Sonnet Quotes - Page 4

• A witty and informative professor posits that more authors do not choose titles borrowed from Shakespeare's sonnets and plays for the reason some people claim not to have partners: "All the good ones are taken."

  Thomas C Foster

  Witty, Taken, Play

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• Just because science can't in practice explain things like the love that motivates a poet to write a sonnet, that doesn't mean that religion can. It's a simple and logical fallacy to say, "If science can't do something therefore religion can.

  Richard Dawkins

  Mean, Writing, Simple

  "Richard Dawkins at the Sydney Writers' Festival". "Science Show" with Robyn Williams, www.abc.net.au. September 8, 2007.

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• O friendship, I too will press flowers between the pages of Shakespeare's sonnets!

  Virginia Woolf

  Flower, Pages, Shakespeare's Sonnets

  Virginia Woolf (2016). “The Waves”, p.64, Virginia Woolf

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• Ah, Evelyn and Vivian, I love you both, I love you for your sad lives, the empty misery of your coming home at dawn. You too are alone, but you are not like Arturo Bandini, who is neither fish, fowl nor good red herring. So have your champagne, because I love you both, and you too, Vivian, even if your mouth looks like it had been dug out with raw fingernails and your old child's eyes swim in blood written like mad sonnets.

  John Fante

  Children, Love You, Home

  John Fante (2002). “Ask The Dust”, p.89, Canongate Books

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• In your language you have a form of poetry called the sonnet…There are fourteen lines, I believe, all in iambic pentameter. That’s a very strict rhythm or meter…And each line has to end with a rigid pattern. And if the poet does not do it exactly this way, it is not a sonnet…But within this strict form the poet has complete freedom to say whatever he wants…You’re given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. What you say is completely up to you.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Believe, Writing, Lines

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• The form I most enjoy writing is the sonnet or sonnet-like forms, where you have a - you know, three stanzas or two stanzas that lead into a concluding couplet.

  Sherman Alexie

  Writing, Two, Three

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• Like a Passover Poet gliding from house to house and from trembling soul to trembling soul the wind scribbled sonnets of first time love and weeping haikus of last hours on earth.

  Aberjhani

  Love, Wind, House

  Aberjhani (2010). “The River of Winged Dreams (Hardcover Gift Edition)”, p.6, Lulu.com

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• We all had such larks. Yes, it was hard work but the friendships and the genuine respect we had for one another, that side I shall miss greatly. I've stopped acting, but I don't think I've finished using my voice. I could, and probably will, record the whole of Shakespeare's sonnets. They live at the side of my bed and are my constant companions.

  Peter O'Toole

  Hard Work, Thinking, Voice

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• Shakespeare wrote his sonnets within a strict discipline, fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, rhyming in three quatrains and a couplet. Were his sonnets dull? Mozart wrote his sonatas within an equally rigid discipline - exposition, development, and recapitulation. Were they dull?.

  David Ogilvy

  Discipline, Three, Development

  David Ogilvy (1963). “Confessions of an advertising man”, Holiday House

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• There is hope for a man who has never read Malory or Boswell or Tristam Shandy or Shakespeare's Sonnets: but what can you do with a man who says he "has read" them, meaning he has read them once, and thinks that this settles the matter?

  C. S. Lewis

  Men, Thinking, Matter

  C. S. Lewis (2002). “On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature”, p.38, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Abolishing the book is like abolishing the symphony, or sonata form, or the sonnet, or the wall painting.

  David Gelernter

  Wall, Book, Symphony

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.

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• People frequently comment on the emptiness in one night stands, but emptiness here has always been just another word for darkness. Blind encounters writing sonnets no one can ever read. Desire and pain communicated in the vague language of sex.
  None of which made sense to me until much later when I realized everything I thought I'd retained of my encounters added up to so very little, hardly enduring, just shadows of love outlining nothing at all.

