Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
My notion of art is very maximalist and souped-up: I love spectacle, overload, magic materials, magic words, incantation and litany, incarnation and possession, spilling and wounds. Art as a sacred event.
The whole history of modern poetry is a continuous commentary on the short text of philosophy: every art should become science, and every science should become art; poetry and philosophy should be united.
Only those beneath me can envy or hate me. I have never been envied nor hated; I am above no one. Only those above me can praise or belittle me. I have never been praised nor belittled; I am below no one.
My yearning is my cup, my burning thirst is my drink, and my solitude is my intoxication; I do not and shall not quench my thirst. But in this burning that is never extinguished is a joy that never wanes.
There is only one thing which can master the perplexed stuff of epic material into unity; and that is, an ability to see in particular human experience some significant symbolism of man's general destiny.
A religion addresses the longing in us to have that said from which we can go on to speak of next and next things rightly, in their immediate time - the telling of what came first and before done forever.
In a universe animated by the interaction of yin (female) and yang (male) energies, the moon was literally yin visible. Indeed, it was the very germ or source of yin, and the sun was its yang counterpart.
The poem is always the last resort. In it the poet makes a world in little, and finds peace, even though, under complete focused emotion, the evocation be far more bitter than reality, or far more lovely.
Adiós," she added in Spanish, "I have no house only a shadow. But whenever you are in need of a shadow, my shadow is yours." "Thank you." "Sank you." "Not sank you, Señora Gregorio, thank you." "Sank you.
Idiom is larger than geography it is the hot breath of a people singing, slashing, explorative. Imagery becomes the magic denominator, the language of a passage, saying the ancient unchanging particulars.
The sharp knife of dawn glitters in my hand but how bare is everything-tall tall tree infinite air, the unrelaxing tension of the world and only hope, hope only, the kind eagle soars and wheels in flight.
When I am alone I can become invisible. I can sit on the top of a dune as motionless as an uprise of weeds, until the foxes run by unconcerned. I can hear the almost unhearable sound of the roses singing.
At the present moment two things about the Christian religion must surely be clear to anybody with eyes in his head. One is, that men cannot do without it; the other, that they cannot do with it as it is.
Jamaica's a country of great dichotomy. On the one hand you have a tourist industry with great beaches and resorts, but on the other you have such great poverty and the violence that goes along with that.
Of course, when a poem is being born, the reasoning part of the brain throbs away at full throttle, but all the other areas are overlapping and interacting as well, the emotional, intuitive, animal areas.
We shared. Parents. Home. Pets. Celebrations. Catastrophes. Secrets. And the threads of our experience became so interwoven that we are linked. I can never be utterly lonely, knowing you share the planet.
I not only couldn't read but often couldn't hear or understand what was being said to me - by the time I'd processed the beginning of a sentence, the teacher was well on her way through a second or third.
Nothing strange should befall us, but only that which has long belonged to us. We will gradually learn to realize that that which we call destiny goes forth from within people, not from without into them.
In Heaven's happy bowers There blossom two flowers, One with fiery glow And one as white as snow; While lo! before them stands, With pale and trembling hands, A spirit who must choose One, and one refuse.
The heart of the matter seems to me to be the direct interaction between one's making a poem in English and a poem in the language that one understands and values. I don't see how you can do it otherwise.
I have done many impious things--no great ruler can do otherwise. I have put the good of the Empire before all human considerations. To keep the Empire free from factions I have had to commit many crimes.
A banker warned the British poet Robert Graves that one could not grow rich writing poetry. He replied that if there was no money in poetry, there was certainly no poetry in money, and so it was all even.
When I was in high school in the '50s you were supposed to be an Elvis Presley, a James Dean, a Marlon Brando or a Kingston Trio type in a button-down shirt headed for the fraternities at Stanford or Cal.
What Simone Weil said politics has meant all along, which means that you fight for 11 percent, 12 percent, 13 percent, that you avoid golden-age thinking and romantic melancholy and you just keep pushing.
