Kenneth Rexroth Quotes

“Crooked cards and straight whiskey,
Slow horses and fast women.”

— Kenneth Rexroth

The mature man lives quietly, does good privately, takes responsibility for his actions, treats others with friendliness and courtesy, finds mischief boring and avoids it. Without the hidden conspiracy of goodwill, society would not endure an hour.

— Kenneth Rexroth

I've had it with these cheap sons of bitches who claim they love poetry but never buy a book.

— Kenneth Rexroth

“Bohemia is a commune in which the Revolution is over and everyone is a member of the aristocracy”

— Kenneth Rexroth

“I write for one and only one purpose, to overcome the invincible ignorance of the traduced heart. [ ... ] I wish to speak to and for those who have had enough of the Social Lie, the Economics of Mass Murder, the Sexual Hoax, and the Domestication of Conspicuous Consumption.”

— Kenneth Rexroth

“Against the ruin of the world, there is only one defense-the creative act.”

— Kenneth Rexroth

“My heavy heart has gone this way before.”

— Kenneth Rexroth

“Making love with you
Is like drinking sea water.
The more I drink
The thirstier I become,
Until nothing can slake my thirst
But to drink the entire sea.”

— Kenneth Rexroth

Man thrives where angels would die of ecstasy and where pigs would die of disgust.

— Kenneth Rexroth

“The basic line in any good verse is cadenced ... building it around the natural breath structures of speech.”

— Kenneth Rexroth

You don't become a saint until you lead a good life whether in Tibet or Italy or America.

— Kenneth Rexroth

“Mary, my little girl, was confirmed in a Buddhist temple. She saw the Life write up on Buddhism, with pictures of the ceremony, and she said she wanted to be confirmed there because she only liked Jesus as a kid. She was a little disappointed in him when he grew up.”

— Kenneth Rexroth

“I've been around jazz and jazz musicians most of my life.”

— Kenneth Rexroth

Did you know I staged the first performance in America of At the Hawk's Well?

— Kenneth Rexroth

“This isn't the best town for what we're doing. Too many other things to pull the crowds away.”

— Kenneth Rexroth

“There have always been those who, though they see tragedy as the outcome of freedom, will nevertheless judge that tragedy is not too high a price to pay.”

— Kenneth Rexroth

“Maturity is having the ability to escape categorization.”

— Kenneth Rexroth

“Poetry has ceased to be a public art and has become, as Whitehead said of religion, What man does with his aloneness.”

— Kenneth Rexroth

Perhaps this is what really happens in life to most good men. They are not crucified. They simply pass through life and then die, and their passing influences just a few people to make them just a little happy.

— Kenneth Rexroth

“Victorian society was homogeneous without being homogenized. It was, to paraphrase the epigram about Parliament, a society of extreme eccentrics who agreed so well that they could afford to differ.”

— Kenneth Rexroth

“The meaning of life can be revealed but never explained.”

— Kenneth Rexroth

“An entomologist is not a bug.”

— Kenneth Rexroth

It is a commonplace that Racine is untranslatable. This is not because his verse is difficult, but because it is not.

— Kenneth Rexroth

“We have forgotten love, and Sat lonely beside each other. We have eaten together, Lonely behind our plates, we Have hidden behind children, We have slept together in A lonely bed. Now my heart Turns toward you, awake at last, Penitent, lost in the last Loneliness. Speak to me. Talk To me. Break the black silence.”

— Kenneth Rexroth

“Today we hear a great deal about Organizational Men, Mass Culture, Conformity, the Lonely Crowd, the Power Elite and its Conspiracy of Mediocrity. We forget that the very volume of this criticism is an indication that our society is still radically pluralistic. Not only are there plenty of exceptionalists who take exception to the stereotyping of the mass culture but that very string of epithets comes from a series of books that have been recent best-sellers, symptoms of a popular, living tradition of dissent from things as they are.”

