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Action(s)
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The curse of me and my nation is that we always think things can be bettered by immediate action of some sort, any sort rather than no sort.
-Ezra Pound
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Anger
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I have never known anyone worth a damn who wasn't irascible.
-Ezra Pound
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Art
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The jargon of these sculptors is beyond me. I do not know precisely why I admire a green granite female, apparently pregnant monster with one eye going around a square corner.
-Ezra Pound
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If a patron buys from an artist who needs money (needs money to buy tools, time, food), the patron then makes himself equal to the artist; he is building art into the world; he creates.
-Ezra Pound
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But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.
-Ezra Pound
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Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.
-Ezra Pound
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Good art however immoral is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.
-Ezra Pound
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Authors & Writing
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It is difficult to write a paradise when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse. It is obviously much easier to find inhabitants for an inferno or even a purgatorio.
-Ezra Pound
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Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.
-Ezra Pound
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Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.
-Ezra Pound
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The secret of popular writing is never to put more on a given page than the common reader can lap off it with no strain whatsoever on his habitually slack attention.
-Ezra Pound
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Birth
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I should consent to breed under pressure, if I were convinced in any way of the reasonableness of reproducing the species. But my nerves and the nerves of any woman I could live with three months, would produce only a victim... lacking in impulse, a mere bundle of discriminations. If I were wealthy I might subsidize a stud of young peasants, or a tribal group in Tahiti.
-Ezra Pound
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Books
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Literature does not exist in a vacuum. Writers as such have a definite social function exactly proportional to their ability as writers. This is their main use.
-Ezra Pound
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The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.
-Ezra Pound
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A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard). It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.
-Ezra Pound
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There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and at forty-eight.
-Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading
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If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.
-Ezra Pound
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Christianity
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A heroic figure... not wholly to blame for the religion that's been foisted on him.
-Ezra Pound
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City Life, Cities
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All great art is born of the metropolis.
-Ezra Pound
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Civilization
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A civilized man is one who will give a serious answer to a serious question. Civilization itself is a certain sane balance of values.
-Ezra Pound
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Criticism
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I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.
-Ezra Pound
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Death
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There are few things more difficult than to appraise the work of a man suddenly dead in his youth; to disentangle promise from achievement; to save him from that sentimentalizing which confuses the tragedy of the interruption with the merit of the work actually performed.
-Ezra Pound
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Economics
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In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries.
-Ezra Pound
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Education
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Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing. The rest is mere sheep-herding.
-Ezra Pound
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Exile
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I dunno what my 23 infantile years in America signify. I left as soon as motion was autarchic -- I mean my motion.
-Ezra Pound
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Books by and about Ezra Pound