William Empson Quotes

When I define polarities in my work, I actually create the space between things. I point to the question I am actually interested in, without naming it.

Everything in life is gray, you know.

It's the murkiness of humanity that I find endlessly fascinating.

At every moment of our lives, we all have one foot in a fairy tale and the other in the abyss.

And the wind that saddens, the sea that gladdens, Are singing the selfsame strain.

I like these people swarming on the sidewalks, wedged into a little space of houses and canals, hemmed in by fogs, cold lands, and the sea streaming like a wet wash. I like them, for they are double. They are here and elsewhere.

turn and turn and turn again you see the what, but not the when remedy and wrong entwine and so they form a single vine

Death and life are the same thing-like the two sides of my hand, the palm and the back. And still the palm and the back are not the same...They can be neither separated, nor mixed.

Africa has a genious for extremes, for the beginning and the end. It seems simultaneously connected to some memory of Eden and to some foretaste of apocalypse. Nowhere is day more vivid or night darker. Nowhere are forests more luxuriant. Nowhere is there a continent more miserable

Humanity i love you because you are perpetually putting the secret of life in your pants and forgetting it's there and sitting down on it and because you are forever making poems in the lap of death Humanity i hate you

Unfathomable mind, now beacon, now sea.

Nature hath meal and bran, contempt and grace.

Sometimes I feel like there is so much to be afraid of, and sometimes I feel like there is nothing left to fear.

And earth was heaven a little the worse for wear. And heaven was earth, done up again to look like new.

Gloriousness and wretchedness need each other. One inspires us, the other softens us.

Sharp and mild, dull and keen, well known and strange, dirty and clean, where both the fool and wise are seen: All this am I, have ever been, - in me dove, snake and swine convene!

Gates appeal to me because of the negative space they allow. They can be closed but at the same time they allow the seasons and breezes to enter and flow. They can shut you out or shut you in. And in some ways there is no difference.

Could you understand the meaning of light if there were no darkness to point the contrast? Day and night, life and death, love and hatred, since none of these things can have any being at all apart from the existence of the other, you can no more separate them than you can separate the two sides of a coin.

What distressed me most - more even than my own folly - was the perplexing question, How can beauty and ugliness dwell so near?

My earth is somebody's ceiling

Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait.

We are at war between consciousness and nature, between the desire for permanence and the fact of flux. It is ourself against ourselves.