Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Given the books of a man, it is not difficult, I think, to detect therein the personality of the man, and the station in life to which he was born.
Scholars look for final truths they will never find. Creative writers concern themselves with possibilities that are always there to the receptive.
I'm never quite sure how the poem is going to resolve itself and that I'm always in some way surprised. I make a discovery in a poem as I write it.
Affectation is certain deformity; by forming themselves on fantastic models, the young begin with being ridiculous, and often end in being vicious.
Each life unfulfilled, you see; It hangs still, patchy and scrappy: We have not sighed deep, laughed free, Starved, feasted, despaired,—been happy.
Ye Hypocrites, are these your pranks To murder men and gie God thanks Desist for shame, proceed no further God won't accept your thanks for murder.
The joy of my heart is to 'study men, their manners, and their ways,' and for this darling object I cheerfully sacrifice every other consideration.
Style is that which indicates how the writer takes himself and what he is saying. It is the mind skating circles around itself as it moves forward.
I only hope that when I am free, as they are free to go in quest, of the knowledge beyond the bounds of life, it may not seem better to me to rest.
Her eyes the glowworm lend thee, The shooting stars attend thee; And the elves also, Whose little eyes glow Like the sparks of fire, befriend thee.
Do not ask the definition of a friend. He/She is that one without whose company death and dying set in earlier and living is made more pleasurable.
There is one way of breathing that is shameful and constricted. Then, there's another way: a breath of love that takes you all the way to infinity.
I was dead, then alive. Weeping, then laughing. The power of love came into me, and I became fierce like a lion, then tender like the evening star.
Poetry can be dangerous, especially beautiful poetry, because it gives the illusion of having had the experience without actually going through it.
You've been walking the ocean's edge, holding up your robes to keep them dry. You must dive naked under, and deeper under, a thousand times deeper!
The lily in splendor, the vine in her grace, The fox in the forest, all had their desire, As then I had mine, in the place that was happy and poor.
Mr. Mum's Rudesheimer And the church of St. Geryon Are the two things alone That deserve to be known In the body-and-soul-stinking town of Cologne.
When the wires are all down and your heart is covered with the snows of pessimism and the ice of cynicism, then, and only then, have you grown old.
Women don't have to be defined by others. We have the power to define ourselves: by telling our own stories, in our own words, with our own voices.
The teaching is very rewarding, and very time-consuming, and very exhausting. But it's wonderful. The community here at NYU is very precious to me.
This boat that we just built is just fine - And don't try to tell us it's not The sides and the back are divine - It's the bottom I guess we forgot
The people who loved me when I was seven years old love my books, and the people who didn't like me when I was seven years old don't like my books.
But most days, I wander around feeling invisible. Like I'm a speck of dust floating in the air that can only be seen when a shaft of light hits it.
A lot of women feel like they should be enjoying motherhood, they should be fulfilled and shouldn't be thinking, 'I wish I didn't have to do this.'
exaggerated sunsets / splashed with rain, odd collisions / of roots, animals, seeds. / I didn't like a thing I saw, / so much effort to be strange.
Loss is the absence of something we were once attached to. Grief is the rope burns left behind, when that which is held is pulled beyond our grasp.
My single pair of eyes Contain the universe they see; Their mirrored multiplicity Is packed into a hollow body Where I reflect the many, in my one.
Paul Valery speaks of the 'une ligne donnee' of a poem. One line is given to the poet by God or by nature, the rest he has to discover for himself.
Why do we electrocute men for murdering an individual and then pin a purple heart on them for mass slaughter of someone arbitrarily labeled “enemy?
Is it the sea you hear in me? Its dissatisfactions? Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness? Love is a shadow. How you lie and cry after it.
Teachers today are breaking down obstacles, finding innovative ways to instill old lessons, proving that greatness can be found in everyday places.
The Shell The sea fills my ear with sand and with fear. You may wash out the sand, but never the sound of the ghost of the sea that is haunting me.
There's nothing wrong with delighting in what you do. In fact, most of the fun you'll have as a poet will come about during the process of writing.
Day is a snow-white Dove of heaven That from the East glad message brings. Night is a stealthy, evil Raven, Wrapped to the eyes in his black wings.
my childhood grew thin and flat, paperlike. It was tired and threadbare, and in low moments it didn't look like it would last until I was grown up.
Woe, alas, to those who have loved only bodies, forms, appearances! Death will rob them of everything. Try to love souls, you will find them again.
Revolutions spring not from accident, but from necessity. A revolution is a return from the factitious to the real. It takes place because it must.
Anger may be foolish and absurd, and one may be wrongly irritated, but a man never feels outraged unless in some respect he is fundamentally right.
In his deepest heart there surge tremendous shame and madness mixed with sorrow and love whipped on by frenzy and a courage aware of its own worth.
What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish.
Aside from purely technical analysis, nothing can be said about music, except when it is bad; when it is good, one can only listen and be grateful.
There is no such thing as the State And no one exists alone; Hunger allows no choice To the citizen or the police; We must love one another or die.
Strange, (is it not?) that battles, martyrs, blood, even assassination should so condense - perhaps only really lastingly condense - a Nationality.
All day long the door of the sub-conscious remains just ajar; we slip through to the other side, and return again, as easily and secretly as a cat.
Do you know what would hold me together on a battlefield? The sense that I was perpetuating the language in which Keats and the rest of them wrote!
That the Jews assumed a right exclusively to the benefits of God will be a lasting witness against them and the same will it be against Christians.
But most thro' midnight streets I hear How the youthful Harlots curse Blasts the new-born Infants tear And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse
Since the French Revolution Englishmen are all intermeasurable one by another, certainly a happy state of agreement to which I forone do not agree.
All that I have said and done, Now that I am old and ill, Turns into a question till I lie awake night after night And never get the answers right.
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray, I hear it in the deep heart's core.