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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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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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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It is not hope but despair that gives us the measure of our ambitions. We may yield secretly to beautiful poems of hope but grief looms start and stripped of all veils.
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We're comic. We're all comics. We live in a comic time. And the worse it gets the more comic we are.
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The basic idea of a hero rising up to represent an oppressed or disenfranchised group of people is as true to hip-hop as it is comic book lore.
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The element of change has been the thing, really. We put out the first one, then the second... then a third LP totally different from them. It's the reason we were able to keep it together.
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I don't want to write poems that are just really clear about how I'm aware of all the traps involved in writing poetry; I don't want to write fiction that's about the irresponsibility of writing fiction and I've thrown out a lot of writing that I think was ultimately tainted by that kind of self-awareness.
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The world is a little more diverse in 2015 than when the Fantastic Four comic first came out in 1961.
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Being famous has changed a lot, because now there's so many outlets, between magazines, TV shows, and the Internet, for people to stalk and follow you. We created the monster.
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The key to developing the courage to change is to first accept that change is inevitable.
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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.
