Archibald MacLeish Quotes

A real writer learns from earlier writers the way a boy learns from an apple orchard - by stealing what he has a taste for, and can carry off

Around, around the sun we go:
The moon goes round the earth.
We do not die of death:
We die of vertigo.

And here face down beneath the sun
And here upon earth's noonward height
To feel the always coming on
The always rising of the night

A poem should not mean
But be.

What is more important to a library than anything else - than everything else - is the fact that it exists."

[The Premise Of Meaning, American Scholar; Washington, DC, June 5, 1972]

As things are now going, the peace we will make, the peace we seem to be making, will be a peace of oil, a peace of gold, a peace of shipping, a peace, in brief... without moral purpose or human interest.

What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice. Without the possibility of choice a man is not a man but a member, an instrument, a thing.