Verses Quotes - Page 8

• The adventitious beauty of poetry may be felt in the greater delight with a verse given in a happy quotation than in the poem.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Beauty, May, Delight

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• After you have pumped your brains for thoughts and verses, there is a better poetry hinted in whistling a tune on your walk.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Writing, Brain, Tunes

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1978). “The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson: 1854-1861”, p.261, Harvard University Press

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• I always loved reading. Growing up, my favorite book was 'A Child's Garden of Verses,' by Robert Louis Stevenson.

  Francine Pascal

  Children, Growing Up, Book

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• Walter [Cronkite] sang me a little sea chantey. The verse ended, 'Just watch your back with Dan [Rather], dear, just watch your back with Dan.'.

  Connie Chung

  Sea, Watches, Littles

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• Before verse can be human again it must learn to be brutal.

  John Millington Synge

  Poetry, Brutal, Humans

  John Millington Synge, Ann Saddlemyer (1998). “Playboy of the Western World and Other Plays”, p.10, Oxford University Press, USA

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• Part of the triumph of modernist poetry is, indeed, to have demonstrated the great extent to which verse can do without explicit meaning and yet not sacrifice anything essential to its effect as art. Here, as before, successful art can be depended upon to explain itself.

  Clement Greenberg

  Art, Sacrifice, Successful

  "Art and Culture: Critical Essays". Book by Clement Greenberg, "T.S. Eliot: A Book Review" (1950/1956), p. 244, 1961.

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• Opinions. Ideas. Possibilities. So many! How can I choose? Between bursts of lightning-swift energy, I enjoy peaceful moments when the whole world seems to be a flowing river of verse and all I have to do is learn how to swim.

  Margarita Engle

  Ideas, Rivers, Swim

  Margarita Engle (2013). “The Lightning Dreamer: Cuba's Greatest Abolitionist”, p.41, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• But theological change happens though selective quoting. Every religious person does it: You quote those verses that resonate with your own religious insights and ignore or reinterpret those that undermine your certainties. Selective quoting isn't just legitimate, but essential: Religions evolve through shifts in selective quoting.

  Yossi Klein Halevi

  Religious, Essentials, Doe

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• So how can a poet-an intelligent, serious poet-write mystical verse now? The poetry of Adam Zagajewski provides the beginning of an answer to this question.

  Adam Kirsch

  Writing, Intelligent, Answers

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• [Among the books he chooses, a statesman] ought to read interesting books on history and government, and books of science and philosophy; and really good books on these subjects are as enthralling as any fiction ever written in prose or verse.

  Theodore Roosevelt

  Philosophy, Book, Science

  Theodore Roosevelt (2013). “Bully!”, p.257, Simon and Schuster

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• Golden Verses So-called because they are "good as gold." They are by some attributed to Epicarmos, and by others to Empedocles, but always go under the name of Pythagoras, and seem quite in accordance with the excellent precepts of that philosopher. They are as follows: Ne'er suffer sleep thine eyes to close Before thy mind hath run O'er every act, and thought, and word, From dawn to set of sun; For wrong take shame, but grateful feel If just thy course hath been; Such effort day by day renewed Will ward thy soul from sin. E. C. B.

  Pythagoras

  Running, Grateful, Sleep

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• Cancel me not - for what then shall remain? Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes, A root or two, a torus and a node: The inverse of my verse, a null domain.

  Stanislaw Lem

  Humorous, Two, Roots

  Stanislaw Lem (2002). “The Cyberiad”, p.57, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I am reading Jonson's verses to the memory of Shakespeare; an insolent, sparing, and invidious panegyric.

  John Dryden

  Memories, Reading, Insolent

  John Dryden (1779). “The Works of the English Poets. With Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, by Samuel Johnson”, p.105

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• Poets may boast (as safely-vain) Their work shall with the world remain: Both bound together, live, or die, The verses and the prophecy. But who can hope his lines shou'd long Last, in a daily changing tongue? While they are new, envy prevails, And as that dies, our language fails.

  Edmund Waller

  Envy, Long, Together

  1645 'Of English Verse'.

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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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• Leave not a foot of verse, a foot of stone, A Page, a Grave, that they can call their own; But spread, my sons, your glory thin or thick, On passive paper, or on solid brick.

  Alexander Pope

  Son, Feet, Paper

  1742 The Dunciad, bk.4, l.127-30.

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• n artistic atmosphere does not create artists a literary atmosphere does not create literators; poets and painters spring up where there was never a verse made or a picture seen. This suggests that God is no more idle now than He was at the beginning, but that He is still and forever shaping the human chaos into the instruments and means of beauty.

  William Dean Howells

  Spring, Mean, Artist

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• I compelled myself all through to write an exercise in verse, in a different form, every day of the year. I turned out my page every day, of some sort - I mean I didn't give a damn about the meaning, I just wanted to master the form - all the way from free verse, Walt Whitman, to the most elaborate of villanelles and ballad forms. Very good training. I've always told everybody who has ever come to me that I thought that was the first thing to do.

  Conrad Aiken

  Mean, Writing, Exercise

  "Conrad Aiken, The Art of Poetry No. 9". Interview with Robert Hunter Wilbur in September 1963, "The Paris Review", www.theparisreview.org. Winter - Spring 1968.

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• But I do not want to use Hungarian verses for British people.

  Gyorgy Ligeti

  People, Use, Want

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• Publication there [in Nimbus] was to prove a turning point… The publication of his next volume of verse, Come Dance with Kitty Stobling, was to be directly linked to the mini-collection in Nimbus, and his Collected Poems (1964)

  Patrick Kavanagh

  Next, Volume, Kitties

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• I dabbled in verse and it became my life

  Patrick Kavanagh

  "Tarry Flynn".

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• The language of the age is never the language of poetry, except among the French, whose verse, where the thought or image does not support it, differs in nothing from prose.

  Thomas Gray

  Support, Age, Doe

  Letter to West, 8 April 1742, in H. W. Starr (ed.) 'Correspondence of Thomas Gray' (1971) vol. 1, letter 103

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• How fast we learn in the day of sorrow! Scripture shines out in a new effulgence; every verse seems to contain a sunbeam, every promise stands out in illuminated splendor; things hard to be understood become in a moment plain.

  Horatius Bonar

  Shining, Promise, Sorrow

  "Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers" by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, (p. 555), 1895.

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• Oh to be my verse an answering gleam from higher radiance caught

  Frances Ridley Havergal

  Radiance, Gleam, Caught

  Frances Ridley Havergal (1872). “The Ministry of Song”, p.1

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• Whenever you see, in an official lectionary, the command to omit two or three verses, you can normally be sure that they contain words of judgment. Unless, of course, they are about sex.

  N. T. Wright

  Sex, Two, Three

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