William Empson Quotations

Law makes long spokes of the short stakes of men.

Waiting for the end, boys, waiting for the end.

My heart pumps yet the poison draught of you.

It seems unpleasantly refined to put things off till someone knows.

Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills. It is not the effort nor the failure tires. The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.

The heart of standing is you cannot fly.

You don't want madhouse and the whole thing there.

. . . life involves maintaining oneself between contradictions that can't be solved by analysis.

Attending there let us absorb the cultures of nationsAnd dissolve into our judgement all their codes.Then, being clogged, with a natural hesitation(People are continually asking one the way out),Let us stand here and admit that we have no road.

Attending there let us absorb the cultures of nations And dissolve into our judgement all their codes. Then, being clogged, with a natural hesitation (People are continually asking one the way out), Let us stand here and admit that we have no road.

So your flesh shall be part of mine And part of mine be yours. Brother and sister we shall be Whose unity endures. Always the sister doll will cry, Made in these careful ways, Cry on and on, Come back to me, Come back, in a few days.

A humanist, as I understand the term, says, "This world is good enough for me, if only I can be good enough for it.

It seems unpleasantly refinedTo put things off till someone knows.

It is this deep blankness is the real thing strange.The more things happen to you the more you can'tTell or remember even what they were.

It is this deep blankness is the real thing strange. The more things happen to you the more you can't Tell or remember even what they were.

The "News," the conferences that leer,the creeping fog, the civil traps.These are what force you into fear.

The "News," the conferences that leer, the creeping fog, the civil traps. These are what force you into fear.

It is the pain, it is the pain, endures.

It seemed the best thing to be up and go.

. . . the waste even in a fortunate life, the isolation of a life rich in intimacy, cannot but be felt deeply, and is the central feeling of tragedy. And anything of value must accept this because it must not prostitute itself; its strength is to be prepared to waste itself, if it does not get the opportunity.

Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.It is not the effort nor the failure tires.The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.

The heart of standing is that you cannot fly.

Poets, on the face of it, have either got to be easier or to write their own notes; readers have either got to take more trouble over reading or cease to regard notes as pretentious and a sign of bad poetry

Waiting for the end, boys, waiting for the end. What is there to be or do? What's become of me or you? Are we kind or are we true? Sitting two and two, boys, waiting for the end.

The central function of imaginative literature is to make you realize that other people act on moral convictions different from your own.

Poetry contains nothing haphazard.

Proust has listed a great many reasons why it is impossible to be happy, but, in the course of being happy, one finds it difficult to remember them.

Life involves maintaining oneself between contradictions that can't be solved by analysis.

The difficult part of good temper consists in forbearance, and accommodation to the ill-humors of others.

All those large dreams by which men long live well Are magic-lanterned on the smoke of hell.

To produce pure proletarian art the artist must be at one with the worker; this is impossible, not for political reasons, but because the artist never is at one with any public.

Liberal hopefulness Regards death as a mere border to an improving picture.

Buddhists and Christians contrive to agree about death Making death their ideal basis for different ideals. The Communists however disapprove of death Except when practical.

Shall I make it clear, boys, for all to apprehend, Those that will not hear, boys, waiting for the end, Knowing it is near, boys, trying to pretend, Sitting in cold fear, boys, waiting for the end?

The machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry.

I'm afraid I take ... this rather clinical view of love: it's saving you from madness. I'm not so enthusiastic as other poets have been.

I think many people (like myself) prefer to read poetry mixed with prose; it gives you more to go by; the conventions of poetry have been getting far off from normal life, so that to have a prose bridge makes reading poetry seem more natural.

Twixt devil and deep sea, man hacks his caves; Birth, death; one, many; what is true, and seems; Earth's vast hot iron, cold space's empty waves.

This world is good enough for me, if only I can be good enough for it.