  Mark Z. Danielewski

  Sex, Pain, Writing

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• We can die by it, if not live by love, And if unfit for tombs and hearse Our legend be, it will be fit for verse; And if no peace of chronicle we prove, We'll build in sonnet pretty rooms; As well a well wrought urne becomes The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs.

  John Donne

  Love, Peace, Ashes

  John Donne (1996). “Selected Poetry”, p.88, Oxford University Press, USA

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• Dancing, is, for the most part, attended with many amorous smiles, wanton compliments, unchaste kisses, scurrilous songs and sonnets, effeminate music, lust provoking attire, ridiculous love pranks, all which savor only of sensuality, of raging fleshly lusts. Therefore, it is wholly to be abandoned of all good Christians.

  William Prynne

  Christian, Song, Kissing

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• Creativity is the result of a struggle between vitality and form. As anyone who has tried to write a sonnet or scan poetry, is aware, the form ideally do not take away from the creativity but may add to it.

  Rollo May

  Struggle, Writing, Creativity

  Rollo May (2011). “Love & Will”, p.320, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Sometimes, when you are in a really constrained situation, it makes you more focused about what you want to say and where you're heading. The most beautiful love poems that were ever written are sonnets, composed in a very constraining form.

  Etgar Keret

  Beautiful, Want, Sometimes

  "Parables of anarchy". Interview With Hephzibah Anderson, www.theguardian.com. February 12, 2005.

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• What is a 'thing'? All is movement, a flowing. How stupid it is to speak of the 'mind'. There is a body; there is a mind: they are mixed up together. Shakespeare with a hole in his sock will not write the sonnet of a Shakespeare with socks intact.

  Kenneth Patchen

  Stupid, Writing, Mind

  Kenneth Patchen (1961). “The Journal of Albion Moonlight”, p.6, New Directions Publishing

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• I'm working now on a collection of Shakespearean sonnets, about 100 of them, that I may publish if anyone's interested. My take on life is a little different from the bard's.

  Jack Prelutsky

  Different, May, Littles

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• What is it about a secret love that makes everything they do shine, everything they say sound like a sonnet and every expression they make perfect, when to everyone else you speak to they're quite ordinary. It's a cruel sort of thing.

  Stefanie Schneider

  Expression, Perfect, Secret Love

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• To me there's no creativity without boundaries. If you're gonna write a sonnet, it's 14 lines, so it's solving the problem within the container.

  Lorne Michaels

  Writing, Creativity, Lines

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• We are made aware that magnitude of material things is relative, and all objects shrink and expand to serve the passion of the poet. Thus, in his sonnets, the lays of birds, the scents and dyes of flowers, he finds to be the shadow of his beloved; time, which keeps her from him, is his chest; the suspicion she has awakened, is her ornament

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Flower, Passion, Bird

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1981). “The Portable Emerson: New Edition”, p.51, Penguin

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• The woodchopper reads the wisdom of the ages recorded on the paper that holds his dinner, then lights his pipe with it. When we ask for a scrap of paper for the most trivial use, it may have the confessions of Augustine or the sonnets of Shakespeare, and we not observe it. The student kindles his fire, the editor packs his trunk, the sportsman loads his gun, the traveler wraps his dinner, the Irishman papers his shanty, the schoolboy peppers the plastering, the belle pins up her hair, with the printed thoughts of men.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Reading, Book, Gun

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• I came to writing mysteries through poetry and still think that a well-constructed mystery is very much like a well-constructed sonnet. Both are artificial forms. Both start off in one direction and then, with a twist of the concluding couplet/surprising ending, both reveal that they were headed somewhere different all the time.

  Margaret Maron

  Writing, Thinking, One Direction

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• The Sonnets of Shakespeare have the fascination of an autobiography, without its clarity. It is like reading an important document in a cave by the light of matches which keep blowing out.

  Gilbert Highet

  Reading, Light, Important

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• I used to write sonnets and various things, and moved from there into writing prose, which, incidentally, is a lot more interesting than poetry, including the rhythms of prose.

  Shelby Foote

  Writing, Interesting, Used

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