Poetry Quotes
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There is a gap in my work from '84 to 2002, 18 years where I stopped writing. I was working at fiction and other things and starting a school and getting married and starting a family, but I wasn't writing poetry for the better part of 15 years.
Philip Schultz
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One of the effects of modern liberal Protestantism has been gradually to turn religion into poetry and therapy, to make truth vaguer and vaguer and more and more relative, to banish intellectual distinctions, to depend on feeling instead of thought, and gradually to come to believe that God has no power, that he cannot communicate with us, cannot reveal himself to us, indeed has not done so, and that religion is our own sweet invention.
Flannery O'Connor
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I have no patience with this dreadful idea that whatever you have in you has to come out, that you can't suppress true talent. People can be destroyed; they can be bent, distorted, and completely crippled . . . In spite of all the poetry, all the philosophy to the contrary, we are not really masters of our fate.
Katherine Anne Porter
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I did literature at university, so I had a real relationship with poetry, but they don't make many films about the world of a poet.
Alice Eve
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I'd like to go back to poetry again. I really, really revere good poetry. It's been my private discipline.
Alice Sebold
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I wrote some bad poetry that I published in North African journals, but even as I withdrew into this reading, I also led the life of a kind of young hooligan.
Jacques Derrida
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The poet's mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.
T. S. Eliot
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When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.
John F. Kennedy
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Do not speak to us of the greatness of poetry, Of the torches wisping in the underground, Of the structure of vaults upon a point of light. There are no shadows in our sun, Day is desire and night is sleep. There are no shadows anywhere. The earth, for us, is flat and bare. There are no shadows.
Wallace Stevens
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'They wanted to come in after the pounds', explained Pooh, 'so I let them. It's the best way to write poetry, letting things come'.
A. A. Milne
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I didn't love Jim Morrison 'cause he was self-destructive. I loved him because of his work. Because of the way he merged poetry and rock-and-roll. Because he did something new.
Patti Smith
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Prophecy is a poetry of change, social, political, moral, spiritual. It was with the prophetic model in mind that Shelley wrote of poets as the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
Allegra Goodman
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An experienced reader uses the poem as an agent of inquiry. This makes poetry very exciting, unstable, and interactive.
John Barton
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Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.
John Updike
