Poetry Quotes
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My obsession with time informs my poetry so completely it is hard for me to summarize it. We want time to pass, for new things to happen to us, we want to hold on to certain moments, we don't want our lives to end.
John Barton
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I wrote poetry, journals, and, especially, plays for the neighborhood kids to perform. I had an ordinary, happy childhood. Nothing much was going on, but I had fun.
Alex Flinn
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Painting is silent poetry.
Plutarch
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I prefer my prose evocative rather than simply effective, with a bit of poetry to it.
Gemma Files
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... the radical deficiency of imagist verse, as such, is in its lack of general ideas. Much of it might have been written by an infinitely sensitive decapitated frog. It is hemisphereless poetry.
Bliss Perry
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A book is sent out into the world, and there is no way of fully anticipating the responses it will elicit. Consider the responses called forth by the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare - let alone contemporary poetry or a modern novel.
Chaim Potok
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Human life without some form of poetry is not human life but animal existence.
Randall Jarrell
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Life is short - while we speak it flies; enjoy, then, the present, and forget the future; such is the moral of ancient poetry, a graceful and a wise moral - indulged beneath a southern sky, and all deserving, the phrase applied to it - the philosophy of the garden.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
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That is what poetry can do. It speaks to us of what does not exist, which is not only better than what exists, but even more like the truth.
Ivan Turgenev
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I studied poetry in college and for a year in an MFA program. As time went on, my poems got more and more complicated. What I was really trying to do was tell stories.
Jennifer McMahon
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Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.
Jean-Paul Sartre
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I certainly can't speak for all cultures or all societies, but it's clear that in America, poetry serves a very marginal purpose. It's not part of the cultural mainstream.
Mark Strand
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For 8,000 years, we've had lyric poetry; for 400 years we've had the novel: theatre hands its meaning down in text. Let's find a medium whose total, sole responsibility is the world as seen as a form of visual intelligence. Surely, surely, surely the cinema should be that phenomenon.
Peter Greenaway
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Ye stars! which are the poetry of heaven!
Lord Byron
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For while the subjects of poetry are few and recurrent, the moods of man are infinitely various and unstable. It is the same in all arts.
John Drinkwater
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In the past things were either in your head (subjective, imaginary, fantasy) or else they were part of the outside world - cold, hard, concrete materialistic reality. If you want to look at it in terms of poetry, there was surrealism and objectivism. Now there's the veil of the virtual in between. The old opposition between inner and outer doesn't quite capture it, especially as it contains elements of both. It's real but not concrete.
Elaine Equi
