Poetry Quotes
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On the one hand, our minds try to probe the ephemeral reality of the quantum world; on the other, we talk, think, and act in a language adapted for discussing trees, rocks, and automobiles -- as well as poetry and emotions.
F. David Peat
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The public want actresses, because they think all actresses bad. They don't want music or poetry because they know that both are good. So actors and actresses thrive and poets and composers starve.
George Bernard Shaw
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Poetry begins where language starts: in the shadows and accidents of one person's life.
Eavan Boland
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Poetry, at its best, is the language your soul would speak if you could teach your soul to speak.
Jim Harrison
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It just happens to be that people like to associate poetry and rap music. I think that idea is kind of corny.
Thebe Neruda Kgositsile
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In poetry, I have, since very young, loved poetry in translation. The Chinese, the French, the Russians, Italians, Indians and early Celts: the formality of the translator's voice, their measured breath and anxiety moves me as it lingers over the original.
Fanny Howe
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If I have to make a self-portrait, I would put poetry and rebellion on the list. To be able to walk on a wire, to be able to juggle six hoops, you need focus, another word for tenacity, which is passion.
Philippe Petit
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Some people think that English poetry begins with the Anglo-Saxons. I don't, because I can't accept that there is any continuity between the traditions of Anglo-Saxon poetry and those established in English poetry by the time of, say, Shakespeare. And anyway, Anglo-Saxon is a different language, which has to be learned.
James Fenton
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Those books of mine that are remunerative - I'm not talking about poetry here - take years to write, and I am never sure they'll be successful. So writing is a risk in more senses than one.
Vikram Seth
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We're all just animals. That's all we are, and everything else is just an elaborate justification of our instincts. That's where music comes from. And romantic poetry. And bad novels.
Elvis Costello
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Poetry is not only a set of words which are chosen to relate to each other; it is something which goes much further than that to provide a glimpse of our vision of the world.
Tahar Ben Jelloun
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Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.
T. S. Eliot
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Though my poems are about evenly split between traditionally formal work that uses rhyme and meter and classical structure, and work that is freer, I feel that the music of language remains at the core of it all. Sound, rhythm, repetition, compression - these elements of my poetry are also elements of my prose.
Floyd Skloot
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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
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Nonfiction speaks to the head. Fiction speaks to the heart. Poetry speaks to the soul. It's the essence of beauty. The essence of pain. It pleases the eye and the ear.
Ellen Hopkins
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Poetry helps me understand who I am. It helps me understand the world around me. But above all, what poetry has taught me is the fact that I need to embrace mystery in order to be completely human.
Yusef Komunyakaa
