Rilke used to say that no poet would mind going to gaol, since he would at least have time to explore the treasure house of his memory. In many respects Rilke was a prick.
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From the preface, p.9Clive James
Unreliable Memoirs was just too hard to classify: most of the first wave of American reviewers had convicted it of trying to be truthful and fanciful at the same time. Since I had clearly had no other aim in mind, I read these indictments with sad bewilderment. The most powerful reviewer, in The New York Review of Books, had seized on my incidental remark 'Rilke was a prick' in order to instruct me that Rilke was, on the contrary, an important German poet.
Clive James
Rainer Maria Rilke, 1924, Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Robert Bly New York, 1981.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Our aim is to gain control of the two great treasure houses on which the West depends: The energy treasure house of the Persian Gulf and the minerals treasure house of Central and Southern Africa.
Leonid Brezhnev
The bombs I dropped on Germany between 1940 and 1944 maybe killed a Rilke or a Goethe or a Hölderin in his cradle. And yes, of course, if it had to be done over, I would do it again. Hitler had condemned us to kill. Not even the most just causes are ever innocent.
Romain Gary
We come after. We know now that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning. To say that he has read them without understanding or that his ear is gross, is cant. In what way does this knowledge bear on literature and society, on the hope, grown almost axiomatic from the time of Plato to that of Matthew Arnold, that culture is a humanizing force, that the energies of spirit are transferable to those of conduct?
George Steiner
James, Clive
James, Donald
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