Hayden Carruth famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

I had always been aware that the Universe is sad; everything in it, animate or inanimate, the wild creatures, the stones, the stars, was enveloped in the great sadness, pervaded by it. Existence had no use. It was without end or reason. The most beautfiul things in it, a flower or a song, as well as the most compelling, a desire or a thought, were pointless. So great a sorrow. And I knew that the only rest from my anxietyâ€”for I had been trembling even in infancyâ€”lay in acknowledging and absorbing this sadness.
-- Hayden Carruth

#Song #Stars #Flower
My curiosity, alas, is not the kind that can be satisfied by objective knowledge. Plato said that opinion is worthless and that only knowledge counts, which is a neat formulation. But melancholy [men] from the northern mists understand that opinion is all there is. The great questions transcend fact, and discourse is a process of personality. Knowledge cannot respond to knowledge. And wisdom? Is it not opinion refined, opinion killed and resuscitated upward? Maybe Plato would have agreed with this.
-- Hayden Carruth

#Plato #Men #Personality
Why speak of the use of poetry? Poetry is what uses us.
-- Hayden Carruth

#Use #Speak #Poetry Is
A poem is not an expression, nor is it an object. Yet it somewhat partakes of both. What a poem is is never to be known, for which I have learned to be grateful.
-- Hayden Carruth

#Grateful #Expression #Be Grateful
My poems, I think, exist in a state of tension between the love of natural beauty and the fear of natural meaninglessness or absurdity.
-- Hayden Carruth

#Thinking #Natural #States
Any page by Paul Goodman will give you not only originality and brilliance but wisdom, that is, something to think about. He is our peculiar, urban, twentieth-century Thoreau, the quintessential American mind of our time.
-- Hayden Carruth

#Thinking #Giving #Mind
Now I am almost entirely love.
-- Hayden Carruth

I dont really take anything from home except some U.S. magazines and books and definitely some U.S. music. There are just certain songs that remind me of home.
I wanted to be different and original but still have it be something my fans could get into. There also are some big, beautiful ballads. I told my producers that I wanted tracks that are going to blow up in the clubs, but I also wanted songs that were very melodic and with a lot of instrumentation.
All my songs are where I am.
Poetry is a way for me to explore a tingly feeling, to let it play itself out, and also to map it. I feel like I'm making little star maps when I write poems.
Stars ink your fingers with a lexicon of flame blazing rare knowledge.
The light, the sky, the water, they were all things you looked *through* during the day. At night, they were things you looked *into*. You looked *into* the stars, you looked *into* dark rollers and the surprising platinum flash of their caps.
You work here [on the farm] simply without philosophizing; sometimes the work is hard and crowded with pettiness. But at times you feel a surge of cosmic exaltation, like the clear light of the heavens... . And you, too, seem to be taking root in the soil which you are digging, to be nourished by the rays of the sun, to share life with the tiniest blade of grass, with each flower; living in nature's depths, you seem then to rise and grow into the vast expanse of the universe.
Some flowers give out little or no odour until crushed.
Nationalist Socialist Germany wants peace because of its fundamental convictions. And it wants peace also owing to the realization of the simple primitive fact that no war would be likely essentially to alter the distress in Europe. The principal effect of every war is to destroy the flower of the nation. Germany needs peace and desires peace!
The root of any film project for me is this inner need to express something. What nurtures this root and makes it grow into a tree is the script. What makes the tree bear flowers and fruit is the directing.

Hayden Carruth famous quotes

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