot at that. I missed his profession. As a little boy I always thought "I'm an archaeologist"; who Could be more respected peaceful serious than that?

John Berryman
Something can (has) been said for sobriety but very little.

John Berryman
But never did Henry, as he thought he did,
end anyone and hacks her body up
and hide the pieces, where they may be found.
He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody's missing.
Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.
Nobody is ever missing.

John Berryman
The world is gradually becoming a place where I do not care to be any more.

John Berryman
It is a true error to marry with poets or to be by them.

John Berryman
Bats have no bankers and they do not drink and cannot be arrested and pay no tax and, in general, bats have it made.

John Berryman
I seldom go to films. They are too exciting,
said the Honourable Possum.

John Berryman
He stared at ruin. Ruin stared straight back. He thought they were old friends.

John Berryman
People will take balls,
Balls will be lost always, little boy,
And no one buys a ball back.

John Berryman
There are so many ways to ruin a poem it's quite amazing good ones ever get written.

John Berryman
Two daiquiris
withdrew into a corner of the gorgeous room and one told the other a lie.

John Berryman
Writing is just a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to make it come out right.

John Berryman
Wishin' was dyin' but I gotta make it all this way to that bed on these feet.

John Berryman
Huffy Henry hid the day,
Unappeasable Henry sulked.

John Berryman
These Songs are not meant to be understood, you understand. They are only meant to terrify & comfort.

John Berryman
I haven't lost a battle yet but I am tense for the first losing.

John Berryman
Decent fall the cloths over a high income.

John Berryman
Offering dragons quarter is no good, they regrow all their parts & come on again, they have to be killed.

John Berryman
I myself walked at the funeral of tenderness.

John Berryman
Mountainous, woman not breaks and will bend: sways God nearby: anguish comes to an end. Blossomed Sarah, and I blossom. Is that thing alive? I hear a famisht howl.

John Berryman