Verses Quotes - Page 3

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

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Free Love, Contradiction, Term

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• When I began rapping, I only had one form at my disposal. All I had, all I needed was a rhyme verse; sixteen bar, thirty-two bar, whatever it was. If I had an idea it came out as a rhyme. When I challenged myself to think beyond that, my first thing other than a rhyme that I wrote was a play.

  Kate Tempest

  Rap, Thinking, Play

  "Personality Clash: Kate Tempest x Loyle Carner". www.clashmusic.com. May 10, 2016.

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• Everything that's prose isn't verse and everything that isn't verse is prose. Now you see what it is to be a scholar!

  Moliere

  Scholarship, Scholar, Prose

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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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• So it is in poetry. All we ask is that the mood recorded shall impress us as having been of the kind that exhausts the imaginative capacity; if it fails to do this the failure will announce itself either in prose or in insignificant verse.

  John Drinkwater

  Kind, Failing, Mood

  John Drinkwater (1922). “The Lyric: An Essay”

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• I can work on a verse for a very long time before realising it's not any good and then, and only then, can I discard it.

  Leonard Cohen

  Long, Realising, I Can

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• The heroes of our youth grow old - 'the boys of summer in their ruin,' in Dylan Thomas's verse - yet we seem the same.

  John Thorn

  Summer, Hero, Boys

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

  Paul Cezanne

  Artist, Landscape, Clear

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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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• A felon could plead "benefit of clergy" and be saved by [reading aloud] what was aptly enough termed the "neck verse", which was very usually the Miserere mei of Psalm 51.

  William Hazlitt

  Book, Reading, Benefits

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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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• Every time we equip the church with a verse, chapter or a story from the Bible, we're really placing another weapon in the hands of the Holy Spirit that He uses to challenge and strengthen the church. I think that's very important.

  Max Lucado

  Thinking, Hands, Challenges

  Source: www.sermoncentral.com

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• Writing fiction, for me, is a more indirect form of self-exploration than writing verse. When I'm working on a novel I'm moving characters around and I'm thinking about plot and there's a lot of other things going on at the level of structure and story. With a poem, a single idea or line or emotion can sometimes be enough - there's often a sense, in the best poems, of capturing a single instant. Perhaps poems differ from prose in the degree of solace they can offer - by speaking so personally, so directly, about shared experience. A few lines of poetry can provide comfort.

  Nick Laird

  Moving, Writing, Character

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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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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• 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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• 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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• Usually I start with a beat, I start making a beat, and my producer side is making the beat. And on a good day, my rapper side will jump in and start the writing process - maybe come up with a hook or start a verse. Sometimes it just happens like that. A song like 'Lights Please' happens like that.

  J. Cole

  Song, Writing, Good Day

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• BLANK-VERSE, n. Unrhymed iambic pentameters - the most difficult kind of English verse to write acceptably; a kind, therefore, much affected by those who cannot acceptably write any kind.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Kindness, Writing, Blank

  Ambrose Bierce (2009). “The Devil's Dictionary: Easyread Super Large 18pt Edition”, p.32, ReadHowYouWant.com

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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 switch between fixed forms and free verse often, and enjoy being a poet who can "swing both ways," so to speak.

  Allison Joseph

  Swings, Way, Speak

  Source: blog.pshares.org

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• The President [Barack Obama] is very focused on [healthcare]. He, of course, is also writing this speech at high speed. And right coming up until the speech, he is convinced that a full plan, letter and verse of what the administration wants, will be released.

  Ron Suskind

  Writing, President, Letters

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• I just chuck a bunch of words down and whether they find themselves into a song... I have lots of weird notes on my phone. I often come up with a phrase that I really like, I write it down and it stays in my notes folder, and when I'm writing I will scroll through and see if it kind of fits and if I can mould a verse around it.

  Thomston

  Song, Writing, Phones

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• I didn't know how write a song, (verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus, bridge, verse), etc., and I didn't know how to write lyrics, so that's when I thought, well, I don't have to write a song with all those verses and choruses or lyrics. I can just sing everything the way I want to. So I sang all the instruments with my voice and just went with it.

  Petra Haden

  Song, Writing, Bridges

  Source: therumpus.net

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