Lawrence Ferlinghetti Quotes

Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

• Poetry
• Shadow
• Imaginations

• Previous
• Next

Quotes to Explore

• After leaving school, I travelled around Europe for about six months. In Denmark, I thought that was my chance to get an amazing haircut, so I went to what I thought was a great hairdresser. It turned out to be the car wash of hairdressers, and I walked out sporting yet another pudding bowl, but this time with a stripe bleached down the centre.

  

  Becki Newton
  • Time
  • Great
  • School

• The wretched and miserable would rise into plenty of joy and happiness as soon as they climb the steps of my mosque.

  

  Sai Baba
  • Joy
  • Happiness
  • Climb

• People who live in glass houses... have to answer the door.

  

  Karl Pilkington
  • People
  • Live
  • Door

• When history looks back, it will prove what I'll die knowing.

  

  Jack Kevorkian
  • History
  • Die
  • Prove

• Only let it be in the name of Jesus Christ, that I may suffer together with Him! I endure everything because He Himself, Who is perfect man, empowers me.

  

  Ignatius of Antioch
  • May
  • Together
  • Man

• The reason I want to show shocking things is that they always pose an ethical question.

  

  Park Chan-wook
  • Want
  • Question
  • Show

• Comics seldom move me the way I would be moved by a novel or movie.

  

  Daniel Clowes
  • Movie
  • Way
  • Me

• My career is chequered. Then I think I got pigeon-holed in humour; Shakespeare is not my thing.

  

  Maggie Smith
  • Think
  • Career
  • Humour

• I don't want to hear about my death.

  

  Oriana Fallaci
  • Want
  • Death
  • Hear

• There were mornings in the make-up trailer where I'd have fits of laughter because of the extraordinary daily events of the shoot. Sometimes, it was all too much to believe. But the wildest things happened.

  

  Madeleine Stowe
  • Up
  • Believe
  • Daily

• My father instilled in me - of utmost importance and innate in me is the yearning to determine for myself - to define God, to define holiness for myself.

  

  Vera Farmiga
  • God
  • Father
  • Myself

• I don't actually think there has ever been too much emphasis on what I am wearing.

  

  Felicity Jones
  • Wearing
  • Emphasis

• Some movies are the kind you take home with you at the end of the day, and some, you can let go.

  

  Naomi Watts
  • Home
  • Day
  • End

• We have now just enshrined, as soon as I sign this bill, the core principle that everybody should have some basic security when it comes to their healthcare.

  

  Barack Obama
  • Security
  • Now
  • Health care

• I was under contract to Paramount. They wanted to make me into somebody which I was not. So I got so scared and rebelled, so they threw me out of the studio.

  

  Ursula Andress
  • Me
  • Scared
  • Studio

• Necessity is laid upon us. We must fight. There are no promises in the Lord Jesus Christ's epistles to the seven churches, except to those who 'overcome.' Where there is grace, there will be conflict. The believer is a soldier. There is no holiness without a warfare. Saved souls will always be found to have fought a fight.

  

  J. C. Ryle
  • Jesus
  • Fight
  • Grace

• I have never been accepted. I'll never make the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. They're never going to let me in.

  

  Nancy Sinatra
  • Me
  • Rock
  • Rock And Roll

• It's the thing I struggle with every day: the mental diligence and stamina needed to sit in front of the computer, open the file, start writing and to keep doing so, word after word, until I've created the next story. A combination of learning disability and chronic health issues make that the hardest thing for me.

  

  Nalo Hopkinson
  • Writing
  • Health
  • Learning

• I would love to meet a philosopher like Nietzsche on a train or boat and to talk with him all night. Incidentally, I don’t consider his philosophy long-lived. It is not so much persuasive as full of bravura.

  

  Anton Chekhov
  • Long
  • Night
  • Boat

• I don't get to listen to music for fun very often; a lot of what I'm hearing is for work and isn't released yet.

  

  John Roger Stephens
  • Work
  • Music
  • Fun

• One culture I find fascinating to juxtapose against American culture is the culture of Germany. They've gone through a long process through their art, poetry, public discourse, their politics, of owning the fact of their complicity in what happened in World War II. It's still a topic of everyday conversation in Germany.

  

  Chris Jordan
  • World
  • Long
  • Art

• Not to know the Bible is, in some ways, to be illiterate, to neglect the very roots of philosophy, art, architecture, literature, poetry and music.

  

  Chris Hedges
  • Music
  • Art
  • Poetry

• The measure of one's love for good poetry and for good music is the hatred, the violent hatred, one feels for bad poetry and bad music.

  

  Bosie
  • Love
  • Poetry
  • Measure

• Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations.

  

  Lawrence Ferlinghetti
  • Poetry
  • Shadow
  • Imaginations