Archibald MacLeish

“Around, around the sun we go:The moon goes round the earth.We do not die of death:We die of vertigo.”

“If you commit yourself to the art of poetry, you commit yourself to the task of learning how to see, using words as elements of sight and their sounds as prisms. And to see means to see something worth all the agony of learning how to see.”

“What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice. Without the possibility of choice a man is not a man but a member, an instrument, a thing.”

“What is more important to a library than anything else -- than everything else -- is the fact that it exists."[The Premise Of Meaning, American Scholar; Washington, DC, June 5, 1972]”

“To see the Earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the Earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold — brothers who know now they are truly brothers.”

“Beauty is that Medusa's head which men go armed to seek and sever, and dead will starve and sting forever.”

“. . . At Ghent the wind rose.There was a smell of rain and a heavy dragOf wind in the hedges but not as the wind blowsOver fresh water when the waves lagFoaming and the willows huddle and it will rain . . .”

“There is no dusk to be, There is no dawn that was, Only there's now, and now, And the wind in the grass.”

“A poem should not meanBut be.”

“As things are now going, the peace we will make, the peace we seem to be making, will be a peace of oil, a peace of gold, a peace of shipping, a peace, in brief... without moral purpose or human interest.”

“How shall freedom be defended? By arms when it is attacked by arms, by truth when it is attacked by lies, by faith when it is attacked by authoritarian dogma. Always, in the final act, by determination and faith.”

“The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.”

“And here face down beneath the sunAnd here upon earth's noonward heightTo feel the always coming onThe always rising of the night”

“Ars PoeticaA poem should be palpable and muteAs a globed fruit,DumbAs old medallions to the thumb,Silent as the sleeve-worn stoneOf casement ledges where the moss has grown—A poem should be wordlessAs the flight of birds.A poem should be motionless in timeAs the moon climbs,Leaving, as the moon releasesTwig by twig the night-entangled trees,Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,Memory by memory the mind—A poem should be motionless in timeAs the moon climbs.A poem should be equal to:Not true.For all the history of griefAn empty doorway and a maple leaf.For loveThe leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—A poem should not meanBut be.”

“You wanted justice ,didn't you?There isn't any...there is only love." - J.B's wife”

“A real writer learns from earlier writers the way a boy learns from an apple orchard -- by stealing what he has a taste for, and can carry off”

“The only thing about a man that is a man . . . is his mind. Everything else you can find in a pig or a horse.”

“Man depends on God for all things: God depends on man for one. Without man's love God does not exist as God, only as creator, and love is the one thing no one, not even God himself, can command. It is a free gift or it is nothing. And it is most itself, most free, when it is offered in spite of suffering, of injustice, and of death . . . The justification of the injustice of the universe is not our blind acceptance of God's inexplicable will, nor our trust in God's love, his dark and incomprehensible love, for us, but our human love, notwithstanding anything, for him.”