Quotes from Frank Bidart

Horrible the fate of the advice-giver in our culture: to repeat oneself in a thousand contexts until death, or irrelevance. * I abjure advice-giver.

Sweet fiction, in which bravado and despair beckon from a cold panache, in which the protected essential self suffers flashes of its existence to be immortalized by a writing self that is incapable of performing its actions without mixing our essence with what is false.

We fill pre-existing forms and when we fill them we change them and are changed.

Then, I said to myself: 'HISTORY IS HUMAN NATURE—; TO SAY I AM GUILTY IS TO ACCEPT IMPLICATION IN THE HUMAN RACE. . .' —Now, for months and months, I have found ANOTHER MAN in me—; HE is NOT me—; I am afraid of him …

Cum acolo unde face ce face, el nu este: Cum atunci când face nu este: De-aici baza înstr?in?rii noastre de sine. - Marx, în 1844

When I started to write about my family, no abstract or conceptual language could account for the world I was trying to capture." —Frank Bidart

Werther s-a sinucis, apoi tineri din toat? Europa l-au urmat ?i s-au sinucis ?i ei, mai pu?in autorul lui, Goethe, viclean maestru al practicii, a tr?it.

La ?aptezeci ?i doi de ani, viitorul e ceea ce jelesc. Din facultate n-am uitat-o niciodat? pe Ma?a în Pesc?ru?ul spunând Sunt în doliu dup? via?a mea.

Because you could not master whatever enmeshed you you became its slave - You learned this bitterly, early. In order not to become its slave you had to become its master. You became its master. Even as master, of course, you remain its slave.

so try as you will you cannot make me feel embarrassment at what I find beautiful.

Old, he included himself in his scorn for those who young want the opposite of this earth then settle for more of it.

In the United States at the end of the twentieth century, the greatest luxury is to live a life in which the work that one does to earn a living, and what one has the appetite to make, coincide--by a kind of grace are the same, one.

When what we understand about / what we are / changes, whole / parts of us fall mute

What once was apprehended in passion survives as opinion.

Obdurate, you say: We are darkness. We are the city whose brightness blots the stars from night

To be a child is to see things and not know them; then you know them.

But being is making; not only large things, a family, a book, a business; but the shape we give this afternoon, a conversation between friends, a meal.

Play, and escaping the ideology one grew up in, is freedom.