Best 10 quotes of Frank Bidart on MyQuotes

But being is making; not only large things, a family, a book, a business; but the shape we give this afternoon, a conversation between friends, a meal.

Earth you know is round but seems flat. // You can't trust / your senses.

Play, and escaping the ideology one grew up in, is freedom.

Couples stay together when each of the two remains a necessity for the other. which you cannot know, until they cease to be.

drugged to sleep by repetition of the diurnal round, the monotonous sorrow of the finite, within       I am awake repairing in dirt the frayed immaculate thread forced by being to watch the birth of suns

Horrible the fate of the advice-giver in our culture: to repeat oneself in a thousand contexts until death, or irrelevance.             * I abjure advice-giver.

I'm not a fool, I knew from the beginning what couldn't happen. What couldn't happen didn't. The enterprise is abandoned. But half our life is dreams, delirium, everything that underlies that feeds that keeps alive the illusion of sanity, semi- sanity, we allow others to see. The half of me that feeds the rest is in mourning. Mourns. Each time we must mourn, we fear this is the final mourning, this time mourning never will lift.

The law is that you must live in the house you have built. The law is absurd: it is written down nowhere. You are uncertain what crime is, though each life writhing to elude what it has made feels like punishment.

The stratagems by which briefly you ameliorated, even seemingly untwisted what still twists within you — you loved their taste and lay there on your side nursing like a puppy.

Understand that when the beast within you succeeds again in paralyzing into unending incompletion whatever you again had the temerity to try to make its triumph is made sweeter by confirmation of its rectitude. It knows that it alone knows you.