Elegy Quotes

• Every angel is terrifying.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Angel

  Duino Elegies no. 1 (written 1912) (translation by Stephen Mitchell)

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• A word is elegy to what it signifies.

  Robert Hass

  Silence

  "Meditation at Lagunitas" l. 11 (1979)

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• Be With Me In The Phases Of My Work Because My Brain Feels Like It Has Been Whipped And I Yearn To Make A Small Perfect Thing Which Will Live In Your Morning Like Curious Static Through A President's Elegy Or A Nude Hunchback Acquiring A Tan On The Crowded Oily Beach.

  Leonard Cohen

  Beach, Morning, Perfect

  Leonard Cohen (2011). “Beautiful Losers”, p.76, Vintage

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• Travel is a caprice in childhood, a passion in youth, a necessity in manhood, and an elegy in old age.

  Jose Rizal

  Passion, Childhood, Age

  "'Los Viajes' ('Travels')". Essay by José Rizal, La Solidaridad, May 15, 1889.

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• Tinted Distances is a tender meditation that reveals a careful eye and steady devotion to elegy and ode.

  Dorianne Laux

  Distance, Eye, Meditation

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• When I was from Cupid's passions free, my Muse was mute and wrote no elegy.

  Ovid

  Passion, Muse, Cupid

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• I want my images to achieve two things in this regard - to be an elegy to a world that is tragically vanishing, to make people see what beauty is disappearing. Also, to try and show that animals are sentient creatures equally as worthy of life as humans.

  Nick Brandt

  Animal, Two, People

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• The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

  Thomas Gray

  Path, Glory, Graves

  "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" l. 36 (1751)

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• The biggest surprise in a man's life is old age.

  Ben Kingsley

  Men, Age, Aging

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• The splendors of the firmament of time May be eclipsed, but are extinguished not; Like stars to their appointed height they climb And death is a low mist which cannot blot The brightness it may veil.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Stars, Veils, May

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats (1832). “The Poetical Works of Coleridge, Shelley and Keats: Complete in One Volume”, p.411

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• How is the soul profited by the strife of Hector, the arguments of Plato, the poems of Virgil, or the elegies of Ovid, who, with others like them, are now gnashing their teeth in the prison of the infernal Babylon, under the cruet tyranny of Pluto?

  Honorius Augustodunensis

  Plato, Scary, Soul

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• ELEGY, n. A composition in verse, in which, without employing any of the methods of humor, the writer aims to produce in the reader's mind the dampest kind of dejection.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Mind, Kind, Produce

  Ambrose Bierce (1996). “Poems of Ambrose Bierce”, p.41, U of Nebraska Press

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• Sooner or later, all the peoples of the world will have to discover a way to live together in peace, and thereby transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Creative, Brotherhood, Together

  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (2013). “The Essential Martin Luther King, Jr.: "I Have a Dream" and Other Great Writings”, p.115, Beacon Press

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• Part of elegy is confrontation - not just with the idea of death, but with the person who has died.

  Allison Joseph

  Ideas, Confrontation, Persons

  Source: lunchticket.org

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• We should write an elegy for every day that has slipped through our lives unnoticed and unappreciated. Better still, we should write a song of thanksgiving for all the days that remain-now that we know how to cherish them.

  Sarah Ban Breathnach

  Inspirational, Song, Writing

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• I can’t talk about my books. I have written them and tried to forget them. I have written once, and readers have read me many times, no? I try to think of what I wrote, it’s very unhealthy to think about the past, the case of elegies is very sad, as much as the case of complaints.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Book, Past, Thinking

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• The nobility of Teresa Leo's poems is that they are not disposed to hide from the dark-rather, they display a mind that tends toward obsession and brooding, that works against fatality like fingers at a knot. The firm, attentive mind on display and the lucid unfolding of the poems are the life instinct seeking and finding its way through again and again. Love and beauty are the argument, but they don't win easily. Bloom in Reverse works through elegy toward survival with moving persistence, both driven and compelling.

  Tony Hoagland

  Moving, Dark, Winning

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• Wheresoe'er I turn my view,
  All is strange, yet nothing new:
  Endless labor all along,
  Endless labor to be wrong:
  Phrase that Time has flung away;
  Uncouth words in disarray,
  Trick'd in antique ruff and bonnet,
  Ode, and elegy, and sonnet.

  Samuel Johnson

  Views, Poetry, Phrases

  Tobias George Smollett, Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith (1810). “The Poetical Works of Doctors Smollett, Johnson, and Goldsmith”, p.113

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• Writing is alchemy. Dross becomes gold. Experience is transformed. Pain is changed. Suffering may become song. The ordinary or horrible is pushed by the will of the writer into grace or redemption, a prophetic wail, a screed for justice, an elegy of sadness or sorrow. ... There is always a tension between experience and the thing that finally carries it forward, bears its weight, holds it in. Without that tension, one might as well write a shopping list.

  Andrea Dworkin

  Song, Pain, Writing

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• The dog, to gain some private ends,
  Went mad, and bit the man.

  Oliver Goldsmith

  Dog, Men, Mad

  "The Vicar of Wakefield" by Oliver Goldsmith, (Ch. 17), 1766.

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• It seems to me that, with but slight reserve and modification, we may apply to our departed friend his own pathetic and beautiful elegy upon another.

  Samuel Laman Blanchard

  Beautiful, Departed, May

  "Sketches from Life". Book by Laman Blanchard, Edward Bulwer Lytton Baron Lytton, "Memoire", 1846.

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• Old age is not for sissies.

  Malcolm Forbes

  Birthday, Age, Sissy

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• My images are unashamedly idyllic and romantic, a kind of enchanted Africa. They're my elegy to a world that is steadily, tragically vanishing.

  Nick Brandt

  Romantic, Photography, Idyllic

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• I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity. Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense conciliatory. They may be to the next. All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful.

  Wilfred Owen

  War, This Generation, Generations

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• Full many a flower is born to blush unseen.

  James Joyce

  Flower, Unseen, Obscurity

  James Joyce (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of James Joyce (Illustrated)”, p.486, Delphi Classics

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