Verses Quotes - Page 24

• We have lobbed verses of Scripture, like hand grenades, into the camps of others, convinced we only have truth.

  George Carey

  Religious, Hands, Scripture

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• Soft is the strain when zephyr gently blows, And the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows; But when loud surges lash the sounding shore, The hoarse rough verse should like the torrent roar. When Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw, The line too labours, and the words move slow: Not so when swift Camilla scours the plain, Flies o'er th' unbending corn, and skims along the main.

  Alexander Pope

  Moving, Blow, Numbers

  'An Essay on Criticism' (1711) l. 368

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• An exact poetic duplication of a man is for the poet a negation of the earth, an impossibility of being, even though his greatest desire is to speak to many men, to unite with them by means of harmonious verses about the truths of the mind or of things.

  Salvatore Quasimodo

  Mean, Men, Mind

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• Mostly the thought and the verse come inseparably. In my poem Poetics, it's as close as I come to telling how I do it.

  Howard Nemerov

  Literature, Poetic

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• If I can quote myself, I explained whatever it is I'm doing once for No Tell Motel, and I still think it's the clearest I've ever been about this: "I don't write free verse poems - mostly because I can't. But I am interested in the musical effects achievable with free verse."

  Shane McCrae

  Writing, Thinking, Musical

  Source: therumpus.net

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• So when I'm killed, don't wait for me, Walking the dim corridor; In Heaven or Hell, don't wait for me, Or you must wait for evermore. You'll find me buried, living-dead In these verses that you've read.

  Robert Graves

  Waiting, Heaven, Hell

  Robert Graves, Beryl Graves, Dunstan Ward (1999). “Complete poems”, Carcanet Pr

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• I don't think of myself as an author. But simply as a grateful child of God. John 3:27 has long been a life verse: "A man can receive nothing unless it has been given him from heaven." Any more words will only be solely a gift from Him. I can only faithfully wait.

  Ann Voskamp

  Children, Grateful, Men

  Source: livesentresources.wordpress.com

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• Oh, princes thrive on caviar, the poor on whey and curds, / And politicians, I infer, must eat their windy words. / It's crusts that feed the virtuous, it's cake that comforts sinners, / But writers live on bread and praise at Literary Dinners.

  Phyllis McGinley

  Cake, Comfort, Caviar

  Phyllis McGinley (1951). “A Short Walk from the Station”

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• The charms of money are distinctly under-represented in literature. There are no songs or poems extolling its virtues. This seems on the face of it strange. The claims of money to be celebrated in verse might well seem to be no less than those of faithful dogs, beautiful women, or jugs of wine.

  Celia Green

  Beautiful, Dog, Song

  "The decline and fall of science". Book by Celia Elizabeth Green, 1976.

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• It was said of Euripides, that every verse was a precept; and it may be said of Shakespeare, that from his works may be collected a system of civil and economical prudence.

  Samuel Johnson

  May, Said, Prudence

  William Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson, George Steevens (1824). “The Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare”, p.25

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• Of little use, the man you may suppose,
  Who says in verse what others say in prose;
  Yet let me show a poet's of some weight,
  And (though no soldier) useful to the state,
  What will a child learn sooner than a song?
  What better teach a foreigner the tongue?
  What's long or short, each accent where to place
  And speak in public with some sort of grace?

  Alexander Pope

  Song, Children, Men

  Alexander Pope (1829). “An Essay on Man: And Other Poems”, p.156

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• In Phebus realm, in knowledge as in verse,All things are clear, the sun of Phoebus clear,Clear was his crystal, the Kastalian.What you cannot clearly say, you don't know:To tongue of man his thought brings word:What's said obscurely is what's thought obscurely.

  Esaias Tegner

  Men, Tongue, Sun

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• The summer lasted a long long time, like verse after verse of a ballad, but when it ended, it ended like a man falling dead in the street of heart trouble. One night, all in one night, severe winter came, a white horse of snow rolling over Bountiful, snorting and rolling in its meadows, its fields.

  Ardyth Kennelly

  Summer, Horse, Fall

  Ardyth Kennelly (1949). “The Peaceable Kingdom”

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• Believe it or not, I sold my first novel, Crank, with only seventy-five pages complete. It was in verse then, and it was hard-hitting then.

  Ellen Hopkins

  Believe, Hitting, Pages

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• A tattered copy of Johnson's large Dictionary was a great delight to me, on account of the specimens of English versifications which I found in the Introduction. I learned them as if they were so many poems. I used to keep this old volume close to my pillow; and I amused myself when I awoke in the morning by reciting its jingling contrasts of iambic and trochaic and dactylic metre, and thinking what a charming occupation it must be to "make up" verses.

  Lucy Larcom

  Morning, Thinking, Poetry

  Lucy Larcom (1961). “A New England girlhood”

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• The definition of good prose is proper words in their proper places; of good verse, the most proper words in their proper places.The propriety is in either case relative. The words in prose ought to express the intended meaning, and no more; if they attract attention to themselves, it is, in general, a fault.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Poetry, Attention, Definitions

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1835). “Specimens of the Table Talk of the Late Samuel Taylor Coleridge: In Two Volumes”, p.214

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• The man who invented Eskimo Pie made a million dollars, so one is told, but E.E. Cummings, whose verse has been appearing off andon for three years now, and whose experiments should not be more appalling to those interested in poetry than the experiment of surrounding ice-cream with a layer of chocolate was to those interested in soda fountains, has hardly made a dent in the doughy minds of our so-called poetry lovers.

  John Dos Passos

  Men, Pie, Ice Cream

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• If only the Geologists would let me alone, I could do very well, but those dreadful Hammers! I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses.

  John Ruskin

  Cadence, Hammers, Bible Verse

  Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, George Allan Cate (1982). “The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin”, p.14, Stanford University Press

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• In verse one can take any damn constant one likes, one can alliterate, or assone, or rhyme, or quant, or smack, only one MUST leave the other elements irregular.

  Ezra Pound

  Poetry, Elements, Likes

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• Faith greatly shaped America's role in the world. We are a country that embodies the Bible verse from Luke chapter 12, verse 48 "From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded."

  Marco Rubio

  Country, America, Roles

  Source: www.cnn.com

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• The problem with writing a book in verse is, to be successful, it has to sound like you knocked it off on a rainy Friday afternoon. It has to sound easy. When you can do it, it helps tremendously because it's a thing that forces kids to read on. You have this unconsummated feeling if you stop.

  Dr. Seuss

  Friday, Book, Writing

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• Dr Donne's verses are like the peace of God; they pass all understanding.

  King James I

  Understanding, Drs, Donne

  "The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations" edited by Elizabeth Knowles, Oxford University Press, 2004.

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• I've forgotten lines all the time. Sometimes I switch verses in a song. It's just hard not to when you're doing the same thing all the time.

  Josh Young

  Song, Lines, Sometimes

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• Poetry does so many different things, it's difficult to say anything definitive about its role, which of course varies from culture to culture. It can range from being stories of the tribe to the private lyric, to being as W.H. Auden said "the clear expression of mixed feelings" to nonsense verse.

  Stephen Dunn

  Feelings, Say Anything, Culture

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Baal-hamon, one of Baal's names, means "the lord of wealth or abundance." Chuck Pierce believes, and I agree, that this is the principality warring against the great transfer of wealth to the Church. You must war against this spirit to see your inheritance released. Claim Jeremiah 51:44 (Bel in this verse is Baal).

  Dutch Sheets

  War, Believe, Mean

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