Delmore Schwartz Quotes

Time is the school in which we learn, time is the fire in which we burn.

Existentialism means that no one else can take a bath for you.

Love is the most difficult and dangerous form of courage. Courage is the most desperate, admirable and noble kind of love.

What was the freedom to which the adult human being rose in the morning, if each act was held back or inspired by the overpowering ghost of a little child?

Major writing is to say what has been seen, so that it need never be said again.

Even paranoids have real enemies.

O your life, your lonely lifeWhat have you ever done with it,And done with the great gift of consciousness?What will you ever do before Death's knifeProvides the answer ultimate and appropriate?As I for my part felt in my heart as one who falls,Falls in a parachute, falls endlessly, and feels the vastDraft of the abyss sucking him down and down,An endlessly helplessly falling and appalled clown:This is the way the night passes by, thisIs the overnight endless trip to the famous unfathomable abyss.

Each minute bursts in the burning room,The great globe reels in the solar fire,Spinning the trivial and unique away.(How all things flash! How all things flare!)What am I now that I was then?May memory restore again and againThe smallest color of the smallest day:Time is the school in which we learn,Time is the fire in which we burn.