George Oppen > Quotes

“I think there is no light in the world
but the world

and I think there is light”
― George Oppen

“What I like more than anything is to visit other islands...”
― George Oppen

“Ultimately the air
Is bare sunlight where must be found
The lyric valuable.”
― George Oppen

“Among days// Having only the force/ Of days//Most simple/ Most difficult”
― George Oppen

“Only one mistake, Ezra! You should have talked to women.”
― George Oppen

“When the hammer strikes a nail, the extreme force of the blow on the broad head is transmitted without loss to the point. The head of the nail is the whole of eternity and the point of that nail is pressed to the center of the human heart. " [ quoting Simone Weil from memory ]”
― George Oppen

“In these explanations it is presumed that an experiencing subject is one occasion of a sensitive reaction to an actual world.’

the rain falls
that had not been falling
and it is the same world”
― George Oppen, Of Being Numerous

“Leviathan"

Truth also is the pursuit of it:
Like happiness, and it will not stand.

Even the verse begins to eat away
In the acid. Pursuit, pursuit;

A wind moves a little,
Moving in a circle, very cold.

How shall we say?
In ordinary discourse—

We must talk now. I am no longer sure of the words,
The clockwork of the world. What is inexplicable

Is the ‘preponderance of objects.’ The sky lights
Daily with that predominance

And we have become the present.

We must talk now. Fear
Is fear. But we abandon one another.”
― George Oppen, New Collected Poems

“There are things
We live among ‘and to see them
Is to know ourselves’.”
― George Oppen

“Boy’s Room"

A friend saw the rooms
Of Keats and Shelley
At the lake, and saw ‘they were just
Boys’ rooms' and was moved

By that. And indeed a poet’s room
Is a boy’s room
And I suppose that women know it.

Perhaps the unbeautiful banker
Is exciting to a woman, a man
Not a boy gasping
For breath over a girl’s body”
― George Oppen

“Poetry must be at least
as powerful as music, but
I am not sure that
it is possible.”
― George Oppen

“[It is not] the poet's business to use verse as an advanced form of rhetoric, nor to give to political statements the aura of eternal truth.”
― George Oppen

“I think always about the thing in which we are. Among the things in it is force, power. It is not enough to say that we like it or that we do not like it. It is here, we must first talk about it. We are not shoppers—or we are not first of all shoppers; it is not enough to say that we like or we do not like—”
― George Oppen, Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers

“A poetry of the meaning of words
And a bond with the universe

I think there is no light in the world
but the world

And I think there is light”
― George Oppen, Selected Poems

“Once the singing was
and is”
― George Oppen

“They used to advise young men to avoid gambling, drink, and women. And they were probably right in their time. But the single most important thing in the world today is not to read The New Yorker.”
― George Oppen, Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers