Stephen Dobyns Quotes
Many of my poems try to use a comic element to reach a place that isn't comic at all. The comic element works as a surprise. It is unexpected and energizing.
Quotes to Explore
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I love love, and I love life. I love. I just love. It's just great. It's the most enduring element we have is love.
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I didn't read comic books; that's not something that was really available to me as a child. We watched more cartoons and movies.
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I'd love a werebear. But I guess you need that seductive element of danger. And though bears can be dangerous, when you say werebear it just sounds kind of cuddly. Probably has a rainbow on his belly.
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Criticism starts - it has to start - with a real passion for reading. It can come in adolescence, even in your twenties, but you must fall in love with poems.
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I never read comic books as a kid.
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People have a comic bent or an angularity to their thinking, and those are the people who make jokes. And it's usually people who were in an environment, when they were young, where jokes were at a premium, or at least considered important to a life. My parents always listened to the comedy radio shows, we went to the comedy movies, and my parents appreciated comedy. So kids listen and follow what their parents like.
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[Simone Weil's] life is almost a perfect blend of the Comic and the Terrible, which two things may be opposite sides of the same coin. In my own experience, everything funny I have written is more terrible than it is funny, or only funny because it is terrible, or only terrible because it is funny.
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There is a hint of despair in the cry of 'I told you so,' an element of disappointment in the apparent satisfaction when idols turn out to have clay feet. The human race, when it thinks it has proved that no one is superior, is partly gratified and partly depressed.
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Woman is also the element of conflict.
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FAITH is the element, the “chemical” which, when mixed with prayer, gives one direct communication with Infinite Intelligence.
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The Element is about discovering your self, and you can't do this if you're trapped in a compulsion to conform. You can't be yourself in a swarm.
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Being in your element is not only about aptitude, it's about passion: it is about loving what you do...tapping into your natural energy and your most authentic self.
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It's like 'What's an atom? What's an element?' ... Teachers feel like we need to hit the basics before we move on to something like the periodic table.
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Of course there is matter for remark in poems. Nobody denies that. But it must be solemnly laid on everybody in this world to make his own observations and remarks. That's what we mean by thinking, and that's about all we mean. A teacher says to a pupil "Watch me notice a few things in the next few months: let's see you notice a few things too."
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If I wasn't a comic or TV star, I really wanted to be a photojournalist.
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I soon realized that poets do not compose their poems with knowledge, but by some inborn talent and by inspiration, like seers and prophets who also say many fine things without any understanding of what they say.
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Good acts are like good poems. One may easily get their drift, but they are not rationally understood.
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I like ornament at the right time, but I don't want a poem to be made out of decoration ... When I read the poems that matter to me, it stuns me how much the presence of the heart-in all its forms-is endlessly available there. To experience ourselves in an important way just knocks me out. It puzzles me why people have given that up for cleverness. Some of them are ingenious, more ingenious than I am, but so many of them aren't any good at being alive.
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Here the frailest leaves of me and yet my strongest lasting, Here I shade and hide my thoughts, I myself do not expose them, And yet they expose me more than all my other poems.
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Imagine if your business burned down and you had to walk across the street and start again, what would you do differently?
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I’ve experienced this as a songwriter working with, and helping develop, new artists. This is truly a page out of a new artist book that has a song that blows up and then is just trying to play catch-up. That really is the story of Chase in this first season. He’s not even thinking about who he is as an artist, he’s being told and given these songs.
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The great wars of the 20th Century made it into the worst Century ever.
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Many of my poems try to use a comic element to reach a place that isn't comic at all. The comic element works as a surprise. It is unexpected and energizing.
