Muse Quotes - Page 18

• A guitarist or a drummer can get a cold and still play; I get a cold and sound like a wet mitten trying to sing you a love song. Charming.

  Tori Amos

  Music, Song, Play

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• She wrote poetry constantly; that was her "work". She was a slow bleeder and she slaved over it for long, exhausting hours, and many a middle of a night I could hear her creaking around the dead house with a pen in one hand, a clipboard and a flashlight in the other, refining her poems, jotting down the lines of a conceit. Writing never came easy for her; it gave her calluses. She never courted the muses, she wrestled them, mauled them all over the house and came up, after weeks of peripatetic labor, with a slim Spencerian sonnet, fourteen lines of imagistic jabberwocky.

  Millard Kaufman

  Writing, Night, Hands

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• But the muse won’t always cooperate and she will never be coerced. Sometimes she’d rather take a nap or see a mid-afternoon movie.

  Jonathan Tropper

  Naps, Afternoon, Sometimes

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• The function of poetry is religious invocation of the muse; its use is the experience of mixed exaltation and horror that her presence excites.

  Robert Graves

  Religious, Experience, Exaltation

  Robert Graves (2011). “The White Goddess”, p.53, Faber & Faber

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• Out of the red and silver and the long cry of alarm to the poet who survives in all human beings, as the child survives in him; to this poet she threw an unexpected ladder in the middle of the city and ordained, 'Climb!

  Anais Nin

  Children, Cities, Long

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• Muse of poetry, come to his aid, I thought. Could the man produce one more metaphor of husbandry? He seemed to be trying. "Green wood," I suggested, but even he sensed that there was something unfortunate about a metaphor for a king in which you dry out your royalty before you set fire to it.

  Megan Whalen Turner

  Kings, Men, Fire

  Megan Whalen Turner (2010). “A Conspiracy of Kings”, Greenwillow

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• She remembered timidly standing atop the Luthadel city wall, afraid to use her Allomancy to jump off, despite Kelsier's coaxing. Now she could step off a cliff and muse thoughtfully to herself on the way down.

  Brandon Sanderson

  Wall, Cities, Use

  Brandon Sanderson (2011). “Mistborn Trilogy”, p.1718, Macmillan

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• Perhaps it’s time, I muse, to close those chapters and remember the enduring lesson of my entrapment: that relationships, not accomplishments, are what’s important in life.

  Aron Ralston

  Accomplishment, Important, Lessons

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• My muse is an ungrateful harlot who’s abandoned me to actually come up with my own plots.

  Richelle Mead

  Ungrateful, Plot, Abandoned

  Richelle Mead (2010). “Succubus Shadows”, p.35, Kensington Publishing Corp.

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• I struggle with enormous discrepancies: between the reality of motherhood and the image of it, between my love for my home and the need to travel, between the varied and seductive paths of the heart. The lessons of impermanance, the occasional despair and the muse, so tenuously moored, all visit their needs upon me and I dig deeply for the spiritual utilities that restore me: my love for the place, for the one man left, for my children and friends and the great green pulse of spring.

  Sally Mann

  Spiritual, Children, Spring

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• American Muse, whose strong and diverse heart So many men have tried to understand But only made it smaller with their art, Because you are as various as your land.

  Stephen Vincent Benet

  Art, Strong, Men

  STEPHEN VINCENT BENET (1928). “JOHN BROWN'S BODY”

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• To wake the soul by tender strokes of art, To raise the genius, and to mend the heart; To make mankind, in conscious virtue bold, Live o'er each Seene, and be what they behold: For this the Tragic Muse first trod the stage.

  Alexander Pope

  Art, Soul, Genius

  'The Rape of the Lock' (1714) canto 1, l. 1

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• In spite of its romantic frisson, the position of muse is very vague and largely thankless for the muse herself.

  Katie Roiphe

  Spite, Position, Thankless

  Katie Roiphe (2013). “In Praise of Messy Lives”, p.61, Canongate Books

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• The number of guests at dinner should not be less than the number of the Graces nor exceed that of the Muses, i.e., it should begin with three and stop at nine.

  Marcus Terentius Varro

  Numbers, Grace, Three

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• Yeah, after making Pablo Honey, we started experimenting with cloning myself in order to double the band's creative energy. However, the experiment was a failure, and the defective Thom Yorke clone escaped. And formed a band called Muse.

  Thom Yorke

  Order, Creative, Energy

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• The absurdly neurotic role you and the rest of your kind have always attributed to me Erato, the Goddess Muse of Erotic Poetry bears no relation at all to reality. As a matter of fact, I was trained as a clinical psychologist. Who simply happens to have specialized in the mental illness that you, in your ignorance, call literature.

  John Fowles

  Writing, Ignorance, Reality

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• New Orleans is my essence, my soul, my muse, and I can only dream that one day she will recapture her glory. I will do everything within my power to make that happen and to help in any way I can to ease the suffering of my city, my people!

  Harry Connick, Jr.

  Dream, New Orleans, Essence

  "Fats Domino Found in New Orleans" by Gina Serpe, www.eonline.com. September 1, 2005.

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• It's only very recently that women have succeeded in entering those professions which, as Muses, they typified for the Greeks

  Miriam

  Greek, Entering, Profession

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• Drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction - a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the muse.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Work, Home, Night

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “The Essential Thoreau”, p.191, Simon and Schuster

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• In the fairy tale the painting represents the here and now. The book is actually divided into five sections, through which the key character, the muse, leads us.

  Kit Williams

  Book, Character, Keys

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• I honor health as the first Muse.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Art, Honor, Firsts

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1875). “Letters and Social Aims”, p.227

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• It inspired all sorts of whims and fancies that I ultimately wove into a fairy tale complete with muse, the earth, the moon, some famous inventors, a dog and a rabbit.

  Kit Williams

  Dog, Moon, Rabbits

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• Clio may be the most austere and chaste of the Muses, but she has been known to come down informally from Mount Helicon in a mood so raffish that there are those who claim to have seen her with her slip showing.

  Thornton Willis

  History, May, Mood

  Willis Thornton (1992). “History: Facts and Fable”, Dorset Pr

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• I'd really like having a couple days of being a rock star, although I'd rather be a backup - like maybe the drummer for Muse It would also be fun to be gorgeous, like be Charlize Theron, just for a couple of days.

  Stephenie Meyer

  Stars, Couple, Fun

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• I honor health as the first muse, and sleep as the condition of health. Sleep benefits mainly by the sound health it produces; incidentally also by dreams, into whose farrago a divine lesson is sometimes slipped.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Dream, Sleep, Honor

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2010). “Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume VIII: Letters and Social Aims”, p.156, Harvard University Press

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