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Robert Pogue Harrison Quotes

Total quotes: 16
“Language does not arise from a need to escape but from a desire to enter, not from frowns of impotence but from a surplus of vitality and wonder.”
— Robert Pogue Harrison, Juvenescence: A Cultural History of Our Age
Tagged: Language, expression, Power of Thoughts
“Only age gives time a measure of reality.”
— Robert Pogue Harrison, Juvenescence: A Cultural History of Our Age
Tagged: Age, Time, What Makes Time Real, Understanding Time
“The past does not cease to exist simply because we lose our memory of it.”
— Robert Pogue Harrison, Juvenescence: A Cultural History of Our Age
Tagged: The Nightmare of History, The Joy of History, We Are History, History
“Traditionally, young people imitated their elders for a simple reason: old people held the power. But they no longer have it.”
— Robert Pogue Harrison, Interview with Robert Pogue Harrison
Tagged: Power of Youth
“Gardening is an opening of worlds-of worlds within worlds-beginning beginning with the world at one's feet.”
— Robert Pogue Harrison, Gardens
“Nothing in the universe— be it the newborn infant or the universe itself— is without age.”
— Robert Pogue Harrison, Juvenescence: A Cultural History of Our Age
Tagged: Age, Age Is The Ultimate Systemizer, How We Measure Life
“We have never before been so young, nor so old.”
— Robert Pogue Harrison, Juvenescence: A Cultural History of Our Age
Tagged: We Are History, Youth, Age
“Gardening is an opening of worlds-of worlds within worlds-beginning beginning with the world at one's feet. To become conscious of what one is treading on requires that one delve into the ground's organic underworld, so as to appreciate, in an engaged way, the soil's potential for fostering life.”
— Robert Pogue Harrison, Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition
Tagged: Gardens, Gardening, Nature, Soil
“Lolita represents a different cultural type than her ancestors. She is not just an adolescent girl on her way to womanhood but a new specimen of humanity whose progeny will embody a historically unparalleled strain of youthfulness, even in their old age. In that sense we all share Lolita’s age.”
— Robert Pogue Harrison, Juvenescence: A Cultural History of Our Age
Tagged: Lolita, Quotes about the work of Vladimir Nabokov, The New Age, Back to an Adolescent Civilization, Hipsters, Understanding Hipsters, Never Going Die
“We have a seemingly infinite capacity for misery. Yet if the human race is cursed, it is not so much because we have been thrown into suffering and mortality, nor because we have a deeper capacity for suffering than other creatures, but rather because we take suffering and mortality to be confirmations of the curse rather than the preconditions of human self-realization.”
— Robert Pogue Harrison, Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition
Tagged: Amor fati, Misery, Pain, Yeasayer
“It is not the poet's task, nor is it within his power, to give birth to a new religion. At most he may keep open the space or possibility for some new revelation. How this might come about—why, when, where, above all whether—remains imponderable, but there is little doubt that, in the present age, it could happen only in some catacombal space.”
— Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization
Tagged: Poetizing, Preparing A Readiness, Reconfigures
“The greatest blessing a society can confer on its young is to turn them into the heirs, rather than the orphans, of history. It is also the greatest blessing a society can confer on itself, for heirs rejuvenate the heritage by creatively renewing its legacies. Orphans, by contrast, relate to the past as an alien, unapproachable continent— if they relate to it at all.”
— Robert Pogue Harrison, Robert Pogue Harrison: Juvenescence : A Cultural History of Our Age (Hardcover); 2014 Edition
Tagged: Historical Continuum, Orphans, Legacy, Movements of History, Orphanage of Postmodernity
“It may appear as if the world now belongs mostly to the younger generations, with their idiosyncratic mindsets and technological gadgetry, yet in truth, the age as a whole, whether wittingly or not, deprives the young of what youth needs most if it hopes to flourish. It deprives them of idleness, shelter, and solitude, which are the generative sources of identity formation, not to mention the creative imagination. It deprives them of spontaneity, wonder, and the freedom to fail. It deprives them of the ability to form images with their eyes closed, hence to think beyond the sorcery of the movie, television, or computer screen. It deprives them of an expansive and embodied relation to nature, without which a sense of connection to the universe is impossible and life remains essentially meaningless. It deprives them of continuity with the past, whose future they will soon be called on to forge.”
— Robert Pogue Harrison, Robert Pogue Harrison: Juvenescence : A Cultural History of Our Age (Hardcover); 2014 Edition
Tagged: Old vs. Young, Youth, Snapchat, Internal Lives
“The gardens that have graced this mortal Eden of ours are the best evidence of humanity's reason for being on Earth. Where history unleashes its destructive and annihilating forces, we must, if we are to preserve our sanity, to say nothing of our humanity, work against and in spite of them. We must seek out healing or redemptive forces and allow them to grow in us. That is what it means to tend our garden.”
— Robert Pogue Harrison, Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition
Tagged: Gardens, Growth
“No society on earth comes close to matching America’s youthful imagination, its liberation of youthful energies, colors, forms, products, and narratives, all of which appeal directly to what is most neotenic or childlike in our nature. That America is comprehensible from the perspectives of all other cultures, while it is the perspective from which no other culture is comprehensible, would be explained by the fact that youth, while comprehensible to adults, does not comprehend adulthood.”
— Robert Pogue Harrison, Juvenescence: A Cultural History of Our Age
Tagged: Youth, America, Americanism, Age
“A young boy and his grandfather in an old-growth forest of the Pacific Northwest may cast their eyes on the same giant redwood, yet they do not see the same phenomenon. Because of their age difference, it appears one way to the boy, another to his elder. The sky I see today is more or less the same blue spectacle it always was, yet it’s not the same sky of old. When I was seven it was my body’s covenant with the cosmos; by twenty it became the face of an abstraction; today it’s the dome of a house I know I will not inhabit for too much longer; shortly it will be the answer to what today still remains a question.”
— Robert Pogue Harrison, Juvenescence: A Cultural History of Our Age
Tagged: Age as Interpretation, Seeing Seeing, Age, Death Is Coming
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