Verses Quotes - Page 13

• Truth shines the brighter, clad in verse.

  Alexander Pope

  Poetry, Shining, Brighter

  Jonathan Swift, John Arbuthnot, Alexander Pope, John Gay (1742). “Miscellanies. In Four Volumes”, p.212

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• How many chapters have been written about love verses - and how many more might be written! - might, would, could, should, or ought to be written! - I will venture to say, will be written!

  Samuel Lover

  Venture, Might, Chapters

  Samuel Lover (1842). “Handy Andy”, p.225

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• If a poet has any obligation toward society, it is to write well. Being in the minority, he has no other choice. Failing this duty, he sinks into oblivion. Society, on the other hand, has no obligation toward the poet. A majority by definition, society thinks of itself as having other options than reading verses, no matter how well written. Its failure to do so results in its sinking to that level of locution at which society falls easy prey to a demagogue or a tyrant. This is society's own equivalent of oblivion.

  Joseph Brodsky

  Fall, Reading, Writing

  "Less Than One: Selected Essays".

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• It should here be added that poetry habitually takes the form of verse.

  John Drinkwater

  Form, Should

  John Drinkwater (1922). “The Lyric: An Essay”, p.5, Library of Alexandria

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• All good verses are like impromptus made at leisure.

  Joseph Joubert

  Leisure, Made

  Joseph Joubert (1896). “Pensées of Joubert”

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• It is worth remembering that every writer begins with a naively physical notion of what art is. A book for him or her is not an expression or a series of expressions, but literally a volume, a prism with six rectangular sides made of thin sheets of papers which should include a cover, an inside cover, an epigraph in italics, a preface, nine or ten parts with some verses at the beginning, a table of contents, an ex libris with an hourglass and a Latin phrase, a brief list of errata, some blank pages, a colophon and a publication notice: objects that are known to constitute the art of writing.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Art, Latin, Book

  "Evaristo Carriego" by Jorge Luis Borges, (Ch. 3), 1930.

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• Yes, the work comes out more beautiful from a material that resists the process, verse, marble, onyx, or enamel.

  Theophile Gautier

  Beautiful, Process, Materials

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• Horace, in a particularly boastful mood, once said his verse would last as long as the vestal virgins kept going up the Capitoline Hill to worship at the temple of Jupiter. But Horace's poetry has lasted longer than Jupiter's religion, and Jupiter himself has only survived because he disappeared into literature.

  Northrop Frye

  Long, Jupiter, Literature

  Northrop Frye, Germaine Warkentin (2006). “Educated Imagination and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1933-1962”, p.447, University of Toronto Press

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• All right, so there he is, our representative to the world, Mr. Western Civilization, in codpiece and pantyhose up there on the boards, firing away at the rapt groundlings with his blank verses, not less of a word-slinger and spellbinder than the Bard himself and therefore not to be considered too curiously on such matters as relevance, coherence, consistency, propriety, sanity, common decency.

  Marvin Mudrick

  Civilization, Common Decency, Consistency

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• Many of today's verses are prose and bad prose.

  Eugenio Montale

  Today, Prose

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• There is poetry even in prose, in all the great prose which is not merely utilitarian or didactic: there exist poets who write in prose or at least in more or less apparent prose; millions of poets write verses which have no connection with poetry.

  Eugenio Montale

  Writing, Connections, Poet

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• Free verse seemed democratic because it offered freedom of access to writers. And those who disdained free verse would always be open to accusations of elitism, mandarinism. Open form was like common ground on which all might graze their cattle - it was not to be closed in by usurping landlords.

  James Fenton

  Might, Common, Accusation

  "Negative images" by James Fenton, www.theguardian.com. November 15, 2002.

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• At four lines, with the quatrain, we reach the basic stanza form familiar from a whole range of English poetic practice. This is the length of the ballad stanza, the verse of a hymn, and innumerable other kinds of verse.

  James Fenton

  Hymns, Practice, Four

  "Changing rooms" by James Fenton, www.theguardian.com. September 6, 2002.

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• I've written many extra verses to songs that I learned to sing - an extra verse about a friend, or just add some verse - and that led to writing my own songs.

  Jackson Browne

  Song, Writing, Add

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• I wrote my own verses. Anything I did, I wrote myself.

  Brandy Norwood

  My Own

  "Brandy thanks Timbaland for endorsing her new rap career" by Shaheem Reid, www.mtv.com. December 9, 2009.

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• Dante Alighieri is a universal poet, and great creators, they are writing for everybody always. Every single verse is very moving, and the beauty - if we don't understand, we just stay listening to the sound and it's like hearing music.

  Roberto Benigni

  Moving, Writing, Listening

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• Teenagers are free verse walking around on two legs.

  Dorothy Allison

  Teenager, Two, Legs

  Dorothy Allison, Mae Miller Claxton (2012). “Conversations with Dorothy Allison”, p.119, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• What judgment I had increases rather than diminishes; and thoughts, such as they are, come crowding in so fast upon me, that my only difficulty is to choose or reject; to run them into verse or to give them the other harmony of prose.

  John Dryden

  Running, Giving, Judgment

  'Fables Ancient and Modern' (1700) preface

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• I fell into writing, I suppose, being one of those awful children who wrote verses. I went to a convent in New York-the Blessed Sacrament... I was fired from there, finally, for a lot of things, among them my insistence that the Immaculate Conception was spontaneous combustion.

  Dorothy Parker

  Hilarious, New York, Children

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• When you translate poetry in particular, you're obliged to look at how the writer with whom you're working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence.

  Marilyn Hacker

  Together, Looks, Syntax

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• I hate my verses, every line, every word. Oh pale and brittle pencils ever to try One grass-blade's curve, or the throat of one bird That clings to twig, ruffled against white sky. Oh cracked and twilight mirrors ever to catch One color, one glinting flash, of the splendor of things.

  Robinson Jeffers

  Hate, Twilight, Curves

  Robinson Jeffers, Tim Hunt (1988). “The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers: 1928-1938”, p.410, Stanford University Press

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• Verse comedy is interesting to me because of the challenge of writing in rhymed couplets, which is not a form that's usually amenable to English, yet to me it gives great possibility for comedy.

  David Ives

  Writing, Giving, Interesting

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• Civil disobedience is not accepted by religion and the state does not accept it and there are many verses in the Holy Book that talk of following the ruler.

  Pope Shenouda III of Alexandria

  Book, Doe, Holy

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• I know I should be leaving this climate, I've got a verse, but can't rhyme it.

  Jimmy Buffett

  Honesty, Leaving, Climate

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• They have written volumes out of which a couplet of verse, a period in prose, may cling to the rock of ages, as a shell that survives a deluge.

  Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

  Rocks, Age, Shells

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