Quotes from Charles Olson

Fact is based upon vulgar matter.

Forgive me if I sleep until I wake up.

I'm trying to climb up both walls at once.

I was playing catch with the European audience.

An American is a complex of occasions, themselves a geometry of spatial nature.

A poem is a 'line' between any two points in creation.

The poem, for me, is simply the first sound realized in the modality of being.

I don't live for poetry. I live far more than anybody else does.

When will government cease being a nuisance to everybody?

I hope you're representing the devil's advocate.

I defer to all these other American poets who, for some reason, I both envy and admire.

You can do anything, literally, right? That's one of the exciting possibilities of the present.

Knowledge is the harvest of attention

You can read everybody. It's not even interesting to tell the truth because to some extent it's false.

There is a grace of life which is still yours, my dear Europe.

My life has been given its orders: the seasons seize the soul and the body, and make mock of any dispersed effort. The hour of death is the only trespass

I'm one of the cliches that has grown up.

This morning of the small snow I count the blessings, the leak in the faucet which makes of the sink time, the drop of the water on water.

You don't help people in your poems. I've been trying to help people all my life - that's my trouble.

The heroes of the present will retreat to the imitation they are anyhow.

I'm sorry, but I was born with a towel on my head.

love is form, and cannot be without important substance

I remember way back when I was young, 10 years ago.

one loves only form, and form only comes into existence when the thing is born.