Phillip Lopate > Quotes

“we who are
your closest friends
feel the time
has come to tell you
that every Thursday
we have been meeting
as a group
to devise ways
to keep you
in perpetual uncertainty
frustration
discontent and
torture
by neither loving you
as much as you want
nor cutting you adrift

your analyst is
in on it
plus your boyfriend
and your ex-husband
and we have pledged
to disappoint you
as long as you need us

in announcing our
association
we realize we have
placed in your hands
a possible antidote
against uncertainty
indeed against ourselves
but since our Thursday nights
have brought us
to a community of purpose
rare in itself
with you as
the natural center
we feel hopeful you
will continue to make
unreasonable
demands for affection
if not as a consequence
of your
disastrous personality

then for the good of the collective”
― Phillip Lopate

“Until people see poetry as springing from all of life, they will isolate it in a creativity corner and treat it like a mascot.”
― Philip Lopate

“Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.

— Walter Benjamin, "Unpacking My Library”
― Phillip Lopate, The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present

“The solution to entrapment in the narcissistic hothouse of self is to not relinquish autobiographical writing, but to expand the self by bringing one's curiosity to interface with more and more history and the present world.”
― Phillip Lopate, To Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction

“I like the freedom that comes with lowered expectations.”
― Phillip Lopate

“What makes me want to keep reading a nonfiction text is the encounter with a surprising, well-stocked mind as it takes on the challenge of the next sentence, paragraph,”
― Phillip Lopate, To Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction

“I can think of another reason... for why thoughts make us sad. We may feel we know too much, or come to know it too early, which is the guilty burden of precocity. Children play to the expectations adults have of them, to behave in a childlike manner, but inside, they may not regard themselves as innocent so much as confused. I grew up sensing that a part of me was faking being a child; I felt I was already an old soul. Lots of people feel that, particularly those who will go on to become writers.”
― Phillip Lopate, To Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction

“For all their shared boundaries, the experiences of fiction and nonfiction are fundamentally different. In the traditional short story or novel, a fictive space is opened up that allows you the reader to disappear into the action, even to the point of forgetting you are reading. In the best nonfiction, it seems to me, you’re always made aware that you are being engaged with a supple mind at work. The story line or plot in nonfiction consists of the twists and turns of a thought process working itself out. This is certainly true for the essay, but it is also true, I think, for classic nonfiction in general, be it Thucydides or Pascal or Carlyle, which follows an organizing principle that can be summarized as “tracking the consciousness of the author.” What makes me want to keep reading a nonfiction text is the encounter with a surprising, well-stocked mind as it takes on the challenge of the next sentence, paragraph, and thematic problem it has set for itself. The other element that keeps me reading nonfiction happily is an evolved, entertaining, elegant, or at least highly intentional literary style. The pressure of style should be brought to bear on every passage. “Consciousness plus style equals good nonfiction” is one way of stating the formula.”
― Phillip Lopate, To Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction

“Edgar Allan Poe bristled at the canard that Americans were too materialistic and engineering-minded to produce literature: “Our necessities have been mistaken for our propensities. Having been forced to make rail-roads, it has been deemed impossible that we should make verse…. But this is the purest insanity. The principles of the poetic sentiment lie deep within the immortal nature of man, and have little necessary reference to the worldly circumstances which surround him… nor can any social, or political, or moral, or physical conditions do more than momentarily repress the impulses which glow in our own bosoms as fervently as in those of our progenitors.”
― Phillip Lopate, The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present

“Part of the storytelling ability is simply the anticipation of boredom.”
― Phillip Lopate, To Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction

“I finished reading, not from the sweet, low pathos of the tale, but from the knowledge of the writer’s success. It is so difficult to do anything well in this mysterious world.”
― Phillip Lopate, The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present

“A young person still thinks it is possible–there is time enough–to become all things: athlete and aesthete, soldier and pacifist, anchorite and debauchee.”
― Phillip Lopate, The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present

