Poetic Quotes - Page 22

• Whatever poet, orator, or sage may say of it, old age is still old age.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Time, Age, May

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, J. D. McClatchy (2000). “Poems and Other Writings”, p.627, Library of America

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• Poetry is plucking at the heartstrings, and making music with them.

  Dennis Gabor

  Heart, Poetry, Great Poet

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• Yet poetry, though the last and finest result, is a natural fruit. As naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done. It is the chief and most memorable success, for history is but a prose narrative of poetic deeds.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Memorable, Men, Poetry

  Henry David Thoreau (1873). “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”, p.99

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• "I know perfectly well that at this moment the whole universe is listening to us," Jean Giraudoux wrote in The Madwoman of Chaillot, "and that every word we say echoes to the remotest star."That poetic paranoia is a perfect description of what the Sun, as a gravitational lens, could do for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

  Frank Drake

  Stars, Echoes, Perfect

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• I'm hunting for the truth. It might be a kind of poetic truth, and not just a factual one, because behind everything that happens to you, there is another truth, a secret life.

  Anne Sexton

  Hunting, Secret, Might

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• It takes great labor to uncover the convincing simple speech of the heart. Poetic candor comes with hard labor, so even does impetuosity and impudence.

  Kenneth Rexroth

  Heart, Simple, Doe

  Kenneth Rexroth, Bradford Morrow (1989). “More Classics Revisited”, p.28, New Directions Publishing

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• Emotionally, it was the hardest 33 days of my life, but it was worth it because the result is that this album is 100 percent me. It’s heartfelt, real, bold, honest, vulnerable, hopeful, strong, poetic, bluesy, gritty, pretty, and simple.

  Christina Perri

  Strong, Real, Simple

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• I'm not responsible for my photographs. Photography is not documentary, but intuition, a poetic experience. It's drowning yourself, dissolving yourself, and then sniff, sniff, sniff - being sensitive to coincidence. You can't go looking for it; you can't want it, or you won't get it. First you must lose your self. Then it happens.

  Henri Cartier-Bresson

  Photography, Self, Intuition

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• Today not even a universal fire could make the torrential poetic production of our time disappear. But it is exactly a question of production, that is, of hand-made products which are subject to the laws of taste and fashion.

  Eugenio Montale

  Fashion, Fire, Hands

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• Homeopathy seemed . . . both mathematical and poetic.

  Scarlett Thomas

  Mathematical, Homeopathy

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• You are ugly when you love her, you are beautiful and fresh, vital and free, modern and poetic when you don't... you are more beautiful as an orphan than as your mother's son.

  Witold Gombrowicz

  Beautiful, Mother, Son

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• Indeed, so far from being humorous, the male American is the most abnormally serious creature who ever existed.. It is only fair to admit that he can exaggerate, but even his exaggeration has a rational basis. It is not founded on wit or fancy; it does not spring from any poetic imagination.

  Oscar Wilde

  Spring, Humorous, Imagination

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• They best can judge a poet's worth, Who oft themselves have known The pangs of a poetic birth By labours of their own.

  William Cowper

  Judging, Birth, Known

  William Cowper, James Thomson (1832). “The Works of Cowper and Thompson: Including Many Letters and Poems Never Before Published in this Country. With a New and Interesting Memoir of the Life of Thomson”, p.113

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• So you got rid of your astonishment that someone could write so much more dynamically than you. You stopped cherishing your aloneness and poetic differentness to your delicately flat little bosom. You said: she's to good to forget. How about making her a friend and competitor — you could learn alot from her. So you'll try. So maybe she'll laugh in your face. So maybe she'll beat you hollow in the end. So anyhow, you'll try, and maybe, possibly, she can stand you. Here's hoping!

  Sylvia Plath

  Writing, Laughing, Trying

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• The study of sickness is the most poetic of the sciences.

  Thomas Bernhard

  Study, Sickness

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• At first I protested and rebelled against poetry. I was about to deny my poetic worlds. I was doing violence to my illusions with analysis, science, and learning Henry’s language, entering Henry’s world. I wanted to destroy by violence and animalism my tenuous fantasies and illusions and my hypersensitivity. A kind of suicide. The ignominy awakened me. Then June came and answered the cravings of my imagination and saved me. Or perhaps she killed me, for now I am started on a course of madness.

  Anais Nin

  Suicide, June, Imagination

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• Now that’s true poetic irony. I rush into battle to defend the fair name of Rose Larkin, and what does she do but fetch Robert to stop me.

  Franny Billingsley

  Names, Rose, Battle

  Franny Billingsley (2013). “Chime”, p.105, A&C Black

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• I think I summed up my attitude to philosophy when I said: philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition.

  Ludwig Wittgenstein

  Attitude, Philosophy, Thinking

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• Poetic simile was strictly limited to statements like 'his mighty steed was as fleet as the wind on a fairly calm day, say about Force Three,' and any loose talk about a beloved having a face that launched a thousand ships would have to be backed by evidence that the object of desire did indeed look like a bottle of champagne.

  Terry Pratchett

  Wind, Desire, Ships

  Terry Pratchett (2012). “The Wit and Wisdom of Discworld”, p.17, Harper Collins

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• Who among us has not dreamt, in moments of ambition, of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm and rhyme, supple and staccato enough to adapt to the lyrical stirrings of the soul, the undulations of dreams, and sudden leaps of consciousness.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Dream, Ambition, Miracle

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• As painters...we must always remember that our precious poetic visions and spiritual insights will remain forever locked within us until we can boil them down to a complex arrangement of a few hundred or possibly even thousands of brushstrokes.

  Richard Schmid

  Spiritual, Forever, Vision

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• Poetic language is singularly appropriate for recounting the life of the king who is traditionally accepted as the author of the poetic psalms, some of which are included in the narrative.

  Robert Pinsky

  Kings, Narrative, Language

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• A lonely, quiet person has observations and experiences that are at once both more indistinct and more penetrating than those of one more gregarious; his thoughts are weightier, stranger, and never without a tinge of sadness. . . . Loneliness fosters that which is original, daringly and bewilderingly beautiful, poetic. But loneliness also fosters that which is perverse, incongruous, absurd, forbidden.

  Thomas Mann

  Beautiful, Lonely, Loneliness

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• Spatial art does not begin with a poetic mood or idea, but with construction of one or more figures, with the harmonizing of several colors and tones, or with the devaluation of spatial relationships and so on.

  Paul Klee

  Art, Space, Color

  Paul Klee (1967). “Paul Klee, 1879-1940: A Retrospective Exhibition”

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• I will not listen to your verse on an empty stomach!" declared the Vicomte. "You have no soul," said Philippe sadly. "But I have a stomach, and it cries aloud for sustenance." "I weep for you," said Philip. "Why do I waste my poetic gems upon you?

  Georgette Heyer

  Soul, Waste, Cry

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