Phillip Lopate famous quotes

03-26-2025

The prospect of a long day at the beach makes me panic. There is no harder work I can think of than taking myself off to somewhere pleasant, where I am forced to stay for hours and 'have fun'.
-- Phillip Lopate

#Beach #Fun #Thinking
... I vowed that I would always respect the right of an individual to kill himself. Whether suicide was a moral or immoral act I no longer felt sure, but of the dignity of its intransigence I was convinced.
-- Phillip Lopate

#Suicide #Suicidal #Moral
The dinner party is a suburban form of entertainment. Its spread in our big cities represents an insidious Fifth Column suburbanization of the metropolis.
-- Phillip Lopate

#Party #Cities #Dinner
Think of a dinner party as a club of revolutionaries, a technocratic elite whose social interactions that night are a dry run for some future takeover of the state.
-- Phillip Lopate

#Running #Party #Night
I am apt to be harsh in my secret judgments of others, seeing them as defective because they are not enough like me.
-- Phillip Lopate

#Secret #Judgment #Enough
Doubt is my boon companion, the faithful St. Bernard ever at my side. Whether writing essays or just going about daily life, I am constantly second-guessing myself. My mind is filled with 'yes, buts,' 'so whats?' and other skeptical rejoinders. I am forever monitoring myself for traces of folly, insensitivity, arrogance, false humility, cruelty, stupidity, immaturity and, guess what, I keep finding examples. Age has not made me wiser, except maybe in retrospect.
-- Phillip Lopate

#Writing #Humility #Stupidity
The trick is to realize that one is not important, except insofar as oneâ€™s example can serve to elucidate a more widespread human trait and make readers feel a little less lonely and freakish.
-- Phillip Lopate

#Lonely #Important #Littles
Why am I attracted to all these lying quotes all of a sudden? Hereâ€™s another one. This one by Phillip Lopate: â€˜(Children know it better than adults) that in telling a lie, fidelity is everything.â€™
-- Phillip Lopate

#Children #Lying #Adults
I like the freedom that comes with lowered expectations.
-- Phillip Lopate

#Expectations
Until people see poetry as springing from all of life, they will isolate it in a creativity corner and treat it like a mascot.
-- Phillip Lopate

#Creativity #People #Treats
I imagined a psychic pain growing inside him (myself) that demanded some physical outlet. Suicide must have been his attempt to give Pain a body, a representation, to put it outside himself. A need to convert inner torment into some outward tangible wound that all could see. It was almost as though suicide were a last-ditch effort at exorcism, in which the person sacrificed his life in order that the devil inside might die.
-- Phillip Lopate

#Suicide #Pain #Suicidal
The knowledge that my discriminations are skewed and not always universally desirable doesn't stop me in the least from making them.
-- Phillip Lopate

#Discrimination

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