William Empson Quotes

Ripeness is all; her in her cooling planet
Revere; do not presume to think her wasted.
Project her no projectile, plan nor man it;
Gods cool in turn, by the sun long outlasted.

Shall I make it clear, boys, for all to apprehend,
Those that will not hear, boys, waiting for the end,
Knowing it is near, boys, trying to pretend,
Sitting in cold fear, boys, waiting for the end?

All those large dreams by which men long live well
Are magic-lanterned on the smoke of hell.

Life involves maintaining oneself between contradictions that can't be solved by analysis.

Feign then what's by a decent tact believed
And act that state is only so conceived,
And build an edifice of form
For house where phantoms may keep warm.

It is this deep blankness is the real thing strange.
The more things happen to you the more you can't
Tell or remember even what they were. The contradictions cover such a range.
The talk would talk and go so far aslant.
You don't want madhouse and the whole thing there.

Buddhists and Christians contrive to agree about death
Making death their ideal basis for different ideals.
The Communists however disapprove of death
Except when practical.

The waste even in a fortunate life, the isolation even of a life rich in intimacy, cannot but be felt deeply, and is the central feeling of tragedy. And anything of value must accept this because it must not prostitute itself; its strength is to be prepared to waste itself, if it does not get its opportunity.

Not to have fire is to be a skin that shrills.

The central function of imaginative literature is to make you realize that other people act on moral convictions different from your own.

Attending there let us absorb the cultures of nations </br> And dissolve into our judgement all their codes. </br> Then, being clogged with a natural hesitation </br> (People are continually asking one the way out), </br> Let us stand here and admit that we have no road.

Liberal hopefulness
Regards death as a mere border to an improving picture.

An ambiguity, in ordinary speech, means something very pronounced, and as a rule witty or deceitful....any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language.

Johnson, Hazlitt and Empson are the greatest English critics of their respective centuries not least because they are the funniest.

To produce pure proletarian art the artist must be at one with the worker; this is impossible, not for political reasons, but because the artist never is at one with any public.