Quotes from Guy Davenport

nothing now exists that is so valuable as whatever theoretically might replace it.

The light is dying, as all light must.

A pettos speckled with gold ajiggle with a fremitus from the heart touches me like Athena's hoolet mewing in uncertain dark. So much is nature, whereon we build our particulars fastidious and critical. Your every arrow O Eros has hit me , as the song goes. O girls, girls. This arrow is Timo's curls, this is Heliodora's shoes, this the smell of quinces that blows from Demo's door, flowers plaited into Dorothea's hair and ox-eyed Antikleia's smile that is music from the islands, summer's stars.

Of the autistically interior, dreaming, reading, erotic, self-sufficient child in Balthus' painting we have practically no image at all. Balthus' children are not being driven to succeed where their parents failed, or to be popular, adjusted, or a somebody.

Avoid the suave flow of prose that's the trademark of the glib writer. An easy and smooth style is all very well, but it takes no chances and has no seductive wrinkles, no pauses for thought.

a boar is a very special kind of animal whose bristling is a thing unto itself, and his nape, like a snake's neck, is more a word than a reality.

Olson's Maximus and Zukofsky's 'A' are too symbolically and verbally complex, respectively, to command large audiences especially in an age when a college degree is becoming a certificate of illiteracy.

You have built a wall of concrete shit between yourself and reality.

Reality was the keener for being fugitive, concealed, and doubtful...

We rise, we fall. We may rise by falling. Defeat shapes us. Our only wisdom is tragic, known to late, and only to the lost.

I also wish I knew why millions of bright American children turn overnight into teenage nerds. The substitution of the automobile for the natural body, which our culture has effected in the most evil perversion of humanity since chivalry, is one cause; narcosis by drugs and Dionysian music is another.

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

Fiction's essential activity is to imagine how others feel, what a Saturday afternoon in an Italian town in the 2nd Century looked like. My ambition is solely to get some effect, as of light on stone in a forest on a September day.

Unless the work of art has wholly exhausted its makers attention, it fails. This is why works of great significance are demanding and why they are infinitely rewarding.

Art is the attention we pay to the wholeness of the world.

I was thought to be retarded as a child, and all the evidence indicates that I was.