Yeats Quotes

• I remember Francis Bacon would say that he felt he was giving art what he thought it previously lacked. With me, it's what Yeats called the fascination with what's difficult. I'm only trying to do what I can't do.

  Lucian Freud

  Art, Giving, Trying

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• One day in Dipstick, Nebraska, or Landfill, Oklahoma, is worth more to me than an eternity in Dante's plastic Paradiso, or Yeats's gold-plated Byzantium.

  Edward Abbey

  Byzantium, Oklahoma, One Day

  Edward Abbey (2015). “A Voice Crying in the Wilderness”, p.28, RosettaBooks

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• There are those who regard this history of past strife and exile as better forgotten. But, to use the phrase of Yeats, let us not casually reduce "that great past to a trouble of fools." For we need not feel the bitterness of the past to discover its meaning for the present and the future.

  John F. Kennedy

  Time, Past, Needs

  Address Before the Irish Parliament, delivered 28 June 1963, Dublin, Ireland

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• Yeats was the greatest poet of our times . . . certainly the greatest in this language, and so far as I am able to judge, in any language.

  T. S. Eliot

  Time, Judging, Able

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• It's just like Yeats said. In dreams begin responsibilities. Flip this around and you could say that where there's no power to imagine, no responsibility can arise.

  Haruki Murakami

  Dream, Responsibility, Flip

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• The sad fact is that I love Dickens and Donne and Keats and Eliot and Forster and Conrad and Fitzgerald and Kafka and Wilde and Orwell and Waugh and Marvell and Greene and Sterne and Shakespeare and Webster and Swift and Yeats and Joyce and Hardy, really, really love them. It’s just that they don’t love me back.

  David Nicholls

  Facts, Wilde, Donne

  David Nicholls (2004). “A Question of Attraction: A Novel”, p.233, Villard

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• And I love Jane Austen's use of language too--the way she takes her time to develop a phrase and gives it room to grow, so that these clever, complex statements form slowly and then bloom in my mind. Beethoven does the same thing with his cadence and phrasing and structure. It's a fact: Jane Austen is musical. And so's Yeats. And Wordsworth. All the great writers are musical.

  Andrew Clements

  Clever, Giving, Musical

  Andrew Clements (2008). “Things Hoped For”, p.77, Penguin

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• The censorious said she slept in a hammock and understood Yeats's poems, but her family denied both stories.

  Hector Hugh Munro

  Hammocks, Stories, Said

  Saki, Hector Hugh Munro (2016). “Delphi Complete Works of Saki (Illustrated)”, p.420, Delphi Classics

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• To be the father of growing daughters is to understand something of what Yeats evokes with his imperishable phrase 'terrible beauty.' Nothing can make one so happily exhilarated or so frightened: it's a solid lesson in the limitations of self to realize that your heart is running around inside someone else's body. It also makes me quite astonishingly calm at the thought of death: I know whom I would die to protect and I also understand that nobody but a lugubrious serf can possibly wish for a father who never goes away.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Daughter, Running, Atheist

  "Hitch-22: A Memoir". Book by Christopher Hitchens, www.huffingtonpost.com. May 20, 2010.

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• Is it not certain that the Creator yawns in earthquake and thunder and other popular displays, but toils in rounding the delicate spiral of a shell? -Yeats, The Trembling of the Veil

  William Butler Yeats

  Earthquakes, Toil, Shells

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• Alister McGrath has now written two books with my name in the title. The poet W. B. Yeats, when asked to say something about bad poets who made a living by parasitizing him, wrote the splendid line, 'was there ever dog that praised his fleas?

  Richard Dawkins

  Dog, Book, Two

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• Earth, receive an honored guest; William Yeats is laid to rest. Let the Irish vessel lie Emptied of its poetry.

  W. H. Auden

  Art, Lying, Poetry

  "In Memory of W. B. Yeats" l. 42 (1940)

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• I wanted to see who this Yeats person was, and I said to my mother, 'I want a book by this person.' And she bought it for me, and a lot of it was over my head, but I had it.

  Patti Smith

  Mother, Book, Want

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• With him in defense, we could play Arthur Askey in goal. 
  (after signing Ron Yeats)

  Bill Shankly

  Play, Goal, Defense

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• [William Butler] Yeats has the phrase Hodos Chameliontos, chameleon-like, in that you don't know where the beginning or the middle or the end is, so it's an unrelieved hallucination, because you don't know where you're coming in and you don't know where you're going out. It ends, you're going into the hallucination, or maybe coming out of it, I don't know.

  Allen Ginsberg

  Going Out, Phrases, Hallucinations

  Source: sensitiveskinmagazine.com

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• I am talking about poetry. It's like that line from [John] Yeats: I go back to "where all the ladders start/ In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart."

  Robert Hass

  Heart, Talking, Ladders

  "Robert Hass" by Sarah Pollock, www.motherjones.com. March/April 1997.

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• ... woman is frequently praised as the more "creative" sex. She does not need to make poems, it is argued; she has no drive to make poems, because she is privileged to make babies. A pregnancy is as fulfilling as, say, Yeats' Sailing to Byzantium.... To call a child a poem may be a pretty metaphor, but it is a slur on the labor of art.

  Cynthia Ozick

  Baby, Art, Sex

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• Most of my influences from outside the commerical strange fiction genre came in with university, discovering James Joyce and Wallace Stevens, Blake and Yeats, Pinter and Borges. And meanwhile within those genres I was discovering Gibson and Shepard, Jeter and Powers, Lovecraft and Peake.

  Hal Duncan

  Jeter, Fiction, Strange

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• Yeats, you need ten years in the library, but I have need of ten years in the wilderness.

  Lionel Johnson

  Years, Library, Needs

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• On a summer night it can be lovely to sit around outside with friends after dinner and, yes, read poetry to each other. Keats and Yeats will never let you down, but it's differently exciting to read the work of poets who are still walking around out there.

  Michael Cunningham

  Summer, Night, Lovely

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• I think that great poetry is the most interesting and complex use of the poet's language at that point in history, and so it's even more exciting when you read a poet like Yeats, almost 100 years old now, and you think that perhaps no one can really top that.

  Diane Wakoski

  Thinking, Years, Interesting

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• The death of every art form seems imminent at least once in every century; but while the very funeral arrangements go forward, some child is born who is Michelangelo, Picasso, Yeats.

  Reynolds Price

  Art, Children, Funeral

  Reynolds Price (1989). “A common room: essays, 1954-1987”, Scribner Paper Fiction

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• I think the whole emphasis in England, in universities, on practical criticism (but not that so much as on historical criticism, knowing what period a line comes from) this is almost paralysing. In America, in University, we read - what? - T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Yeats, that is where we began. Shakespeare flaunted in the background. I'm not sure I agree with this, but I think that' for the young poet, the writing poet, it is not quite so frightening to go to university in America as it is in England, for these reasons.

  Sylvia Plath

  Writing, Thinking, Knowing

  Source: www.english.illinois.edu

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• There is a part of me that will forever want to be walking under autumn leaves, carrying a briefcase containing the works of Shakespeare and Yeats and a portable chess set. I will pass an old tree under which once on a summer night I lay on the grass with a fragrant young woman and we quoted e.e. cummings back and forth.

  Roger Ebert

  Summer, Autumn, Night

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• I always thought old age would be a writer’s best chance. Whenever I read the late work of Goethe or W. B. Yeats I had the impertinence to identify with it. Now, my memory’s gone, all the old fluency’s disappeared. I don’t write a single sentence without saying to myself, ‘It’s a lie!’ So I know I was right. It’s the best chance I’ve ever had.

  Samuel Beckett

  Memories, Lying, Writing

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