Irving Layton Quotes

“A poet is deeply conflicted and it's in his work that he reconciles those deep conflicts. The place is the harbor. It doesn't set the world in order, you know, it's the place of reconciliation. It's the Consolamentum, the kiss of peace.”

“An aphorism should be like a burr:

sting, ... and leave a little soreness.”

“Death is a name for beauty not in use.”

“Only the tiniest fraction of mankind want freedom. All the rest want someone to tell them they are free.”

“Progress of a marriage: There was a time when you couldn't make me happy. Now the time has come when you can make me unhappy.”

“Since I no longer expect anything from mankind except madness, meanness, and mendacity; egotism, cowardice, and self-delusion, I have stopped being a misanthrope.”

“To this pass Christianity has come There is no God, and Jesus is his son.”

“We’ll mark the butterflies disappearing over the hedge with tiny wristwatches on their wings: our fingers touching the earth, like two Buddhas”

“It amazes me that organs that piss Can give human beings such perfect bliss.”

“By walking, I found out where I was going.”

“Time flames like a paraffin stove / and what burns are the minutes I live.”

“I am a genius who has written poems that will survive with the best of Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Keats”

“Whom the gods do not intend to destroy, they first make mad with poetry.”

“Canadians look down on the United States and consider it Hell. They are right to do so. Canada is to the United States what, in Dante's scheme, Limbo is to Hell.”

“Conscience: self-esteem with a halo.”

“God is indeed dead. He died of self-horror when He saw the creature He had made in His own image.”

“I have stopped being a misanthrope.”

“Idealist: a cynic in the making.”

“My neighbor doesn't want to be loved as much as he wants to be envied.”

“We love in another's soul whatever of ourselves we can deposit in it; the greater the deposit, the greater the love.”

“When you argue with your inferiors, you convince them of only one thing: they are as clever as you.”