331 Quotes by Ezra Pound

This is no book. Whoever touches this touches a man.

Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.

It is difficult to write a paradiso when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse.

And the good writer chooses his words for their 'meaning', but that meaning is not a a set, cut-off thing like the move of knight or pawn on a chess-board. It comes up with roots, with associations, with how and where the word is familiarly used, or where it has been used brilliantly or memorably.

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear. It doesn't matter whether the good writer wants to be useful, or whether the good writer wants to be harm.

I would like to accept C. H.'s bookBut it would make my own seem so out of date.Heaven will protectThe lay reader.

In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries.

Make-strong old dreams lest this our world lose heart

The individual cannot think and communicate his thought, the governor and legislator cannot act effectively or frame his laws without words, and the solidity and validity of these words is in the care of the damned and despised litterati...when their very medium, the very essence of their work, the application of word to thing goes rotten, i.e. becomes slushy and inexact, or excessive or bloated, the whole machinery of social and of individual thought and order goes to pot.