Donne Quotes

• Commemoration of John Donne, Priest, Poet, 1631 He was the Word that spake it; He took the bread and brake it; And what that Word did make it I do believe, and take it.

  John Donne

  Believe, Doctrine, Bread

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• The sad fact is that I love Dickens and Donne and Keats and Eliot and Forster and Conrad and Fitzgerald and Kafka and Wilde and Orwell and Waugh and Marvell and Greene and Sterne and Shakespeare and Webster and Swift and Yeats and Joyce and Hardy, really, really love them. It’s just that they don’t love me back.

  David Nicholls

  Facts, Yeats, Wilde

  David Nicholls (2004). “A Question of Attraction: A Novel”, p.233, Villard

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• Dr Donne's verses are like the peace of God; they pass all understanding.

  King James I

  Understanding, Drs, Verses

  "The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations" edited by Elizabeth Knowles, Oxford University Press, 2004.

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• I was clever enough to know that John Donne was offering something that was awfully enjoyable. I just wasn't clever enough to actually enjoy it.

  Wallace Shawn

  Clever, Offering, Enough

  Wallace Shawn (2010). “The Designated Mourner”, p.22, Theatre Communications Group

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• A human being without the proper empathy or feeling is the same as an android built so as to lack it, either by design or mistake. We mean, basically, someone who does not care about the fate which his fellow living creatures fall victim to; he stands detached, a spectator, acting out by his indifference John Donne's theorem that "No man is an island," but giving that theorem a twist: that which is a mental and a moral island is not a man.

  Philip K. Dick

  Mistake, Fall, Mean

  "The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick". Book by Lawrence Sutin, 1995.

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• Gascoigne, Ben Jonson, Greville, Raleigh, Donne,
  Poets who wrote great poems, one by one,
  And spaced by many years, each line an act
  Through which few labor, which no men retract.
  This passion is the scholar's heritage

  Yvor Winters

  Passion, Men, Years

  Yvor Winters (1963). “Collected Poems”

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• And as if reporting some felony to the police they let you know you were not John Donne.

  Ted Hughes

  Police, Knows, Felony

  Ted Hughes (2009). “Birthday Letters”, p.28, Faber & Faber

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• A man, engaged in his simple reflections in everyday life, will comprehend neither the possibility, nor the benefits of self-sacrifice, but, when given ("qu'on lui donne", Fr.) a great cause to defend, and he will find only natural to sacrifice oneself for it.

  African Spir

  Sacrifice, Men, Reflection

  "Paroles d'un sage: Choix de pensées d'African Spir" ("Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir") by Hélène Claparède-Spir, (p. 53), 1937.

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• Heaven deprives me of a wife who never caused me any other grief than that of her death.

  Louis XIV

  Grief, Wife, Heaven

  "Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations" by Jehiel Keeler Hoyt, (pp. 868-871), 1922.

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• All problems have to be solved eventually by ONESELF, and that's where all your lovely John Donne stuff turns out to be a load of crap because, in the last analysis, A MAN IS AN ISLAND.

  Kenneth Williams

  Men, Islands, Lovely

  "Kenneth Williams: secret loves behind the life of a tormented man" by Vanessa Thorpe, www.theguardian.com. October 9, 2010.

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• I didn't want to be the archetypal sponging brother-in-law, so I didn't go into acting when I got to the States. I thought, 'No, I'll go to school and then I'll be an English teacher; that'll be fun.' But I was horrible as a teacher. As hard as I tried, I just couldn't inspire those kids to take an interest in Milton and Shakespeare and Donne.

  John Mahoney

  Teacher, Brother, Fun

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• I have frequently noticed in myself a tendency to a diffuse style; a disposition to push my metaphors too far, employing a multitude of words to heighten the patness of the image, and so making of it a conceit rather than a metaphor, a fault copiously illustrated in the poetry of Cowley, Waller, Donne, and others of that ilk.

  Sidney Lanier

  Style, Faults, Metaphor

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• Franchement, quand je survole certains pays européens (les éoliennes) ne donne pas envie. (Frankly, when I fly over some European countries, their turbines don't fill me with envy.)

  Nicolas Sarkozy

  Country, Wind, Envy

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• I still read Donne, particularly his love poems

  Carol Ann Duffy

  Poetry, His Love, Reading Books

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• And as we leave Donne and Walton on the shores of Metahemeralism, we wave a fond farewell to those famous chums of yore.

  Donna Tartt

  Farewell, Wave, Shore

  Donna Tartt (2011). “The Secret History”, p.102, Vintage

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• Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility.

  T. S. Eliot

  Thinking, Rose, Poet

  T. S. Eliot (2014). “Selected Essays”, p.256, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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