“the only man woman or child who wrote
a simple declarative sentence with seven grammatical
errors “is dead”
beautiful Warren Gamaliel Harding
“is” dead
he's
“dead””
W [ViVa] (1931) XVII
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E.E. Cummings208
American poet 1894–1962Related quotes
Yevgeny Zamyatin (1884–1937) Russian author
On Literature, Revolution, Entropy and Other Matters (1923)
Context: It is an error to divide people into the living and the dead: there are people who are dead-alive, and people who are alive-alive. The dead-alive also write, walk, speak, act. But they make no mistakes; only machines make no mistakes, and they produce only dead things. The alive-alive are constantly in error, in search, in questions, in torment.
The same is true of what we write: it walks and it talks, but it can be dead-alive or alive-alive. What is truly alive stops before nothing and ceaselessly seeks answers to absurd, "childish" questions. Let the answers be wrong, let the philosophy be mistaken — errors are more valuable than truths: truth is of the machine, error is alive; truth reassures, error disturbs. And if answers be impossible of attainment, all the better! Dealing with answered questions is the privilege of brains constructed like a cow's stomach, which, as we know, is built to digest cud.
“If a man watches three football games in a row, he should be declared legally dead.”
Erma Bombeck (1927–1996) When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent le…
“The live dead-man is dead as a producer and alive insofar as he consumes”
Jean Paul Sartre book Saint Genet
139
Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)
“I was dead. I was a woman who had divorced her soul.”
Khalil Gibran book Jesus, The Son of Man
Mary Magdalen: On Meeting Jesus For The First Time
Jesus, The Son of Man (1928)
Context: I was dead. I was a woman who had divorced her soul. I was living apart from this self which you now see. I belonged to all men, and to none. They called me harlot, and a woman possessed of seven devils. I was cursed, and I was envied.
But when His dawn-eyes looked into my eyes all the stars of my night faded away, and I became Miriam, only Miriam, a woman lost to the earth she had known, and finding herself in new places.
“The commonest error in politics is sticking to the carcass of dead policies.”
Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1830–1903) British politician
Letter to Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl of Lytton (25 May 1877), as quoted in G. Cecil, The Life of Robert, Marquis of Salisbury. Volume II, p. 145
1870s
“Seven cities warred for Homer being dead,
Who living had no roofe to shrowd his head.”
Thomas Heywood (1574–1641) English playwright, actor, and author
Hierarchie of the Blessed Angells (1635). Compare: "Homer himself must beg if he want means, and as by report sometimes he did 'go from door to door and sing ballads, with a company of boys about him", Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, Part i. Sect. 2, Memb. 4, Subsect. 6.
“It is only the dead who do not return.”
Alexandre Dumas book The Three Musketeers
Source: The Three Musketeers