Verses Quotes - Page 2

• With living colours give my verse to glow: The sad memorial of a tale of woe!

  William Falconer

  Giving, Memorial, Woe

  William Falconer (1807). “The shipwreck, by W. Falconer, with a sketch of his life”, p.8

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• Usually I read several books at a time - old books, new books, fiction, nonfiction, verse, anything - and when the bedside heap of a dozen volumes or so has dwindled to two or three, which generally happens by the end of one week, I accumulate another pile.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Book, Two, Three

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• The stuff that I make and the things that I talk about, you have to listen, so if the beat is doing too much, it's going to take you away. If the hook is too distracting, it's going to take you away. The hook just needs to be enough to get you from one verse to the next.

  Lupe Fiasco

  Hook, Enough

  Source: pitchfork.com

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• Robin Williams was an airman, a doctor, a genie, a nanny, a president, a professor, a bangarang Peter Pan, and everything in between. But he was one of a kind. He arrived in our lives as an alien - but he ended up touching every element of the human spirit. He made us laugh. He made us cry. He gave his immeasurable talent freely and generously to those who needed it most - from our troops stationed abroad to the marginalized on our own streets. The Obama family offers our condolences to Robin’s family, his friends, and everyone who found their voice and their verse thanks to Robin Williams.

  Barack Obama

  Condolences, Voice, Doctors

  Statement by the President on the Passing of Robin Williams, obamawhitehouse.archives.gov. August 11, 2014.

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• That question in marriage is mutual submission, really - the next verse goes on: "husbands love your wife as Christ loves the Church."

  Francis George

  Husband, Love You, Wife

  Source: www.realclearreligion.org

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• The simple Wordsworth . . . / Who, both by precept and example, shows / That prose is verse, and verse is merely prose.

  Lord Byron

  Simple, Example, Wordsworth

  'English Bards and Scotch Reviewers' (1809) l. 241 (of Wordsworth)

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• We see then how far the monuments of wit and learning are more durable than the monuments of power, or of the hands. For have not the verses of Homer continued twenty-five hundred years or more, without the loss of a syllable or letter; during which time infinite palaces, temples, castles, cities have been decayed and demolished?

  Francis Bacon

  Wisdom, Loss, Hands

  Francis Bacon (2012). “The Advancement of Learning”, p.61, Modern Library

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• There was once a Hindu sage, who sat down on the banks of the Ganges and thought for seventy years about the millennium. Just as he arrived at the solution and was putting it into verse, a mosquito stung him and he forgot it again at once.

  Don Marquis

  Years, Mosquitoes, Sage

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• Feeble verses are those which sin not against rules, but against genius.

  Voltaire

  Sins Not, Genius, Sin

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• Mr Witwould: "Pray, madam, do you pin up your hair with all your letters? I find I must keep copies." Mrs Millamant: "Only with those in verse.... I never pin up my hair with prose."

  William Congreve

  Hair, Poetry, Letters

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• With a lot of songs on this record, one verse doesn't relate to the next verse. I don't think that one day really relates to the next day in life.

  Neil Young

  Life, Song, Thinking

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• Once it happened, as I lay awake at night, that I suddenly spoke in verses, in verses so beautiful and strange that I did not venture to think of writing them down, and then in the morning they vanished; and yet they lay hidden within me like the hard kernel within an old brittle husk.

  Hermann Hesse

  Beautiful, Morning, Writing

  Hermann Hesse (2013). “Steppenwolf: A Novel”, p.30, Macmillan

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• Free verse is like free love; it is a contradiction in terms.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Free Love, Contradiction, Term

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• And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

  Pablo Neruda

  Fall, Soul, Dew

  Pablo Neruda (1990). “Selected Poems”, p.33, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• No one is saved by good works (Ephesians 2:8-9), but every Christian has been saved for good works (verse 10).

  David Jeremiah

  God, Christian, Religious

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• ...but when The Spirit speaks,—or beauty from the sky Descends into my being,—when I hear The storm-hymns of the mighty ocean roll, Or thunder sound,—the champion of the storm!— Then I feel envy for immortal words, The rush of living thought; oh! then I long To dash my feelings into deathless verse, That may administer to unborn time, And tell some lofty soul how I have lived A worshipper of Nature and of Thee!

  Robert Montgomery

  Nature, Ocean, Sky

  Robert Montgomery (1829). “An Universal Prayer ; Death ; A Vision of Heaven ; and A Vision of Hell &c. &c”, p.63

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• To write a verse or two is all the praise That I can raise.

  George Herbert

  Writing, Two, Praise

  George Herbert (1874). “The complete works in verse and prose of George Herbert: for the 1. time fully collected and collated with the orig. and early editions and mss. and much enl. ...”, p.68

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• A glance at the history of European poetry is enough to inform us that rhyme itself is not indispensable. Latin poetry in the classical age had no use for it, and the kind of Latin poetry that does rhyme - as for instance the medieval Carmina Burana - tends to be somewhat crude stuff in comparison with the classical verse that doesn't.

  James Fenton

  Latin, Age, Doe

  "It ain't necessarily so" by James Fenton, www.theguardian.com. October 18, 2002.

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• Like most kids, I grew up singing 'This Land Is Your Land' in grammar school, but with the most radical verses neatly removed. This was before I knew it was a Woody Guthrie song.

  Steve Earle

  Song, School, Kids

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• If a poem is not memorable, there's probably something wrong. One of the problems of free verse is that much of the free verse poetry is not memorable.

  Robert Morgan

  Memorable, Problem, Poetry Is

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• I ought to warn you that my verse is of no interest to people who can think.

  John Betjeman

  Thinking, People, Interest

  John Betjeman, Stephen Games (2006). “Trains and buttered toast: selected radio talks”, John Murray Pubs Ltd

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• I think there's one thing which distinguishes our art - we don't consider. We don't think. We write a little verse because it comes to us.

  Howard Nemerov

  Art, Writing, Thinking

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• France at the dinner table in faraway places; but here, among ourselves, in the family, let us face the facts: France is not poetic; to tell the truth, she even feels a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse, those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Use, France, Facts

  "Baudelaire as a literary critic".

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• The clear French landscape is as pure as a verse of Racine.

  Paul Cezanne

  Artist, Landscape, Clear

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• Most of those who make collections of verse or epigram are like men eating cherries or oysters: they choose out the best at first, and end by eating all.

  Nicolas Chamfort

  Men, Oysters, Literature

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