James Fenton Quotes

The MistakeWith the mistake your life goes in reverse.Now you can see exactly what you didWrong yesterday and wrong the day beforeAnd each mistake leads back to something worseAnd every nuance of your hypocrisyTowards yourself, and every excuseStands solidly on the perspective linesAnd there is perfect visibility.What an enlightenment. The colonnadeRolls past on either side. You needn't move.The statues of your errors brush your sleeve.You watch the tale turn back — and you're dismayed.And this dismay at this, this big mistakeIs made worse by the sight of all those whoKnew all along where these mistakes would lead — Those frozen friends who watched the crisis
James Fenton
The IdealThis is where I came from.I passed this way.This should not be shameful Or hard to say.A self is a self. It is not a screen. A person should respectWhat he has been. This is my past Which I shall not discard. This is the ideal.This is hard.
James Fenton
The great cause of the new Republican intake is the reduction of the deficit but to anyone seeking evidence of sincere attempts at deficit-reduction the evidence is baffling. The Republicans showed before Christmas that they would seek to reduce the deficit but not when it came to a matter of the tax breaks that had aggravated the deficit in the first place.Now there's a date set for the abolition of Barack Obama's healthcare plan, parts of which only came into operation at the start of this month. The Republicans are out to destroy the plan. Or, more precisely, to pretend to destroy the plan in the name of making good on election pledges. The measure won't get past the Senate.But suppose it did get past the Senate, what effect would this have on the deficit? The answer is it would aggravate the deficit. Somehow, somewhere, there's an override mechanism that makes destroying Obamacare more important than destroying the deficit. If only one could figure out how it works.
James Fenton
It is not what they built. It is what they knocked down.It is not the houses. It is the spaces between the houses.It is not the streets that exist. It is the streets that no longer exist.
James Fenton
God, A Poem 'I didn't exist at Creation, I didn't exist at the Flood, And I won't be around for SalvationTo sort out the sheep from the cud-'Or whatever the phrase is. The fact isIn soteriological termsI'm a crude existential malpracticeAnd you are a diet of worms
James Fenton