James Merrill Quotes

• What one wants in this world isn’t so much to ‘live’ as to…be lived, to be used by life for its own purposes.

  James Merrill

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• Here one is in Later Life, and it’s perfectly pleasant really, not for a moment that garden of cactus and sour grapes I’d always assumed it must be.

  James Merrill

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• The simplest science book is over my head.

  James Merrill

• Strange about parents. We have such easy access to them and such daunting problems of communication.

  James Merrill

• Knowing some Greek helped defuse forbidding words – not that I counted much on using them. You’ll find only trace elements of this language in the poem.

  James Merrill

• In life, there are no perfect affections.

  James Merrill

• I’d like to think the scientists need us – but do they? Did Newton need Blake?

  James Merrill

• He puts his right hand lightly on the cup, I put my left, leaving the right free to transcribe, and away we go. We get, oh, 500 to 600 words an hour. Better than gasoline.

  James Merrill

• But those two plays left me on fresh terms with language. I didn’t always have to speak in my own voice.

  James Merrill

• Before trying a novel I wrote a couple of plays.

  James Merrill

• At college I’d seen my dead frog’s limbs twitch under some applied stimulus or other – seen, but hadn’t believed. Didn’t dream of thinking beyond or around what I saw.

  James Merrill

• Arthur Young’s Reflexive Universe – fascinating but too schematic to fit into my scheme. The most I could hope for was a sense of the vocabulary and some possible images.

  James Merrill

• And, as I have said, it’s made me think twice about the imagination. If the spirits aren’t external, how astonishing the mediums become! Victor Hugo said of his voices that they were like his own mental powers multiplied by five.

  James Merrill

James Merrill (13)

Birth:	3rd March, 1926
Death:	6th February, 1995
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Poet

About

James Ingram Merrill was born in New York City, New York, USA. He was an American poet. Although most of his published work was poetry, he also wrote essays, fiction, and plays. He wrote several poems include: The Black Swan, Water Street, Nights and Days, The Fire Screen, Braving the Elements, The Yellow Pages, Divine Comedies(Won- Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1977), Mirabell: Books of Number, Scripts for the Pageant, The Changing Light at Sandover, Late Settings, and A Scattering of Salts. He wrote two novels, including The Seraglio and The (Diblos) Notebook.

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