'Write' is almost the wrong verb for what I do. I think 'compose' is more accurate because you're trying to make the sounds in your mind and in your voice. So I compose while I'm driving or in the shower.
When you go through a hard period, When everything seems to oppose you, ... When you feel you cannot even bear one more minute, NEVER GIVE UP! Because it is the time and place that the course will divert!
Last night you left me and slept your own deep sleep. Tonight you turn and turn. I say, 'You and I will be together till the Universe dissolves.' You mumble back things you thought of when you were drunk.
If your heart isn't yet illumined Be awake always, be a seeker of the heart, Be at war continually with your carnal soul. But if your heart is already awakened, Sleep peacefully, sleep in the arms of Love
Avoid that which an enemy tells you to do; for if you follow his advice, you will smite your, knees with the hand of sorrow. If he shows you a road straight as an arrow, turn from it and go the other way.
A woman's friendship borders more closely on love than man's. Men affect each other in the reflection of noble or friendly acts; whilst women ask fewer proofs and more signs and expressions of attachment.
If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awake - Aye, what then?
His wet white face and miserable eyesBrought nurses to him more than groans and sighs:But hoarse and low and rapid rose and fellHis troubled voice: he did the business well.(First verse of Died of Wounds)
Literature rests on language. It is a linguistic art. So it cannot sever its relationship with the past. But it can create new methods and styles that differ in structure, form, and content from the past.
My words like eyes that flinch from light, refuse And shut upon obscurity; my acts Cast to their opposites by impatient violence Break up the sequent path; they fly On a circumference to avoid the centre.
There is blood in Mr. Ervine's 'Carson'; he knows nothing about Sir Edward Carson, of course, but his teeth are firmly fixed in the calf of someone's leg, all the time, and he draws blood without a doubt.
It was sometime in October; she had long ago lost track of all the days and it really didn’t matter because one was like another and there were no nights to separate them because she never slept any more.
It was difficult being a teacher and out of the closet in the '50s. By the time I retired, the English department was proud of having a gay poet of a certain minor fame. It was a very satisfactory change!
Behind the steps that Misery treads Approaching Comfort view: The hues of bliss more brightly glow Chastised by sabler tints of woe, And blended form, with artful strife, The strength and harmony of life.
I have kept journals at different times in my life. And a lot of my early notebooks became places where I would just think on the page, trying to parse what I was feeling, to find out what I was thinking.
Through all of youth I was looking for you without knowing what I was looking for part memory part distance remaining mine in the ways that I learn to miss you from what we cannot hold the stars are made.
You have to be rather relentless about pushing other things out of the way. This activity of writing, which has no promises attached to it, comes to be given a kind of arbitrary but persistent importance.
I can't imagine ever writing anything of any kind on a machine. I never tried to write either poetry or prose on a typewriter. I like to do it on useless paper, scrap paper, because it's of no importance.
If the hero is not a person, the emblem Of him, even if Xenophon, seems To stand taller than a person stands, has A wider brow, large and less human Eyes and bruted ears: the man-like body Of a primitive.
Love the earth and sun and animals, Despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, Stand up for the stupid and crazy, Devote your income and labor to others... And your very flesh shall be a great poem.
Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son, Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding, No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from them, No more modest than immodest.
I always tell students that writing a poem and publishing it are two quite separate things, and you should write what you have to write, and if you're afraid it's going to upset someone, don't publish it.
I have been an "Official" all my life, without the least turn for it. I never could attain a true official manner, which is highly artificial and handles trifles with ludicrously disproportionate gravity.
I have been an 'Official' all my life, without the least turn for it. I never could attain a true official manner, which is highly artificial and handles trifles with ludicrously disproportionate gravity.
Like a fiend in a cloud, With howling woe, After night I do crowd, And with night will go; I turn my back to the east, From whence comforts have increased; For light doth seize my brain With frantic pain.
Come, fix upon me that accusing eye. I thirst for accusation. All that was sung. All that was said in Ireland is a lie Breed out of the contagion of the throng, Saving the rhyme rats hear before they die.