DELMORE SCHWARTZ

I always cause those who are near to me more suffering than pleasure.

I am of Russian-Jewish distraction.

To be the child of immigrants from Eastern Europe is in itself a special kind of experience; and an important one to an author. He has heard two languages through childhood, the one spoken with ease at home, and the other spoken with ease in the streets and at school, but spoken poorly at home.

All literature is an effort at the formal character of the epigram.

Love is the most difficult and dangerous form of courage. Courage is the most desperate, admirable and noble kind of love.

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

Sometimes even paranoids have enemies.

Order and disorder, form and formless must have profound psychological roots, nervous roots.

Major writing is to say what has been seen, so that it need never be said again.

All poets' wives have rotten lives Their husbands look at them like knives.

I admired my father very much... at the age of sixteen. But now I see that he was a brutal and cruel man, - but not without remorse, and that was what tortured us, his alternations.

In dreams begin responsibilities.

Even paranoids have real enemies.

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?

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

The Jew is at once alienated and indestructible; he is in exile from his own country and in exile even from himself, yet he survives the annihilating fury of history.

Whence, if ever, shall come the actualityOf a voice speaking the mind's knowing,The sunlight bright on the green windowshade,And the self articulate, affectionate, and flowing,Ease, warmth, light, the utter showing,When in the white bed all things are made.

I got married the second time in the way that, when a murder is committed, crackpots turn up at the police station to confess the crime.

How the false truths of the years of youth have passed!Have passed at full speed like trains which never stoppedThere where I stood and waited, hardly aware,How little I knew, or which of them was the oneTo mount and ride to hope or where true hope arrives.

O your life, your lonely lifeWhat have you ever done with it,And done with the great gift of consciousness?What will you ever do before Death's knifeProvides the answer ultimate and appropriate?As I for my part felt in my heart as one who falls,Falls in a parachute, falls endlessly, and feels the vastDraft of the abyss sucking him down and down,An endlessly helplessly falling and appalled clown:This is the way the night passes by, thisIs the overnight endless trip to the famous unfathomable abyss.

I am a book I neither wrote nor read.

Is it not clear that a reviewer's psyche, like an iceberg, is seven-eighths beneath the surface?