William Empson Quotes

27 Sourced Quotes

Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.
It is not the effort nor the failure tires.
The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.

William Empson
Waiting for the end, boys, waiting for the end.
What is there to be or do?
What's become of me or you?
Are we kind or are we true?
Sitting two and two, boys, waiting for the end.

William Empson
It seems unpleasantly refined to put things off till someone knows.

William Empson
As for propaganda, some very good work has been that; most authors want their point of view to be convincing. Pope said that even the Aeneid was a "political puff"; its dreamy, impersonal, universal melancholy was a calculated support for Augustus.

William Empson
Shall I make it clear, boys, for all to apprehend, Those that will not hear, boys, waiting for the end, Knowing it is near, boys, trying to pretend, Sitting in cold fear, boys, waiting for the end?

William Empson
All those large dreams by which men long live well Are magic-lanterned on the smoke of hell.

William Empson
Space is like earth, rounded, a padded cell; Plumb the stars' depth, your lead bumps you behind.

William Empson
I think many people (like myself) prefer to read poetry mixed with prose;
it gives you more to go by; the conventions of poetry have been getting
far off from normal life, so that to have a prose bridge makes
reading poetry seem more natural.

William Empson
Poets, on the face of it, have either got to be easier or to write their own notes; readers have either got to take more trouble over reading or cease to regard notes as pretentious and a sign of bad poetry

William Empson
The machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry.

William Empson
I'm afraid I take... this rather clinical view of love: it's saving you from madness. I'm not so enthusiastic as other poets have been.

William Empson
It is the pain, it is the pain, endures.
Your chemic beauty burned my muscles through.
Poise of my hands reminded me of yours.

William Empson
Proust has listed a great many reasons why it is impossible to be happy, but, in the course of being happy, one finds it difficult to remember them.

William Empson
There is a Supreme God in the ethnological section;
A hollow toad shape, faced with a blank shield.
He needs his belly to include the Pantheon,
Which is inserted through a hole behind.
At the navel, at the points formally stressed, at the organs of sense,
Lice glue themselves, dolls, local deities,
His smooth wood creeps with all the creeds of the world.

William Empson
Liberal hopefulness
Regards death as a mere border to an improving picture.

William Empson
Imagine then, by miracle, with me,
(Ambiguous gifts, as what gods give must be)
What could not possibly be there,
And learn a style from a despair.

William Empson
Life involves maintaining oneself between contradictions that can't be solved by analysis.

William Empson
Buddhists and Christians contrive to agree about death
Making death their ideal basis for different ideals.
The Communists however disapprove of death
Except when practical.

William Empson
To produce pure proletarian art the artist must be at one with the worker; this is impossible, not for political reasons, but because the artist never is at one with any public.

William Empson
Learning French is some trouble, but after that you have a clear and beautiful language; in English the undergrowth is part of the language.

William Empson
An ambiguity, in ordinary speech, means something very pronounced, and as a rule witty or deceitful.... any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language.

William Empson
Twixt devil and deep sea, man hacks his caves;
Birth, death; one, many; what is true, and seems;
Earth's vast hot iron, cold space's empty waves.

William Empson
The central function of imaginative literature is to make you realize that other people act on moral convictions different from your own.

William Empson
Ripeness is all; her in her cooling planet
Revere; do not presume to think her wasted.
Project her no projectile, plan nor man it;
Gods cool in turn, by the sun long outlasted.

William Empson
The waste even in a fortunate life, the isolation even of a life rich in intimacy, cannot but be felt deeply, and is the central feeling of tragedy. And anything of value must accept this because it must not prostitute itself; its strength is to be prepared to waste itself, if it does not get its opportunity.

William Empson
Short dictionaries should be improved because they are intended for people who actually need help.

William Empson
Critics…are of two sorts: those who merely relieve themselves against the flower of beauty, and those, less continent, who afterwards scratch it up.

William Empson