Quotes from John Berryman

Gift us," Berryman prays to God, "with long cloaks & adrenaline" ("Eleven Addresses

Goodbye, sir, & fare well. You're in the clear.

leave wizard Henry: at his lectern where he's working on his phantasies: Disperse! and everything goes worse so the world fills with her knees, harmful & fair: a medium where 'Fuck you' comes as no curse but come as a sigh or a prayer.

The trouble with this country is that a man can live his entire life without knowing whether or not he is a coward.

Heartmating hesitating unafraid

That is our 'pointed task. Love & die.

I cry. Evil dissolves, & love, like foam; that love. Prattle of children powers me home, my heart claps like the swan's under a frenzy of who love me & who shine.

I think that what happens in my poetic work in the future will depend on my being knocked in the face, and thrown flat, and given cancer, and all kinds of other things short of senile dementia.

The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business.

You should always be trying to write a poem you are unable to write, a poem you lack the technique, the language, the courage to achieve. Otherwise you're merely imitating yourself, going nowhere, because that's always easiest.

I am so wise I had my mouth sewn shut.

We must travel in the direction of our fear.

We have reason to be afraid. This is a terrible place.

These Songs are not meant to be understood, you understand. They are only meant to terrify & comfort.

Them lady poets must not marry, pal.

One must be ruthless with one's own writing or someone else will be.

I do strongly feel that among the greatest pieces of luck for high achievement is ordeal. Certain great artists can make out without it, Titian and others, but mostly you need ordeal. My idea is this: the artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business: Beethoven's deafness, Goya's deafness, Milton's blindness, that kind of thing.

The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business.

There is no such thing as Freedom (though it is the most important condition of human life, after Humility, -which does not exist either). There is only Slavery (walls around one) and absence-of-Slavery (ability to walk in any direction, or to remain still).

Them lady poets must not marry, pal . . . It is a true error to marry with poets / or to be by them.

something has been said for sobriety but very little.

That is our 'pointed task. Love & die.

Two daiquiris withdrew into a corner of a gorgeous room and one told the other a lie.

I conclude now I have no inner resources, because I am heavy bored. Peoples bore me, literature bores me, especially great literature,