Quotes from Delmore Schwartz

Existentialism means that no one else can take a bath for you.

I always cause those who are near to me more suffering than pleasure.

Literature doesn't matter! The only thing that matters is money and getting your teeth fixed!

Poetry must be as new as foam & old as rock.

And hence the poet must seek to be essentially anonymous, He must die a little death each morning, He must swallow his toad and study his vomit as Baudelaire studied la charogne of Jeanne Duval.

The Jew is at once alienated and indestructible; he is in exile from his own country and in exile even from himself, yet he survives the annihilating fury of history.

Even paranoids have real enemies.

That inescapable animal walks with me.Has followed me since the black womb held,Moves where I move, distorting my gesture,A caricature, a swollen shadow,A stupid clown of the spirit's motive,Perplexes and affronts with his own darkness,The secret life of belly and bone.

No one fools anyone much, except himself," said Jacob to himself. "How do I fool myself?

I am of Russian-Jewish distraction.

What does long life avail? The best seats at the funerals of friends.

At the moment I'm so exhausted that I feel like cutting my throat, so the next news masy well be that I am across the river and under the trees: what is the meaning and purpose of life? Death.

Order and disorder, form and formless must have profound psychological roots, nervous roots.

All literature is an effort at the formal character of the epigram.

All poets' wives have rotten lives Their husbands look at them like knives.

I got married the second time in the way that, when a murder is committed, crackpots turn up at the police station to confess the crime.

How could I think the brief years were enough To prove the reality of endless love?

Love is the tact of every good, The only warmth, the only peace.

Even paranoids have real enemies.

Time is the fire in which we burn.

I admired my father very much... at the age of sixteen. But now I see that he was a brutal and cruel man, - but not without remorse, and that was what tortured us, his alternations.

To be the child of immigrants from Eastern Europe is in itself a special kind of experience; and an important one to an author. He has heard two languages through childhood, the one spoken with ease at home, and the other spoken with ease in the streets and at school, but spoken poorly at home.

Time is the school in which we learn, Time is the fire in which we burn. (Calmly We Walk Through This April's Day)

Love is the most difficult and dangerous form of courage. Courage is the most desperate, admirable and noble kind of love.