Quotes by Thomas Harrison

• Most film directors do not come up with their own subjects or write their own screenplays.
• With the question of the effect of a poem, the topic of investigation shifts from that of textual autonomy to textual reception - to the issue of what we actually look for or find in reading a poem.
• Unlike metaphor, metonymy does not try to fuse images together.
• Other, far fewer, directors are more like the composer - conceptualizing the piece, scoring it, distributing its musical lines among a range of registers, chords, and instruments.
• Still the question remains of what actually speaks in a poem, if not subjectivity as historically constructed.
• No art form points like poetry to this originality of language as to its essential and abiding concern.
• In an age where history is recorded on T-shirts, the very notion of dwelling on the deep structure of an experience has come to appear both arcane and archaic.
• To liberate words means first to shatter their function as vehicles of idea, memory, hope, or regret.
• Experience has ceded to a series of happenings, about which the most we can expect is information.
• As witnesses that the things were not done in a corner.
• A poem conveys not a message so much as the provenance of a message, an advent of sense.
• A jacket commemorating the Germans as champions of the 1990 World Cup is out of date two weeks after the event has passed.
• In recent decades this symbolic or metaphorical lyric has given way to one which leans toward metonymy.