Poetry Quotes
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The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.
David Hare
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So I really began as a failed poet - although when I first wanted to be a writer, I learned to write prose by reading poetry.
Nicholson Baker
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Poetry offers works of art that are beautiful, like paintings, which are my second favorite work of the art, but there are also works of art that embody emotion and that are kind of school for feeling. They teach how to feel, and they do this by the means of their beauty of language.
Donald Hall
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In the writing of poetry we never know anything for sure. We will never know if we have 'trained' or 'practised' enough. We will never be able to say that we have reached grade eight, or that we have left the grades behind and are now embarked on an advanced training.
James Fenton
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And yet, in a culture like ours, which is given to material comforts, and addicted to forms of entertainment that offer immediate gratification, it is surprising that so much poetry is written.
Mark Strand
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When we come to poetry, we can't fancy a more poverty stricken predicament.
Xu Zhimo
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The Bible is very resonant. It has everything: creation, betrayal, lust, poetry, prophecy, sacrifice. All great things are in the Bible, and all great writers have drawn from it and more than people realise, whether Shakespeare, Herman Melville or Bob Dylan.
Patti Smith
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What other people may find in poetry or art museums, I find in the flight of a good drive.
Arnold Palmer
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Islamic culture has given us majestic arches and soaring spires; timeless poetry and cherished music; elegant calligraphy and places of peaceful contemplation.
Barack Obama
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I think poetry was always where I went to deal with my deepest feelings.
Jonathan Galassi
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To paraphrase Robin Williams’s compelling teacher character in Dead Poets Society: We don’t study poetry to get an “A,” to graduate, to get a job, to make money, to meet material needs. Rather, “we read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. So medicine, law, business, engineering . . . these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love . . . these are what we stay alive for.
Benjamin E. Sasse
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In order to write poetry, you must first invent a poet who will write it.
Antonio Machado
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I shall have poetry in my life. And adventure. And love, love, love, above all. Love as there has never been in a play. Unbiddable, ungovernable, like a riot in the heart and nothing to be done, come ruin or rapture.
Tom Stoppard
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Music pulled me like a gravitational force. I entered college as a physics major but left as a Bachelor of Music, a degree with the same practical application as, say, one in the History of Chinese Poetry.
Marshall Brickman
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I would define, in brief, the Poetry of words as the Rhythmical Creation of Beauty. Its sole arbiter is taste. With the intellect or with the conscience, it has only collateral relations. Unless incidentally, it has no concern whatever either with duty or with truth.
Edgar Allan Poe
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For one thing is needful: that a human being should attain satisfaction with himself, whether it be by means of this or that poetry or art; only then is a human being at all tolerable to behold. Whoever is dissatisfied with himself is constantly ready for revenge, and we others will be his victims, if only by having to endure his ugly sight.
Friedrich Nietzsche
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To be poet laureate is to try to spread the love and the accessibility of poetry to young people.
Jacqueline Woodson
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That's another pompous expression that is out of fashion, to say that poetry is a gift. It sounds pompous because you say, 'Who gave you the gift, and what is this gift?' And the gift is where I am; the gift is what I have come out of, the people around me who, I think, are beautiful people.
Derek Walcott
