Delmore Schwartz Quotes

Love is the most difficult and dangerous form of courage. Courage is the most desperate, admirable and noble kind of love.

- Delmore Schwartz

All literature is an effort at the formal character of the epigram.

- Delmore Schwartz

What was the freedom to which the adult human being rose in the morning, if each act was held back or inspired by the overpowering ghost of a little child?

- Delmore Schwartz

All poets' wives have rotten lives Their husbands look at them like knives.

- Delmore Schwartz

To be the child of immigrants from Eastern Europe is in itself a special kind of experience; and an important one to an author. He has heard two languages through childhood, the one spoken with ease at home, and the other spoken with ease in the streets and at school, but spoken poorly at home.

- Delmore Schwartz

The Jew is at once alienated and indestructible; he is in exile from his own country and in exile even from himself, yet he survives the annihilating fury of history.

- Delmore Schwartz

Existentialism means that no one else can take a bath for you.

- Delmore Schwartz

I always cause those who are near to me more suffering than pleasure.

- Delmore Schwartz

Sometimes even paranoids have enemies.

- Delmore Schwartz

Even paranoids have real enemies.

- Delmore Schwartz

I admired my father very much... at the age of sixteen. But now I see that he was a brutal and cruel man, - but not without remorse, and that was what tortured us, his alternations.

- Delmore Schwartz

I am of Russian-Jewish distraction.

- Delmore Schwartz

In dreams begin responsibilities.

- Delmore Schwartz

Order and disorder, form and formless must have profound psychological roots, nervous roots.

- Delmore Schwartz

Time is the school in which we learn, time is the fire in which we burn.

- Delmore Schwartz