Guy Davenport Quotes

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Sometimes when reading Goethe I have a paralyzing suspicion that he is trying to be funny.
Guy Davenport Quotes: Sometimes when reading Goethe I
Lives do not have plots, only biographies do.
Guy Davenport Quotes: Lives do not have plots,
A boar is a very special kind of animal whose bristling is a thing unto itself, and his nape, like a snake's neck, is more a word than a reality.
Guy Davenport Quotes: A boar is a very
Bonnie Jean (who thinks all philosophers are idiots) has this quarrel with Wittgenstein, who in several places says that reddish green is inconceivable. Yet every summer, when our peppers are drying from green to red, one can see an intermediate stage that is precisely reddish green.
Guy Davenport Quotes: Bonnie Jean (who thinks all
There's nothing like being a soldier for confidence or learning your limits or enduring utter humiliation.
Guy Davenport Quotes: There's nothing like being a
Reality was the keener for being fugitive, concealed, and doubtful...
Guy Davenport Quotes: Reality was the keener for
Nothing now exists that is so valuable as whatever theoretically might replace it.
Guy Davenport Quotes: Nothing now exists that is
Originality houses many rooms, and the views from the windows are all different.
Guy Davenport Quotes: Originality houses many rooms, and
As long as you have ideas, you can keep going. That's why writing fiction is so much fun: because you're moving people about, and making settings for them to move in, so there's always something there to keep working on.
Guy Davenport Quotes: As long as you have
My view, as one who taught it, is that the whole purpose of a literary education should be to tell people that these things exist. I don't think any teacher should try to 'teach an author,' but rather simply describe what the author has written. And this is what I tried to do.
Guy Davenport Quotes: My view, as one who
The unexamined life is eminently worth living, were anyone so fortunate. It would be the life of an animal, brave and alert, with instincts instead of opinions and decisions, loyalty to mate and cubs, to the pack. It might, for all we know, be a life of richest interest and happiness. Dogs dream. The quickened spirit of the eagle circling in high cold air is beyond our imagination. The placidity of cattle shames the Stoic, and what critic has the acumen of a cat? We have used the majesty of the lion as a symbol of royalty, the wide-eyed stare of owls for wisdom, the mild beauty of the dove for the spirit of God.
Guy Davenport Quotes: The unexamined life is eminently
We will always return to the private and inviolable act of reading as our culture's way of developing an individual.
Guy Davenport Quotes: We will always return to
The poet and poetess have always had a rough time of it in the Republic. It has ever been their endemic luck to starve, become a Harvard professor, commit suicide, lose their reading glasses before an audience of sophomores, go upon the people a la Barnum, and serve as homework in state universities, where they could in nowise get a position and where their presence usually scatters the English faculty like a truant officer among the Amish.
Guy Davenport Quotes: The poet and poetess have
Reality is the most effective mask of reality. Our fondest wish, attained, ceases to be our fondest wish. Success is the greatest of disappointments. The spirit is most alive when it is lost. Anxiety was Kafka's composure, as despair was Kierkegaard's happiness. Kafka said impatience is our greatest fault. The man at the gate of the Law waited there all of his life.
Guy Davenport Quotes: Reality is the most effective
Art knows neither doctrine nor idea; its nature is to show.
Guy Davenport Quotes: Art knows neither doctrine nor
Fiction's essential activity is to imagine how others feel, what a Saturday afternoon in an Italian town in the 2nd Century looked like. My ambition is solely to get some effect, as of light on stone in a forest on a September day.
Guy Davenport Quotes: Fiction's essential activity is to
How can I shake and dispel the awful reputation of being an "erudite" writer? I'm about as erudite as a traffic cop. I like to know things; what's so two-headed peculiar about that?
Guy Davenport Quotes: How can I shake and
Imagination is like the drunk man who lost his watch and must get drunk again to find it.
Guy Davenport Quotes: Imagination is like the drunk
A work of art is a form that articulates forces, making them intelligible.
Guy Davenport Quotes: A work of art is
You have built a wall of concrete shit between yourself and reality.
Guy Davenport Quotes: You have built a wall
Something of the previous state, however, survives every change. This is called in the language of cybernetics (which took it form the language of machines) feedback, the advantages of learning from experience and of having developed reflexes.
Guy Davenport Quotes: Something of the previous state,
I've carved the puppet, and I manipulate the strings, but while it's on stage, the show belongs to the puppet.
Guy Davenport Quotes: I've carved the puppet, and
There are many objects of desire, and therefore many desires. Some are born with us, hunger, yearning, and pride of place, and some are the foolishness of the world, such as the desire to eat off silver plates. Desire is a wild horse to be tamed. Virtue is a habit long continued. The taming of desire is like the training of the athlete. Discipline is not the restraint but the use of energy ... When I forbid myself what I may have, no person is going to tempt me with what is truly forbidden.
Guy Davenport Quotes: There are many objects of
Poetry and fiction have grieved for a century now over the loss of some vitality which they think they see in a past from which we are by now irrevocably alienated.
Guy Davenport Quotes: Poetry and fiction have grieved
When Heraclitus said that everything passes steadily along, he was not inciting us to make the best of the moment, an idea unseemly to his placid mind, but to pay attention to the pace of things. Each has its own rhythm: the nap of a dog, the procession of the equinoxes, the dances of Lydia, the majestically slow beat of the drums at Dodona, the swift runners at Olympia.
Guy Davenport Quotes: When Heraclitus said that everything
The difference between the Parthenon and the World Trade Center, between a French wine glass and a German beer mug, between Bach and John Philip Sousa, between Sophocles and Shakespeare, between a bicycle and a horse, though explicable by historical moment, necessity, and destiny, is before all a difference of imagination.
Guy Davenport Quotes: The difference between the Parthenon
The birds suffer their suffering each in a lifetime, forgetting it as they go.
Guy Davenport Quotes: The birds suffer their suffering
I am not writing for scholars or fellow critics, but for people who like to read, to look at pictures, and to know things.
Guy Davenport Quotes: I am not writing for
Man was first a hunter, and an artist: his early vestiges tell us that alone. But he must always have dreamed, and recognized and guessed and supposed, all the skills of the imagination. Language itself is a continuously imaginative act. Rational discourse outside our familiar territory of Greek logic sounds to our ears like the wildest imagination. The Dogon, a people of West Africa, will tell you that a white fox named Ogo frequently weaves himself a hat of string bean hulls, puts it on his impudent head, and dances in the okra to insult and infuriate God Almighty, and that there's nothing we can do about it except abide him in faith and patience.

This is not folklore, or quaint custom, but as serious a matter to the Dogon as a filling station to us Americans. The imagination; that is, the way we shape and use the world, indeed the way we see the world, has geographical boundaries like islands, continents, and countries. These boundaries can be crossed. That Dogon fox and his impudent dance came to live with us, but in a different body, and to serve a different mode of the imagination. We call him Brer Rabbit.
Guy Davenport Quotes: Man was first a hunter,
The real use of imaginative reading is precisely to suspend one's mind in the workings of another sensibility.
Guy Davenport Quotes: The real use of imaginative
Art is always the replacement of indifference by attention.
Guy Davenport Quotes: Art is always the replacement
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