Quotes from Delmore Schwartz

I am a book I neither wrote nor read.

Time is the school in which we learn, Time is the fire in which we burn.

What was the freedom to which the adult human being rose in the morning, if each act was held back or inspired by the overpowering ghost of a little child?

Call us what you will: we are made such by love.

Each minute bursts in the burning room, The great globe reels in the solar fire, Spinning the trivial and unique away. (How all things flash! How all things flare!) What am I now that I was then? May memory restore again and again The smallest color of the smallest day: Time is the school in which we learn, Time is the fire in which we burn.

In this our life there are no beginnings but only departures entitled beginnings, wreathed in the formal emotions thought to be appropriate and often forced. Darkly rises each moment from the life which has been lived and which does not die, for each event lives in the heavy head forever, waiting to renew itself.

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

Time is the fire in which we burn.

For reality's glow and glory, without poetry, Fade, like the red operas of sunset

Its perorations verge upon the ceaseless orations of the ocean: For reality's glow and glory, without poetry, Fade, like the red operas of sunset, The blue rivers and windows of morning.

In the morning, when it was raining In the morning, when it was raining, Then the birds were hectic and loudy; Through all the reign is fall's entertaining; Their singing was erratic and full of disorder: They did not remember the summer blue Or the orange of June. They did not think at all Of the great red and bursting ball Of the kingly sun's terror and tempest, blazing, Once the slanting rain threw over all The colorless curtains of the ceaseless spontaneous fall.

What will become of you and me (This is the school in which we learn ...) Besides the photo and the memory? (... that time is the fire in which we burn.) Avid its rush, that reeling blaze! Where is my father and Eleanor? Not where are they now, dead seven years, But what they were then? No more? No more?

Sometimes even paranoids have enemies.