Kenneth Patchen famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

The one who comes to question himself cares for mankind.
-- Kenneth Patchen

#Care #Mankind
Destiny is the music of the improbable. Were it otherwise, almost anyone could exist.
-- Kenneth Patchen

#Destiny
Everyman is me. I am his brother. No man is my enemy. I am Everyman and he is in and of me. This is my faith, my strength, my deepest hope, and my only belief.
-- Kenneth Patchen

#Brother #Men #Enemy
'THIS ROOM HAS MYSTERY LIKE A TRANCE' This room has mystery like a trance Of wine ; forget-me-nots of you Are chair and couch, the books your Fingers touched. And now that you Are absent here the silence scrapes A secret rust from everything; While sudden wreaths of sorrow's Dust uncover emptiness like halls To stumble through, and terror falls
-- Kenneth Patchen

#Book #Fall #Wine
O take heart, my brothers. Even now... with every leader & every resource & every strategy of every nation on Earth arrayed against Her - Even now, O even now, my brothers, Life is in no danger of losing the argument! - For after all .... (as will be shown) She has only to change the subject.
-- Kenneth Patchen

#Brother #Heart #Leader
Literature is what you write when you think you should be saying something. Writing begins when you'd rather be doing anything else: and you've just done it.
-- Kenneth Patchen

#Writing #Thinking #Done
What is a 'thing'? All is movement, a flowing. How stupid it is to speak of the 'mind'. There is a body; there is a mind: they are mixed up together. Shakespeare with a hole in his sock will not write the sonnet of a Shakespeare with socks intact.
-- Kenneth Patchen

#Stupid #Writing #Mind
The question is not: do we believe in God? but rather: does God believe in us? And the answer is: only an unbeliever could have created our image of God; and only a false God could be satisfied with it.
-- Kenneth Patchen

#Believe #Doe #Answers
That which is not daring is nothing.
-- Kenneth Patchen

#Daring
Snow is the only one of us that leaves no tracks.
-- Kenneth Patchen

#Snow #Track
You will protect with the last drop of someone else's blood what was never yours.
-- Kenneth Patchen

#Blood #Lasts #Protect
Think enough and you won't know anything.
-- Kenneth Patchen

#Thinking #Enough
All at Once Is What Eternity Is.
-- Kenneth Patchen

#Eternity
Art is not to throw light but to be light...
-- Kenneth Patchen

#Art #Light #Art Is
Come now, my child, if we were planning to harm you, do you think we'd be lurking here beside the path in the very darkest part of the forest?
-- Kenneth Patchen

#Children #Thinking #Forests
There are so many little dyings How do we know which one of them is death?
-- Kenneth Patchen

#Death #Dying #Littles
It's dark out, Jack, the stations out there don't identify themselves, we're in it raw-blind like burned rats, it's running out all around us, the footprints of the beast, one nobody has any notion of. The white and vacant eyes of something above there, something that doesn't know we exist. I smell heartbreak up there, Jack, a heartbreak at the center of things, and in which we don't figure at all.
-- Kenneth Patchen

#Running #Eye #Dark
Do I not deal with angels When her lips I touch.
-- Kenneth Patchen

#Angel #Lips #Deals
God must have loved the People in Power, for he made them so very like their own image of him.
-- Kenneth Patchen

#People #Made
It is fully practical to create that which has form in the silence. The noise art makes is usually heard by those whose lives listen to god. It is not adviseable to cheat that which has no other stake than the deeps and brights of all man.
-- Kenneth Patchen

#Life #Art #Men
I don't consider myself to be a painter. I think of myself as someone who has used the medium of painting in an attempt to extend - give an extra dimension to - the medium of words. It happens very often my writing with a pen is interrupted with my writing with a brush - but I think of both as writing.
-- Kenneth Patchen

#Writing #Thinking #Giving
The best hope is that one of these days the ground will get disgusted enough just to walk away - leaving people with nothing more to stand on than what they have so bloody well stood for up to now.
-- Kenneth Patchen

#People #Leaving #Enough
Greatness and Truth can never be in danger from these murdering wretches. To perform one's duty, be it now, be it clean, and be it done with humilityâ€¦ A man is a sacred thing. ANY ACTION OR THOUGHT WHICH INJURES THE HUMAN IMAGINATION IS EVIL.
-- Kenneth Patchen

#Humility #Men #Greatness
I think you will agree that I am alive in every part of this book; turn back twenty, thirty, one hundred pages - I am back there. That is why I hate the story; characters are not snakes that they must shed their skins on every page - there can only be one action: what a man is. When you have understood this, you will be through with novels.
-- Kenneth Patchen

#Hate #Book #Writing
For greatness is only the drayhorse that coaxes The built cart out; and where we go is reason. But genius is an enormous littleness, a trickling Of heart that covers alike the hare and the hunter.
-- Kenneth Patchen

#Heart #Greatness #Hunters
Dogs with broken legs are shot; men with broken souls write through the night.
-- Kenneth Patchen

#Dog #Writing #Night
Gentle and giving-all the rest is treason.
-- Kenneth Patchen

#Giving #Gentle #Treason

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