Lewis H. Lapham Quotes

We often find far more power in a symbol than in something that is an an actuality.

I've grown up on a diet of metaphors. If young writers would find those writers who can give them metaphors by the bushel and the peck, then they'll become better writers - to learn how to capsualize things and present them in metaphorical form.

Every poem is a coat of arms. It must be deciphered. How much blood, how many tears in exchange for these axes, these muzzles, these unicorns, these torches, these towers, these martlets, these seedlings of stars and these fields of blue!

You can't create a movie as you think about it. And what's in the scene is not what's being seen. A shot always means something other than what it is. All are vehicles. A landscape is just a vehicle. The viewer might think different things, and I'm not going to intervene.

Metaphors are our way of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeming.

There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street.

Just because something is a metaphor doesn't mean it can't be real.

Everything in life is a metaphor.

A powerful enough metaphor grows its own truth.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

In painting you must give the idea of the true by means of the false.

Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony.

In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.

Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.

All poetry is an ordered voice, one which tries to tell you about a vision in the un-visionary language of farm, city, and love.

What you look for in a picture is a metaphor, something that means something more, that makes you think about things you've seen or thought about.

When you allegorize, you're gonna get everybody saved somehow.

Even in a less exaggerated description, any verbal account of a person is bound to find itself employing an assortment of waterfalls, lightning rods, landscapes, birds, etc.

The poetic act consists of suddenly seeing that an idea splits up into a number of equal motifs and of grouping them; they rhyme.

Statues and pictures and verse may be grand, But they are not the Life for which they stand.

Metaphors are much more tenacious than facts.

Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.

I am searching for abstract ways of expressing reality, abstract forms that will enlighten my own mystery.

The analysis of the thing is not the thing itself.

I lost many literary battles the day I read 'Their Eyes Were Watching God.' I had to concede that occasionally aphorisms have their power. I had to give up the idea that Keats had a monopoly on the lyrical.