Lewis Hyde > Quotes

“Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.”
― Lewis Hyde, Alcohol and Poetry: John Berryman and the Booze Talking

“Most artists are brought to their vocation when their own nascent gifts are awakened by the work of a master. That is to say, most artists are converted to art by art itself. Finding one's voice isn't just an emptying and purifying oneself of the words of others but an adopting and embracing of filiations, communities, and discourses. Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos. Any artist knows these truths, no matter how deeply he or she submerges that knowing.”
― Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property

“Better to operate with detachment, then; better to have a way but infuse it with a little humor; best, to have no way at all but to have instead the wit constantly to make one's way anew from the materials at hand.”
― Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art

“Erik Erikson has commented: Potentially creative men like (Bernard) Shaw build the personal fundament of their work during a self-decreed moratorium, during which they often starve themselves, socially, erotically, and, at last but not least, nutritionally, in order to let the grosser weeds die out, and make way for the growth of their inner garden. ”
― Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property

“But neither money nor machines can create. They shuttle tokens of energy, but they do not transform. A civilization based on them puts people out of touch with their creative powers.”
― Lewis Hyde, Alcohol and Poetry: John Berryman and the Booze Talking

“The passage into mystery always refreshes. If, when we work, we can look once a day upon the face of mystery, then our labor satisfies. We are lightened when our gifts rise from pools we cannot fathom. Then we know they are not a solitary egotism and they are inexhaustible.”
― Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World

“We are each born into a situation—a particular body (its race, sex, health...), a set of ancestors, a community, a nation—and born into the stories told of each of these.”
― Lewis Hyde, Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership

“An anaesthetic is a poet-killer.”
― Lewis Hyde, Alcohol and Poetry: John Berryman and the Booze Talking

“An essential portion of any artist’s labor is not creation so much as invocation. Part of the work cannot be made, it must be received; and we cannot have this gift except, perhaps, by supplication, by courting, by creating within ourselves that ‘begging bowl’ to which the gift is drawn.”
― Lewis Hyde

“It is hard to travel in this fallen world if you lose the power of speech every time evil meets you on the path.”
― Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art

“The first story I have to tell is not exactly true, but it isn't exactly false, either.”
― Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art

“Irony got dangerous when it became a habit. Wallace quoted Lewis Hyde…”Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy the cage.” Then he continued: This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a ground clearing…. Irony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks. That was it exactly—Irony was defeatist, timid, the telltale of a generation too afraid to say what it meant, and so in danger of forgetting it had anything to say.”
― Lewis Hyde

“Out of bad faith comes a longing for control, for the law and the police. Bad faith suspects that the gift will not come back, that things won’t work out, that there is a scarcity so great in the world that it will devour whatever gifts appear. In bad faith the circle is broken.”
― Lewis Hyde, The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World

“All cultures seem to find a slightly alien local population to carry the Hermes projection. For the Vietnamese it is the Chinese, and for the Chinese it is the Japanese. For the Hindu it is the Moslem; for the North Pacific tribes it was the Chinook; in Latin America and in the American South it is the Yankee. In Uganda it is the East Indians and Pakistanis. In French Quebec it is the English. In Spain the Catalans are "the Jews of Spain". On Crete it is the Turks, and in Turkey it is the Armenians. Lawrence Durrell says that when he lived in Crete he was friends with the Greeks, but that when he wanted to buy some land they sent him to a Turk, saying that a Turk was what you needed for a trade, though of course he couldn't be trusted.
This figure who is good with money but a little tricky is always treated as a foreigner even if his family has been around for centuries. Often he actually is a foreigner, of course. He is invited in when the nation needs trade and he is driven out - or murdered - when nationalism begins to flourish: the Chinese out of Vietnam in 1978, the Japanese out of China in 1949, the Jankees out of South America and Iran, the East Indians out of Uganda under Idi Amin, and the Armenians out of Turkey in 1915-16. The outsider is always used as a catalyst to arouse nationalism, and when times are hard he will always be its victim as well.”
― Lewis Hyde, The Gift

“that all pretensions to being self-made hide the reciprocal truth, that we have unpayable debts to the world around us, to our community, to our forebears, to the ancients, to nature, to the gods.”
― Lewis Hyde, Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership

“There is the family of our birth and then there is a more noble world to which we really belong; the richness of this ideal world is often proportional to the poverty of the real, as personal grandiosity is proportional to shame.”
― Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art

“Every act of memory is an act of forgetting. The tree of memory set its roots in blood. To secure an ideal, surround it with a moat of forgetfulness. To study the self is to forget the self. In forgetting lies the liquefaction of time. The Furies bloat the present with the undigested past. “Memory and oblivion, we call that imagination.” We dream in order to forget.”
― Lewis Hyde, A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past

“There is no way to suppress change…not even in heaven; there is only a choice between a way of living which allows constant, if gradual alterations and a way of living that combines great control and cataclysmic upheavals. Those who panic and bind the trickster choose the latter path. It would be better to learn to play with him, better especially to develop skills (cultural, spiritual, artistic) that allow some commerce with accident, and some acceptance of the changes that contingency will always engender.”
― Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art

“The prophet speaks of things that will be true in the future because they are true in all time. The prophet disrupts the mundane in order to reveal the eternal.”
― Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art

“Because the spirit of the gift shuns exactness and because gifts do not necessarily move reciprocally (and therefore do not produce the adversary roles of creditor and debtor), courts of law would be rightly perplexed as to how to adjudicate a case of ingratitude. Contracts”
― Lewis Hyde, The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World

“It must be that sometimes our assertions about higher order and hidden design are fables we’ve made up to help us ignore our own contingency. Accidents tear”
― Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art

“In a free market the people are free, the ideas are locked up.”
― Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World

“As such, he is sometimes the messenger of the gods and sometimes the guide of souls, carrying the dead into the underworld or opening the tomb to release them when they must walk among us.”
― Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art

“we would no longer call it an ego at all. The gift leaves all boundary and circles into mystery. The passage into mystery always refreshes. If, when we work, we can look once a day upon the face of mystery, then our labor satisfies. We are lightened when our gifts rise from pools we cannot fathom. Then we know they are not a solitary egotism and they are inexhaustible. Anything contained within a boundary must contain as well its own exhaustion. The”
― Lewis Hyde, The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World

“Most of the travelers, liars, thieves, and shameless personalities of the twentieth century are not tricksters at all, then. Their disruptions are not subtle enough, or pitched at a high enough level. Trickster isn’t a run-of-themill liar and thief. When he lies and steals, it isn’t so much to get away with something or get rich as to disturb the established categories of truth and property and, by so doing, open the road to possible new worlds.”
― Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art

“A market exchange has an equilibrium or stasis: you pay to balance the scale. But when you give a gift there is momentum, and the weight shifts from body to body.”
― Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World

“Trickster is among other things the gatekeeper who opens the door into the next world; those who mistake him for a psychopath never even know such a door exists.”
― Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art

“An essential portion of any artist’s labor is not creation so much as invocation.”
― Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World

“The more we allow such commodity art to define and control our gifts, the less gifted we will become, as individuals and as a society. The”
― Lewis Hyde, The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World

“Scarcity appears when wealth cannot flow. Elsewhere”
― Lewis Hyde, The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World