Quotes from Phillip Lopate

The prospect of a long day at the beach makes me panic. There is no harder work I can think of than taking myself off to somewhere pleasant, where I am forced to stay for hours and 'have fun'.

Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. — Walter Benjamin, "Unpacking My Library

The solution to entrapment in the narcissistic hothouse of self is to not relinquish autobiographical writing, but to expand the self by bringing one's curiosity to interface with more and more history and the present world.

I like the freedom that comes with lowered expectations.

What makes me want to keep reading a nonfiction text is the encounter with a surprising, well-stocked mind as it takes on the challenge of the next sentence, paragraph

I finished reading, not from the sweet, low pathos of the tale, but from the knowledge of the writer's success. It is so difficult to do anything well in this mysterious world.

A young person still thinks it is possible–there is time enough–to become all things: athlete and aesthete, soldier and pacifist, anchorite and debauchee.

Part of the storytelling ability is simply the anticipation of boredom.

he flatters himself in what he has done, in what he is now doing, or what he intends to do. Every one lays out matters in his own mind how he shall avoid damnation, and flatters himself that he contrives well for himself, and that his schemes will not fail.

He felt his poverty; without a cent, without a home, without land, tools, or savings, he had entered into competition with rich, landed, skilled neighbors. To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.

Art, on the other hand, must be first of all "forceful." The artist, in dealing with ethical revaluations (as he naturally would, since the characteristics of the century would be as fully represented in him as in a scientist or an inventor) had to make those conflicts explicit which the scientist could leave implicit.

source material for wider reception. Indeed, when we consider how few masters of theology there were in the early Church, how small was their reading public, yet how great was their influence upon the course of history, we realize that a work can, by devious ways, profoundly affect people who have never laid eyes upon it. A single book, were it greatly to influence one man in a position of authority, could thus indirectly alter the course of a nation;

Now, if anything in the world is complex, language is complex.

To be a writer is a monstrously arrogant act. It presumes that you should be listened to for pages on end... But there is much in the culture to clip the wings of arrogance, mute assertion, and encourage speedy consensus.

I have also time on my hands to correct my opinions, and polish my periods;

but the one I cannot, and the other I will not do.

Fornicating is like parenting: no matter how you do it, you have the guilty sense that somewhere other people are doing it more correctly.

The changing conditions of history touch only the surface of the show.

But all these times and places and occasions are now and here. God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages. And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us.

No one can expect to write well who will not first take the risk of writing badly.

The present winter is worth an age if rightly employed, but if lost or neglected, the whole continent will partake of the misfortune; and there is no punishment which that man will not deserve, be he who, or what, or where he will, that may be the means of sacrificing a season so precious and useful.

Even the greatest works of art are couched, not in the language of "mankind," but in the language of a specific cultural tradition, and the loss of the tradition is like the loss of the dictionary;

But that jealousy to be useful must be impartial; else it becomes the instrument of the very influence to be avoided, instead of a defence against it.

Maybe it's the fault of our language but dreams are innocent and pictorial. Then let our dreams speak for us side by side, leg over leg, an electroencephalographic kiss flashing blue movies from temple to temple, as we lie gagged in sleep…