David Lehman Quotes

• The best song lyrics seem to me so artful, so brilliant, so warm and humorous, with both passion and wit, that my admiration is matched only by my envy.

  David Lehman

  Song, Humorous, Passion

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• If you're not paying for it through the health plan, you pay for it in the emergency room.

  David Lehman

  Pay, Rooms, Emergencies

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• Words have no single fixed meaning. Like wayward electrons, they can spin away from their initial orbits and enter a wider magnetic field. No one owns them or has a proprietary right to dictate how they will be used.

  David Lehman

  Orbit, Fields, Used

  David Lehman (1992). “Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man”, Poseidon Pr

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• Obscurantism is the academic theorist's revenge on society for having consigned him or her to relative obscurity - a way of proclaiming one's superiority in the face of one's diminished influence.

  David Lehman

  Revenge, Obscurity, Way

  David Lehman (1992). “Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man”, Poseidon Pr

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• Jargon is the verbal sleight of hand that makes the old hat seem newly fashionable; it gives an air of novelty and specious profundity to ideas that, if stated directly, would seem superficial, stale, frivolous, or false. The line between serious and spurious scholarship is an easy one to blur, with jargon on your side.

  David Lehman

  Hands, Your Side, Ideas

  David Lehman (1992). “Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man”, Poseidon Pr

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• Poetry criticism at its worst today is mean in spirit and spiteful in intent, as if determined to inflict the wound that will spur the artist to new heights if it does not cripple him or her.

  David Lehman

  Mean, Artist, Criticism

  David Lehman (2015). “The State of the Art: A Chronicle of American Poetry, 1988-2014”, p.162, University of Pittsburgh Press

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• If you have too good a time writing hostile reviews, you'll injure not only your sensibility but your soul.

  David Lehman

  Writing, Soul, Reviews

  David Lehman (2015). “The State of the Art: A Chronicle of American Poetry, 1988-2014”, p.162, University of Pittsburgh Press

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• There is an air of last things, a brooding sense of impending annihilation, about so much deconstructive activity, in so many of its guises; it is not merely postmodernist but preapocalyptic.

  David Lehman

  Air, Criticism, Lasts

  David Lehman (1992). “Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man”, Poseidon Pr

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• I am completing a book I began back in 2002 called 'Poems in the Manner of.' 'The Matador of Metaphor' is from this manuscript. It is an homage to Wallace Stevens that appropriates certain of his techniques.

  David Lehman

  Book, Technique, Metaphor

  4 Copy quote

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