Don PatersonThinkers

The Anxiety of influence is, pace Bloom, mostly a business between contemporaries. The tensions are all sibling, not Oedipal.

Desire is the inconvenience of its object. Lourdes isn't Lourdes if you live in Lourdes.

Gravity fluctuates.

Heaven is a voluntary solitude, hell an enforced one.

Hell is an enforced solitude, heaven a voluntary one.

Novel is a monumental waste of time -- the poem is a complete waste of time and the aphorism is a brief waste of time.

A Poem is a little machine for remembering itself.

Sense is fluid — no sense steps into the same word twice.

A Style is a strategy of evasion.

Style's first procedure is the inversion of the form in which the idea occurred to the thinker.