James BaldwinYou can not describe anything without betraying your point of view, your aspirations, your fears, your hopes. Everything.
About This Quote
You can not describe anything without betraying your point of view, your aspirations, your fears, your hopes. Everything by e. e. cummings captures the essence of all things in a single phrase.
Written in 1946, the poem was about the disillusionment that comes with finding out that nothing is as it seems. In a more recent interview with The New Yorker , he explained that the poem was about the limits of language and how it cannot be explained without being reduced to one thing or another. He also said that he tried to write a poem about a line from a child’s book by Hans Christian Andersen: “The greatest happiness of life is the conviction of being loved for oneself, or rather of loving oneself, for it is only with one's self that one can really love anything else in this world.”
Source: Notes Of A Native Son
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- You can not describe anything without betraying your point of view, your aspirations, your fears, your hopes. Everything.
- That summer, in any case, all the fears with which I had grown up, and which were now a part of me and controlled my vision of the world, rose up like a wall between the world and me, and drove me into the church.
- Ain't no such thing as a little fault or a big fault. Satan get his foot in the door, he ain't going to rest till he's in the room. You is in the Word or you ain't--ain't no halfway with God.
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