George Oppen Quotes

People are always reading things into the films.

All films speak to their times. It becomes obvious only after.

For people who know McQueen, there is always an underlying message. It's usually only the intellectual ones who understand what's going on in what I do.

The business, task or object of the scientific study of languages will if possible be 1) to trace the history of all known languages. Naturally this is possible only to a very limited extent and for very few languages.

Art is more than a series of images that are disembodied. Art is objects that live in real places, economies, spaces, architecture.

I was really grateful to have a chance to have some really in-depth study about the power of language using a philosopher who taught at the University of Chicago by the name of Paul Ricoeur. I'm really happy to be in Chicago because a lot of what I do is rooted in his approach to language.

Much as there are things about our own life stories that we can learn only from the systematic study of our dreams, there are things about the human condition that we can learn only from a systematic study of literature.

My writing is not just all facts and voices. I strive to create a text that works as a sign, pointing out undercurrents that lie beneath the facts.

A symbol always transcends the one who makes use of it and makes him say in reality more than he is aware of expressing.

A poet's mission is to make words do more work than they normally do, to make them work on more than one level.

The symbol in the dream has more the value of a parable: it does not conceal, it teaches.

I don't tell everything. I want the reader to have the feeling that maybe they know the whole truth, but they don't.

Philologists, who chase A painting syllable through time and space Start it at home, and hunt it in the dark, To Gaul, to Greece, and into Noah's Ark.

It is a commentary on Berlin in 1931 that ... it was 'My Yiddishe Momme' that the Berlin Broadcasting Company asked for.

The language that reveals also obscures.

Remain open. There is something bigger than you know going on here.

He who travels west travels not only with the sun but with history.

A word is nothing unless it has values and an atmosphere, unless you grasp its historical significance.

The Bible was written two thousand years ago. The world is a different place now. Stories that had meaning then are meaningless now. Beliefs that might have been valid then are invalid now. Those books should be looked at in the same way we look at anything of that age with interest with an acknowledgement of the historical importance but they should not be thought of as anything that has any value.

Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don't know you know.

Whereas Freud was for the most part concerned with the morbid effects of unconscious repression, Jung was more interested in the manifestations of unconscious expression, first in the dream and eventually in all the more orderly products of religion and art and morals.

Study the Bible to know about God. Obey the Bible to really know God.

A writer's work may be a coded autobiography, but only a very close friend could decipher it.

The only way you can truly get to know an author is through the trail of ink he leaves behind him. The person you think you see is only an empty character: truth is always hidden in fiction.

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.