Quotes from William Empson

Waiting for the end, boys, waiting for the end.

Law makes long spokes of the short stakes of men.

Twixt devil and deep sea, man hacks his caves; Birth, death; one, many; what is true, and seems; Earth's vast hot iron, cold space's empty waves.

Poetry contains nothing haphazard.

Imagine then, by miracle, with me,(Ambiguous gifts, as what gods give must be)What could not possibly be there,And learn a style from a despair.

Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.It is not the effort nor the failure tires.The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.

Life involves maintaining oneself between contradictions that can't be solved by analysis.

The heart of standing is that you cannot fly.

Let It Go It is this deep blankness is the real thing strange. The more things happen to you the more you can't Tell or remember even what they were. The contradictions cover such a range. The talk would talk and go so far aslant. You don't want madhouse and the whole thing there.

The central function of imaginative literature is to make you realize that other people act on moral convictions different from your own

it is an obvious bit of interpretation to say that the Queen of Hearts is a symbol of "uncontrolled animal passion" seen through the clear but blank eyes of sexlessness; obvious, and the sort of thing critics are now so sure would be in bad taste; Dodgson said it himself, to the actress who took the part when the thing was acted.

All languages are composed of dead metaphors as the soil of corpses, but English is perhaps uniquely full of metaphors of this sort, which are not dead but sleeping, and, while making a direct statement, colour it with an implied comparison.

The object of life, after all, is not to understand things, but to maintain one's defences and equilibrium and live as well as one can; it is not only maiden aunts who are placed like this

He [Christ] climbs the tree to repay what was stolen, as if he was putting the apple back; but the phrase in itself implies rather that he is doing the stealing ... Either he stole on behalf of man ... or he is climbing upwards like Jack on the Beanstalk, and taking his people with him back to heaven. The phrase has an odd humility which makes us see him as the son of the house; possibly Herbert is drawing on the medieval tradition that the Cross was made of the wood of the forbidden trees.

The way earlier societies seem obviously absurd and cruel gives a kind of horror at the forces that must be at work in our own, but suggests that any society must have dramatically satisfying and dangerous conventions; and people can put up with almost any political conditions, either because they are lazy or because they are ambitious.

Once you break into the godlike unity of the appreciator you find a microcosm of which the theatre is the macrocosm; the mind is complex and ill-connected like an audience, and it is as surprising in the one case as the other that a sort of unity can be produced by a play.

An ambiguity, in ordinary speech, means something very pronounced, and as a rule witty or deceitful. I propose to use the word in an extended sense, and shall think relevant to my subject any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language.

the machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry.

It is because of the wealth of implication which must be carried by sentences in poetry, because they must start from scratch and put the reader in possession of the entire attitude they assume, that the notion of ' sincerity ' is important, and that it is so hard to imitate a style.

As for the immediate importance of the study of ambiguity, it would be easy enough to take up an alarmist attitude, and say that the English language needs nursing by the analyst very badly indeed. Always rich and dishevelled, it is fast becoming very rich and dishevelled…

Thus a poetical word is a thing conceived in itself and includes all its meanings; a prosaic word is flat and useful and might have been used differently.

Normal sensibility is a tissue of what has been conscious theory made habitual and returned to the pre-conscious, and, therefore, conscious theory may make an addition to sensibility even though it draws no (or no true) conclusion, formulates no general theory, in the scientific sense, which reconciles and makes quickly available the results which it describes.

This world is good enough for me, if only I can be good enough for it.

Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills. It is not the effort nor the failure tires. The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.