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Saturday, June 2, 2012

Theodore Roethke Quotes


"A lively understandable spirit Once entertained you. It will come again. Be still. Wait."
"By daily dying I have come to be."
"Deep in their roots, all flowers keep the light."
"Love begets love. This torment is my joy."
"Over every mountain there is a path, although it may not be seen from the valley."
"What we need is more people who specialize in the impossible."

Christina Rossetti Quotes


"And all the winds go sighing, for sweet things dying."
"Be the green grass above me, with showers and dewdrops wet; and if thou wilt, remember, and if thou wilt, forget."
"Better by far you should forget and smile that you should remember and be sad."
"For there is no friend like a sister in calm or stormy weather; To cheer one on the tedious way, to fetch one if one goes astray, to lift one if one totters down, to strengthen whilst one stands."
"Hope is like a hairball trembling from its birth."
"I dream of you to wake; would that I might Dream of you and not wake but slumber on."
"I might show facts as plain as day: but, since your eyes are blind, you'd say, "Where? What?" and turn away."
"Love shall be our token; love be yours and love be mine."
"My heart is like a singing bird."
"Obedience is the fruit of faith."
"She gave up beauty in her tender youth, gave all her hope and joy and pleasant ways; she covered up her eyes lest they should gaze on vanity, and chose the bitter truth."
"Silence is more musical than any song."
"To strengthen whilst one stands."
"Who has seen the wind? Neither you nor I but when the trees bow down their heads, the wind is passing by."

Salvatore Quasimodo Quotes

"Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own."

Coventry Patmore Quotes

"To him that waits all things reveal themselves, provided that he has the courage not to deny, in the darkness, what he has seen in the light."

Fernando Pessoa Quotes


"All is worthwhile if the soul is not small."
"At first, it's unfamiliar, then it strikes root."
"Could it think, the heart would stop beating."
"God wills, Man dreams, the Work is born."
"Look, there's no metaphysics on earth like chocolates."
"No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it."
"Success consists in being successful, not in having potential for success. Any wide piece of ground is the potential site of a palace, but there's no palace till it's built."
"To choose ways of not acting was ever the concern and scruple of my life."
"To feel today what one felt yesterday isn't to feel - it's to remember today what was felt yesterday, to be today's living corpse of what yesterday was lived and lost."
"Wise is he who enjoys the show offered by the world."

Boris Pasternak Quotes


"A corner draft fluttered the flame, and the white fever of temptation, upswept its angel wings that cast, a cruciform shadow."
"Art has two constant, two unending concerns: It always meditates on death and thus always creates life. All great, genuine art resembles and continues the Revelation of St John."
"As far as modern writing is concerned, it is rarely rewarding to translate it, although it might be easy. Translation is very much like copying paintings."
"As in an explosion, I would erupt with all the wonderful things I saw and understood in this world."
"Even so, one step from my grave, I believe that cruelty, spite, The powers of darkness will in time, Be crushed by the spirit of light."
"I come here to speak poetry. It will always be in the grass. It will also be necessary to bend down to hear it. It will always be too simple to be discussed in assemblies."
"I don't like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and it isn't of much value. Life hasn't revealed its beauty to them."
"I have been writing in spurts, bit by bit. It is incredibly difficult. Everything is corroded, broken, dismantled; everything is covered with hardened layers of accumulated insensitivity, deafness, entrenched routine. It is disgusting."
"I think that if the beast who sleeps in man could be held down by threats of any kind, whether of jail or retribution, then the highest emblem of humanity would be the lion tamer, not the prophet who sacrified himself."
"Immensely grateful, touched, proud, astonished, abashed."
"In view of the meaning given to this honor in the community to which I belong, I should abstain from the undeserved prize that has been awarded to me. Do not meet my voluntary refusal with ill will."
"Love is not weakness. It is strong. Only the sacrament of marriage can contain it."
"Man is born to live and not to prepare to live."
"No deep and strong feeling, such as we may come across here and there in the world, is unmixed with compassion. The more we love, the more the object of our love seems to us to be a victim."
"Our evenings are farewells. Our parties are testaments. So that the secret stream of suffering. May warm the cold of life."
"Poetry is a rich, full-bodied whistle, cracked ice crunching in pails, the night that numbs the leaf, the duel of two nightingales, the sweet pea that has run wild, Creation's tears in shoulder blades."
"That's metaphysics, my dear fellow. It's forbidden me by my doctor, my stomach won't take it."
"The writer is the Faust of modern society, the only surviving individualist in a mass age. To his orthodox contemporaries he seems a semi-madman."
"They don't ask much of you. They only want you to hate the things you love and to love the things you despise."
"What for centuries raised man above the beast is not the cudgel but the irresistible power of unarmed truth."
"What is laid down, ordered, factual is never enough to embrace the whole truth: life always spills over the rim of every cup."
"What you don't understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels."
"Work is the order of the day, just as it was at one time, with our first starts and our best efforts. Do you remember? Therein lies its delight. It brings back the forgotten; one's stores of energy, seemingly exhausted, come back to life."
"You fall into my arms. You are the good gift of destruction's path, When life sickens more than disease. And boldness is the root of beauty. Which draws us together."

Li Po Quotes

"Heaven is high, Earth Wide. Bitter between them flies my sorrow."

Dorothy Parker Quotes


"I'm never going to be famous. I don't do anything, not one single thing. I used to bite my nails, but I don't even do that any more."
"I don't care what is written about me so long as it isn't true."
"Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words."
"You can't teach an old dogma new tricks."
"Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses."
"Four be the things I'd have been better without:"
"Love, curiosity, freckles and doubt."
"A girl's best friend is her mutter."
"I require only three things of a man. He must be handsome, ruthless and stupid."
"Take care of luxuries and the necessities will take care of themselves."
"Salary is no object; I want only enough to keep body and soul apart."
"Money cannot buy health, but I'd settle for a diamond-studded wheelchair."
"The two most beautiful words in the English language are 'cheque enclosed.'"
"If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to."
"The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity."
"The best way to keep children home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant -- and let the air out of the tires."
"Now, look, baby, 'Union' is spelled with 5 letters. It is not a four-letter word."
"It serves me right for keeping all my eggs in one bastard."
"All I need is room enough to lay a hat and a few friends."
"Heterosexuality is not normal, it's just common."
"Scratch a lover, and find a foe."
"Men don't like nobility in woman. Not any men. I suppose it is because the men like to have the copyrights on nobility -- if there is going to be anything like that in a relationship."
"That woman speaks eighteen languages, and can't say No in any of them."
"People are more fun than anybody."
"I like to have a martini,"
"Two at the very most."
"After three I'm under the table,"
"after four I'm under my host."
"I'd rather have a bottle in front of me, than a frontal lobotomy."
"You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think."
"Ducking for apples -- change one letter and it's the story of my life."
"The Monte Carlo casino refused to admit me until I was properly dressed so I went and found my stockings, and then came back and lost my shirt."
"Brevity is the soul of lingerie."
"This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force."
"She runs the gamut of emotions from A to B."
"The only ism Hollywood believes in is plagiarism."
"If all the young ladies who attended the Yale prom were laid end to end, no one would be the least surprised."
"As only New Yorkers know, if you can get through the twilight, you'll live through the night."
"Misfortune, and recited misfortune especially, may be prolonged to that point where it ceases to excite pity and arouses only irritation."
"Summer makes me drowsy."
"Autumn makes me sing."
"Winter's pretty lousy,"
"But I hate Spring."

Matthew Prior Quotes


"And 'tis remarkable that they talk most who have the least to say."
"Be to their virtue very kind; be to their faults a little blind."
"Cured yesterday of my disease, I died last night of my physician."
"Fantastic tyrant of the amorous heart. How hard thy yoke, how cruel thy dart. Those escape your anger who refuse your sway, and those are punished most, who most obey."
"For, when with beauty we can virtue join, We paint the semblance of a form divine."
"Hope is but the dream of those who wake."
"Hopes are but the dreams of those that wake."
"It takes two to quarrel, but only one to end it."
"Odds life! must one swear to the truth of a song?"
"The ends must justify the means."
"They never taste who always drink: They always talk, who never think."
"They talk most who have the least to say."
"To John I owed great obligation; but John, unhappily, thought fit to publish it to all the nation: Sure John and I are more than quit."
"Who walks the fastest, but walks astray, is only furthest from his way."

Katherine Anne Porter Quotes


"Experience is what really happens to you in the long run; the truth that finally overtakes you."
"Human life itself may be almost pure chaos, but the work of the artist is to take these handfuls of confusion and disparate things, things that seem to be irreconcilable, and put them together in a frame to give them some kind of shape and meaning."
"I have not much interest in anyone's personal history after the tenth year, not even my own. Whatever one was going to be was all prepared before that."
"I was right not to be afraid of any thief but myself, who will end by leaving me nothing."
"It's a man's world, and you men can have it."
"Our being is subject to all the chances of life. There are so many things we are capable of, that we could be or do. The potentialities are so great that we never, any of us, are more than one-fourth fulfilled."
"Physical infidelity is the signal, the notice given, that all fidelities are undermined."
"They had both noticed that a life of dissipation sometimes gave to a face the look of gaunt suffering spirituality that a life of asceticism was supposed to give and quite often did not."
"You can't write about people out of textbooks, and you can't use jargon. You have to speak clearly and simply and purely in a language that a six-year-old child can understand; and yet have the meanings and the overtones of language, and the implications, that appeal to the highest intelligence."

Alexander Pope Quotes


"A cherub's face, a reptile all the rest."
"A God without dominion, providence, and final causes, is nothing else but fate and nature."
"A little learning is a dangerous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring."
"A man should never be ashamed to own he has been in the wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday."
"A person who is too nice an observer of the business of the crowd, like one who is too curious in observing the labor of bees, will often be stung for his curiosity."
"A wit with dunces, and a dunce with wits."
"A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left."
"Act well your part, there all the honour lies."
"All are but parts of one stupendous whole, Whose body Nature is, and God the soul."
"All nature is but art unknown to thee."
"An honest man's the noblest work of God."
"And all who told it added something new, and all who heard it, made enlargements too."
"And, after all, what is a lie? 'Tis but the truth in a masquerade."
"At every word a reputation dies."
"Aurora now, fair daughter of the dawn, Sprinkled with rosy light the dewy lawn."
"Be not the first by whom the new are tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside."
"Behold the child, by Nature's kindly law pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw."
"Blessed is the man who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed was the ninth beatitude."
"Blest paper-credit! last and best supply! That lends corruption lighter wings to fly!"
"But blind to former as to future fate, What mortal knows his pre-existent state?"
"But honest instinct comes a volunteer; Sure never to o'er-shoot, but just to hit, While still too wide or short in human wit."
"Did some more sober critics come abroad? If wrong, I smil'd; if right, I kiss'd the rod."
"Education forms the common mind. Just as the twig is bent, the tree's inclined."
"Extremes in nature equal ends produce; In man they join to some mysterious use."
"Fondly we think we honor merit then, When we but praise ourselves in other men."
"Fools admire, but men of sense approve."
"Fools rush in where angels fear to tread."
"For Forms of Government let fools contest; whatever is best administered is best."
"For modes of faith let graceless zealots fight, His can't be wrong whose life is in the right."
"Genius creates, and taste preserves. Taste is the good sense of genius; without taste, genius is only sublime folly."
"Gentle dullness ever loves a joke."
"Get place and wealth, if possible with grace; if not, by any means get wealth and place."
"Good God! how often are we to die before we go quite off this stage? In every friend we lose a part of ourselves, and the best part."
"Happy the man whose wish and care a few paternal acres bound, content to breathe his native air in his own ground."
"Health consists with temperance alone."
"Histories are more full of examples of the fidelity of dogs than of friends."
"Honor and shame from no condition rise. Act well your part: there all the honor lies."
"Hope springs eternal in the human breast: Man never is, but always To be Blest."
"How happy is the blameless vestal's lot? The world forgetting, by the world forgot."
"How prone to doubt, how cautious are the wise!"
"I am his Highness dog at Kew; pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?"
"If a man's character is to be abused there's nobody like a relative to do the business."
"If that's art, I'm a Hottentot!"
"If, presume not to God to scan; The proper study of Mankind is Man. Plac'd on this isthmus of a middle state, a being darkly wise, and rudely great."
"In words, as fashions, the same rule will hold; Alike fantastic, if too new, or old: Be not the first by whom the new are tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside."
"It is with narrow-souled people as with narrow-necked bottles: the less they have in them the more noise they make in pouring it out."
"Know then this truth, enough for man to know virtue alone is happiness below."
"Learn to live well, or fairly make your will; you played, and loved, and ate, and drunk your fill: walk sober off; before a sprightlier age comes tittering on, and shoves you from the stage: leave such to trifle with more grace and ease, whom Folly pleases, and whose Follies please."
"Like Cato, give his little senate laws, and sit attentive to his own applause."
"Lo! The poor Indian, whose untutored mind sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind."
"Lulled in the countless chambers of the brain, our thoughts are linked by many a hidden chain; awake but one, and in, what myriads rise!"
"Men dream of courtship, but in wedlock wake."
"Men would be angels, angels would be gods."
"Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night: God said, "Let Newton be!" and all was light."
"Never find fault with the absent."
"No one should be ashamed to admit they are wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that they are wiser today than they were yesterday."
"Not to go back is somewhat to advance, and men must walk, at least, before they dance."
"Of Manners gentle, of Affections mild; In Wit a man; Simplicity, a child."
"On life's vast ocean diversely we sail. Reasons the card, but passion the gale."
"On wrongs swift vengeance waits."
"One science only will one genius fit; so vast is art, so narrow human wit."
"Order is heaven's first law."
"Our passions are like convulsion fits, which, though they make us stronger for a time, leave us the weaker ever after."
"Party-spirit at best is but the madness of many for the gain of a few."
"Passions are the gales of life."
"Praise undeserved, is satire in disguise."
"Pride is still aiming at the best houses: Men would be angels, angels would be gods. Aspiring to be gods, if angels fell; aspiring to be angels men rebel."
"Remembrance and reflection how allied. What thin partitions divides sense from thought."
"Satan is wiser now than before, and tempts by making rich instead of poor."
"Slave to no sect, who takes no private road, But looks through Nature up to Nature's God."
"So vast is art, so narrow human wit."
"Some old men, continually praise the time of their youth. In fact, you would almost think that there were no fools in their days, but unluckily they themselves are left as an example."
"Some people will never learn anything, for this reason, because they understand everything too soon."
"Spreads his light wings, and in a moment flies."
"Teach me to feel another's woe,To hide the fault I see,That mercy I to others show,That mercy show to me."
"Ten censure wrong, for one that writes amiss."
"The appearance and disappearance of the Universe are pictured as an outbreathing and inbreathing of "the Great Breath," which is eternal, and which, being Motion, is one of the three aspects of the Absolute - Abstract Space and Duration being the other two."
"The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read With loads of learned lumber in his head."
"The hungry judges soon the sentence sign, and wretches hang that jurymen may dine."
"The most positive men are the most credulous."
"The proper study of Mankind is Man."
"The ruling passion, be it what it will. The ruling passion conquers reason still."
"The same ambition can destroy or save, and make a patriot as it makes a knave."
"The vulgar boil, the learned roast, an egg."
"The way of the Creative works through change and transformation, so that each thing receives its true nature and destiny and comes into permanent accord with the Great Harmony: this is what furthers and what perseveres."
"There goes a saying, and 'twas shrewdly said, "Old fish at table, but young flesh in bed.""
"'Tis education forms the common mind, Just as the twig is bent, the tree's incln'd."
"'Tis not enough your counsel still be true; Blunt truths more mischief than nice falsehoods do."
"To be angry is to revenge the faults of others on ourselves."
"To err is human; to forgive, divine."
"To observations which ourselves we make, we grow more partial for th' observer's sake."
"True politeness consists in being easy one's self, and in making every one about one as easy as one can."
"Trust not yourself, but your defects to know, make use of every friend and every foe."
"Virtue she finds too painful an endeavour, content to dwell in decencies for ever."
"What some call health, if purchased by perpetual anxiety about diet, isn't much better than tedious disease."
"When to the Permanent is sacrificed the Mutable, the prize is thine: the drop returneth whence it came. The Open Path leads to the changeless change - Non-Being, the glorious state of Absoluteness, the Bliss past human thought."
"Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?"
"Who shall decide when doctors disagree, And soundest casuists doubt, like you and me?"
"Whoever thinks a faultless piece to see, Thinks what ne'er was, nor is, nor e'er shall be."
"Wit is the lowest form of humor."
"With loads of learned lumber in his head."

Ezra Pound Quotes


"A civilized man is one who will give a serious answer to a serious question. Civilization itself is a certain sane balance of values."
"A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression."
"A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him."
"And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there... Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will."
"Any general statement is like a check drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it."
"As a bathtub lined with white porcelain, when the hot water gives out or goes tepid, so is the slow cooling of our chivalrous passion, o my much praised but-not-altogether-satisfactory lady."
"But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY."
"Either move or be moved."
"Genius... is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one."
"Good art however "immoral" is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise."
"Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear."
"Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts."
"I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later."
"I could I trust starve like a gentleman. It's listed as part of the poetic training, you know."
"I dunno what my 23 infantile years in America signify. I left as soon as motion was autarchic - I mean my motion."
"I guess the definition of a lunatic is a man surrounded by them."
"If a patron buys from an artist who needs money, the patron then makes himself equal to the artist; he is building art into the world; he creates."
"If the individual, or heretic, gets hold of some essential truth, or sees some error in the system being practiced, he commits so many marginal errors himself that he is worn out before he can establish his point."
"It ought to be illegal for an artist to marry. If the artist must marry let him find someone more interested in art, or his art, or the artist part of him, than in him. After which let them take tea together three times a week."
"Literature is news that stays news."
"Men do not understand books until they have a certain amount of life, or at any rate no man understands a deep book, until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents."
"Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance... poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music."
"No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents."
"Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market."
"One measure of a civilization, either of an age or of a single individual, is what that age or person really wishes to do. A man's hope measures his civilization. The attainability of the hope measures, or may measure, the civilization of his nation and time."
"People find ideas a bore because they do not distinguish between live ones and stuffed ones on a shelf."
"Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand."
"Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding."
"The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity."
"The real meditation is... the meditation on one's identity. Ah, voila une chose! You try it. You try finding out why you're you and not somebody else. And who in the blazes are you anyhow? Ah, voila une chose!"
"The worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism."
"There is natural ignorance and there is artificial ignorance. I should say at the present moment the artificial ignorance is about eighty-five per cent."
"There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and forty-eight."
"There once was a brainy baboon who always breathed down a bassoon for he said, "It appears that in billions of years I shall certainly hit on a tune.""
"'Tis the white stag, Fame, we're a-hunting, bid the world's hounds come to horn!"
"Wars are made to make debt."
"We do NOT know the past in chronological sequence. It may be convenient to lay it out anesthetized on the table with dates pasted on here and there, but what we know we know by ripples and spirals eddying out from us and from our own time."
"When two men in business always agree, one of them is unnecessary."
"When you cannot make up your mind which of two evenly balanced courses of action you should take - choose the bolder."

Sylvia Plath Quotes


"And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt."
"Apparently, the most difficult feat for a Cambridge male is to accept a woman not merely as feeling, not merely as thinking, but as managing a complex, vital interweaving of both."
"Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I've a call."
"How frail the human heart must be - a mirrored pool of thought."
"I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my eyes and all is born again."
"I talk to God but the sky is empty."
"I took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart. I am. I am. I am."
"If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days."
"Is there no way out of the mind?"
"The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it."
"There must be quite a few things that a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them."
"Widow. The word consumes itself."

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