Basil Bunting famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

Always carry a corkscrew and the wine shall provide itself.
-- Basil Bunting

#Wine
Men are fools to invest in real estate.
-- Basil Bunting

#Real #Men #Fool
Sooner or later we must absorb Islam if our own culture is not to die of anemia.
-- Basil Bunting

#Islam #Culture #Anemia
I hate Science. It denies a man's responsibility for his own deeds, abolishes the brotherhood that springs from God's fatherhood. It is a hectoring, dictating expertise, which makes the least lovable of the Church Fathers seem liberal by contrast.
-- Basil Bunting

#Father #Hate #Spring
Prose exists to convey meaning, and no meaning such as prose conveys can be expressed as well in poetry. That's not poetry's purpose.
-- Basil Bunting

#Purpose #Wells #Prose
Compose aloud: poetry is a sound. Never explain- your reader is as smart as you. Your reader is not just any reader, but is the rare one with ears in his head.
-- Basil Bunting

#Smart #Sound #Ears
Name and date split in soft slate a few months obliterate. 166
-- Basil Bunting

#Names #Splits #Months
Our doom is, to be sifted by the wind, heaped up, smoothed down like silly sands. We are less permanent than thought.
-- Basil Bunting

#Silly #Wind #Sand
Praise the green earth. Chance has appointed her home, workshop, larder, middenpit. Her lousy skin scabbed here and there by cities provides us with name and nation.
-- Basil Bunting

#Home #Cities #Names
All you can usually say about a poem or a picture is, 'Look at it, listen to it.' Whether you listen to a piece of music or a poem, or look at a picture or a jug or a piece of sculpture, what matters about it is not what it has in common with others of its kind, but what is singularly its own.
-- Basil Bunting

#What Matters #Jugs #Looks
Can a moment of madness make up for an age of consent?
-- Basil Bunting

#Age #Madness #Moments
But their determination to banish fools foundered ultimately in the installation of absolute idiots.
-- Basil Bunting

#Determination #Fool #Idiot
The times are squalid. They always were. It is a poet's duty to hold the line.
-- Basil Bunting

#Lines #Poet #Duty
To appreciate present conditions, collate them with those of antiquity.
-- Basil Bunting

#Appreciate
The mystic purchases a moment of exhilaration with a lifetime of confusion; and the confusion is infectious and destructive. It is confusing and destructive to try and explain anything in terms of anything else, poetry in terms of psychology.
-- Basil Bunting

#Confusion #Psychology #Confusing

You may also like: