Guy Davenport Quotes

• Art is always the replacement of indifference by attention.

  Guy Davenport

  Art, Attention, Indifference

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• Art is the attention we pay to the wholeness of the world.

  Guy Davenport

  Art, Attention, World

  Guy Davenport (2013). “The Guy Davenport Reader”, p.408, Counterpoint

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• The poet is at the edge of our consciousness of the world, finding beyond the suspected nothingness which we imagine limits our perception another acre or so of being worth our venturing upon.

  Guy Davenport

  Perception, World, Acres

  Guy Davenport (1997). “The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays”, p.192, David R. Godine Publisher

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• In curved Einsteinian space we are at all times, technically, looking at the back of our own head.

  Guy Davenport

  Space, All Time

  Guy Davenport (1989). “A Balthus notebook”, W W Norton & Company Incorporated

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• Originality houses many rooms, and the views from the windows are all different.

  Guy Davenport

  Views, House, Different

  Ronald Johnson, Guy Davenport (1977). “Radi Os”

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• Imagination is like the drunk man who lost his watch and must get drunk again to find it.

  Guy Davenport

  Men, Drunk, Imagination

  Guy Davenport (1997). “The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays”, p.5, David R. Godine Publisher

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• We will always return to the private and inviolable act of reading as our culture's way of developing an individual.

  Guy Davenport

  Book, Reading, Culture

  Guy Davenport (2013). “The Guy Davenport Reader”, p.302, Counterpoint

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• I’ve carved the puppet, and I manipulate the strings, but while it’s on stage, the show belongs to the puppet.

  Guy Davenport

  Puppets, Strings, Stage

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• Sometimes when reading Goethe I have the paralyzing suspicion that he is trying to be funny.

  Guy Davenport

  Witty, Powerful, Humorous

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• There are many objects of desire, and therefore many desires. Some are born with us, hunger, yearning, and pride of place, and some are of the foolishness of the world, such as the desire to eat off silver plates. Desire is a wild horse to be tamed. Virtue is habit long continued. The taming of desire is like the training of an athlete. Discipline is not the restraint but the use of energy.

  Guy Davenport

  Horse, Athlete, Pride

  "Eclogues: Eight Stories".

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• Theres nothing like being a soldier for confidence or learning your limits or enduring utter humiliation.

  Guy Davenport

  Soldier, Limits, Endure

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• 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

  Dog, Naps, Ideas

  Guy Davenport (2013). “The Guy Davenport Reader”, p.224, Counterpoint

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• It is worthwhile adding that the power of the poem to teach not only sensibilities and the subtle movements of the spirit but knowledge, real lasting felt knowledge, is going mostly unnoticed among our scholars. The body of knowledge locked into and releasable from poetry can replace practically any university in the Republic. First things first, then: the primal importance of a poem is what it can add to the individual mind.Poetry is the voice of a poet at its birth, and the voice of a people in its ultimate fulfillment as a successful and useful work of art.

  Guy Davenport

  Art, Real, Successful

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• Unless the work of art has wholly exhausted its makers attention, it fails. This is why works of great significance are demanding and why they are infinitely rewarding.

  Guy Davenport

  Art, Attention, Exhausted

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• nothing now exists that is so valuable as whatever theoretically might replace it.

  Guy Davenport

  Might, Valuable

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• A work of art is a form that articulates forces, making them intelligible.

  Guy Davenport

  Art, Form, Force

  Guy Davenport (2015). “Every Force Evolves a Form: Twenty Essays”, p.5, Open Road Media

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• I never intended to be a teacher. I just like going to school and learning things.

  Guy Davenport

  Teacher, School

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• 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

  Machines, Cybernetics, Language

  Guy Davenport (1997). “The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays”, p.93, David R. Godine Publisher

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• The birds suffer their suffering each in a lifetime, forgetting it as they go.

  Guy Davenport

  Bird, Suffering, Forget

  Guy Davenport (2013). “The Guy Davenport Reader”, p.61, Counterpoint

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