Quotes from Phillip Lopate

The knowledge that my discriminations are skewed and not always universally desirable doesn't stop me in the least from making them.

Hedonism can be a rational response to a difficult life.

Until people see poetry as springing from all of life, they will isolate it in a creativity corner and treat it like a mascot.

For most of my life, I have wanted broad impact but now, at 72, I'm not so sure that's always my first priority.

My wife and daughter have accused me of being too silent at breakfast but I don't want to talk when I don't have much to say.

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'.

In new work, we need to see the shadow, however faint, of previous literary effort.

I'm fortunate in being able to find great satisfaction in my work.

My other work, teaching, also is satisfying because I can be with people but in controlled circumstances, which aren't as likely to yield the pain of dealing with family.

Precise sentences were my ideals, though in practice I was slipshod and sentimental. I began to seek a balance between improvisation and revision.

All things swim and glitter. Our life is not so much threatened as our perception. Ghostlike we glide through nature, and should not know our place again.

Every ship is a romantic object, except that we sail in. Embark, and the romance quits our vessel, and hangs on every other sail in the horizon. Our life looks trivial, and we shun to record it. Men seem to have learned of the horizon the art of perpetual retreating and reference. "Yonder uplands are rich pasturage, and my neighbor has fertile meadow, but my field," says the querulous farmer, "only holds the world together.

So much of our time is preparation, so much is routine, and so much retrospect, that the pith of each man's genius contracts itself to a very few hours.

There is no adaptation or universal applicability in men, but each has his special talent, and the mastery of successful men consists in adroitly keeping themselves where and when that turn shall be oftenest to be practised.

contentment, which is the last victory of justice

common sense is as rare as genius,—is the basis of genius, and experience is hands and feet to every enterprise;—

Those who have been persecuted are, alas, all too often the persecutors of tomorrow.

Marilynne Robinson defends the Puritans from what she regards as a caricature of their positions. Say what you will about their rigid morality: these Puritan thinkers were highly learned, with sophisticated prose styles, and we are fortunate in having them set so high an intellectual standard for later American essayists to follow.

They labor quietly, endure privations and pains, live and die, and throughout everything see the good without seeing the vanity. I had to love these people. The more I entered into their life, the more I loved them; and the more it became possible for me to live, too. It came about not only that the life of our society, of the learned and of the rich, disgusted me—more than that, it lost all semblance of meaning in my eyes.

The Japanese believe that sadness comes from an awareness of the fragility of life at the same time one is captivated by its transient beauty. The cherry blossoms. But that is a very superficial understanding of sadness, may I say. True sadness arises when we realize that the world around us is imperishable, and rather ugly.

Think of a dinner party as a club of revolutionaries, a technocratic elite whose social interactions that night are a dry run for some future takeover of the state.