— Kenneth Rexroth

“Marriage is the last sacrament available to modern man, and with the terrible destruction of interpersonal relations by capitalism and its war-making State, it is not very available, nor is it surely enduring. But then, vision does not come with guarantees.”

— Kenneth Rexroth

Ex-cons always say, "You never know what makes the wheels go round until you've done time in the joint." This is even more true of psychiatric hospitals. It is a perfect mass hypostatization of society, the organization of the Social Lie.

— Kenneth Rexroth

“It takes great labor to uncover the convincing simple speech of the heart. Poetic candor comes with hard labor, so even does impetuosity and impudence.”

— Kenneth Rexroth

“The free, creative, loving people who shine so brightly in my memory of studios and coffee shops have become models for a huge section of the population. If they in turn can just stay alive in the face of power and terror, they may become the decisive section.”

— Kenneth Rexroth

“You learn nothing if you carry with you a journalistic system of values, which is invented to save reporters from experience.”

— Kenneth Rexroth

“Erotic love is one of the highest forms of contemplation.”

— Kenneth Rexroth

Any talented decadent can make unreality believable. To make reality convincing is another matter, a matter for only the greatest masters.

— Kenneth Rexroth

As Aristotle said, you have to be an aristocrat or a reactionary to write a good proletarian poem.

— Kenneth Rexroth

The dumping of the mentally ill, full of these new psychiatric drugs, into the streets is a scandal. It's been carried furthest in New York, where whole sections of the decayed Upper West Side are being filled with pensioners and psychotic patients on stelazine, lithium carbonate, and everything else under the sun. They can't diagnose the patient, so they give him the whole psychiatric pharmacopoeia at once, and he walks around in a psychotic trance beautifully painted all over with petrochemicals.

— Kenneth Rexroth

“Men who live like Casanova are seldom interested in themselves; their egocentricity does not give them time for egotism.”

— Kenneth Rexroth

“Harvey , Galileo , Copernicus do not seem occult to us, but they did so to their contemporaries, hierophants of the mysteries of Natural Law, revealers of the secrets of a New Order of the Ages. After all, the movement eventually came to be called the Age of Enlightenment.”

— Kenneth Rexroth

Love is the garment of knowledge.

— Kenneth Rexroth

“The holiness of the real
Is always there, accessible
In total immanence. The nodes
Of transcendence coagulate
In you, the experiencer,
And in the other, the lover.”

— Kenneth Rexroth

A white crowned night sparrow sings as the moon sets. Thunder growls far off. Our campfire is a single light. Amongst a hundred peaks and waterfalls. The manifold voices of falling water Take all night. Wrapped in your down bag Starlight on you cheeks and eyelids Your breath comes and goes In a tiny cloud in the frosty night. Ten thousand birds sing in the sunrise. Ten thousand years revolve without change. All this will never be again.

— Kenneth Rexroth

“When the newspapers have got nothing else to talk about, they cut loose on the young. The young are always news. If they are up to something, that's news. If they aren't, that's news too.”

— Kenneth Rexroth

“Art is the reasoned derangement of the senses.”

— Kenneth Rexroth

“Lost in loneliness and pain. Black and unendurable, Thinking of you with every Corpuscle of my flesh, in Every instant of night And day.”

— Kenneth Rexroth

“With my own group I like to keep it loose. They have to counter rather than go with me. When they stop I like to be moving.”

— Kenneth Rexroth

The modern sensibility attempts to drain the contents of experience; these Greek poets strive to state the fact so poignantly that it becomes an ever-flowing spring as Sappho says, More real than real, more gold than gold.

— Kenneth Rexroth

The moral issues with which Marcus struggles would be, as he points out, unchanged whether the universe were mechanical and devoid of meaning or value or ruled by deity or Providence; whether the will were in fact free or determined; whether there were or were not a future life, or any even fugitive rewards and punishments at all.

— Kenneth Rexroth