“What makes me want to keep reading a nonfiction text is the encounter with a surprising, well-stocked mind as it takes on the challenge of the next sentence, paragraph, and thematic problem it has set for itself. The other element that keeps me reading nonfiction happily is an evolved, entertaining, elegant, or at least highly intentional literary style. The pressure of style should be brought to bear on every passage. "Consciousness plus style equals good nonfiction" is one way of stating the formula.”
― Phillip Lopate, To Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction

“What makes me want to keep reading a nonfiction text is the encounter with a surprising, well-stocked mind as it takes on the challenge of the next sentence, paragraph, and thematic problem it has set for itself. The other element that keeps me reading nonfiction happily is an evolved, entertaining, elegant, or at least highly intentional literary style. The pressure of style should be brought to bear on every passage. “Consciousness plus style equals good nonfiction” is one way of stating the formula. For me, the great adventure in reading nonfiction is to follow, as I say, a really interesting, unpredictable mind struggling to entangle and disentangle itself in a thorny problem, or even a frivolous problem that is made complex through engagement with a sophisticated mind.”
― Phillip Lopate, To Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction

“Fornicating is like parenting: no matter how you do it, you have the guilty sense that somewhere other people are doing it more correctly.”
― Phillip Lopate

“To be a writer is a monstrously arrogant act. It presumes that you should be listened to for pages on end... But there is much in the culture to clip the wings of arrogance, mute assertion, and encourage speedy consensus.”
― Phillip Lopate, To Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction

“but the one I cannot, and the other I will not do.”
― Phillip Lopate, Portrait Inside My Head

“source material for wider reception. Indeed, when we consider how few masters of theology there were in the early Church, how small was their reading public, yet how great was their influence upon the course of history, we realize that a work can, by devious ways, profoundly affect people who have never laid eyes upon it. A single book, were it greatly to influence one man in a position of authority, could thus indirectly alter the course of a nation;”
― Phillip Lopate, The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present

“I have also time on my hands to correct my opinions, and polish my periods;”
― Phillip Lopate, Portrait Inside My Head

“Art, on the other hand, must be first of all “forceful.” The artist, in dealing with ethical revaluations (as he naturally would, since the characteristics of the century would be as fully represented in him as in a scientist or an inventor) had to make those conflicts explicit which the scientist could leave implicit.”
― Phillip Lopate, The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present

“Now, if anything in the world is complex, language is complex.”
― Phillip Lopate, The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present

“he flatters himself in what he has done, in what he is now doing, or what he intends to do. Every one lays out matters in his own mind how he shall avoid damnation, and flatters himself that he contrives well for himself, and that his schemes will not fail.”
― Phillip Lopate, The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present

“He felt his poverty; without a cent, without a home, without land, tools, or savings, he had entered into competition with rich, landed, skilled neighbors. To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.”
― Phillip Lopate, The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present

“common sense is as rare as genius,—is the basis of genius, and experience is hands and feet to every enterprise;—”
― Phillip Lopate, The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present

“Even if it were the case that they could have intuited the same insight strictly from scenes, I still would want to encourage emerging writers to put into words what they think about an experience when retelling it.”
― Phillip Lopate, To Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction

“They labor quietly, endure privations and pains, live and die, and throughout everything see the good without seeing the vanity. I had to love these people. The more I entered into their life, the more I loved them; and the more it became possible for me to live, too. It came about not only that the life of our society, of the learned and of the rich, disgusted me—more than that, it lost all semblance of meaning in my eyes.”
― Phillip Lopate, The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present

“The changing conditions of history touch only the surface of the show.”
― Phillip Lopate, The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present

“Even the greatest works of art are couched, not in the language of “mankind,” but in the language of a specific cultural tradition, and the loss of the tradition is like the loss of the dictionary;”
― Phillip Lopate, The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present

“So much of our time is preparation, so much is routine, and so much retrospect, that the pith of each man’s genius contracts itself to a very few hours.”
― Phillip Lopate, The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present

“The present winter is worth an age if rightly employed, but if lost or neglected, the whole continent will partake of the misfortune; and there is no punishment which that man will not deserve, be he who, or what, or where he will, that may be the means of sacrificing a season so precious and useful.”
― Phillip Lopate, The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present