Poetry Quotes
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Mastery in poetry consists largely in the instinct for not ruining or smothering or tinkering with moments of vision.
Edmund Blunden
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I have heard that hysterical women say
They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow,
Of poets that are always gay
William Butler Yeats
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When I was younger, I felt it was my duty to wake people up. I thought poetry was asleep. I thought rock 'n' roll was asleep.
Patti Smith
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At times of crisis or distress, it's poems that people turn to. Poetry still has a power to speak to people's feelings, maybe in a way that fiction, because it works in a longer way, can't. There's a little bit of your brain that mourns and grieves that you're not writing poetry, but actually as long as I'm writing something, I'm happy.
Blake Morrison
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When I began, poetry was very academic. You published little pamphlets from fancy presses. It was rather... chaste. There wasn't much public reading. Then there was poetry and jazz, which I don't think worked, though I love jazz.
John Fuller
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Poetry has a small audience, but a large influence.
Genevieve Taggard
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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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A lot of people think, 'I'll give acting or poetry or filmmaking a try. And if it doesn't work out I'll go get a law degree, do something else that's more practical.' For me I went the reverse way. I lived the back-up plan.
Brit Marling
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You know, bad poetry I wrote in high school can still be found on the Internet, and, you know, there's a Web log of our college newspaper. You know, there's so many different stages of my creative development are sort of on-record if somebody were to choose to look for them.
Lena Dunham
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It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.
William Carlos Williams
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Painting is silent poetry.
Plutarch
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We believe we can also show that words do not have exactly the same psychic "weight" depending on whether they belong to the language of reverie or to the language of daylight life-to rested language or language under surveillance-to the language of natural poetry or to the language hammered out by authoritarian prosodies.
Gaston Bachelard
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Poetry is the greatest literature, and pleasure in poetry is the greatest of literary pleasures. It is also the least easy to attain and there are some people who never do attain it.
Edward Grey, 1st Viscount Grey of Fallodon
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Eroticism cannot be entirely revealed without poetry.
Georges Bataille
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It is the province of poetry to be more realistic and present than the artificial narratives of an outer discourse, and not afraid of the truthful difficulty of the average human life.
David Whyte
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If you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry.
J. D. Salinger
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There is no merit in being truthful when one is truthful by nature, or rather when one can be nothing else; it is a gift, like poetry or music. But it needs courage to be truthful after carefully considering the matter, unless a kind of pride is involved; for example, the man who says to himself, "I am ugly," and then says, "I am ugly" to his friends, lest they should think themselves the first to make the discovery.
Eugene Delacroix
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don’t write out of what I know; I write out of what I wonder. I think most artists create art in order to explore, not to give the answers. Poetry and art are not about answers to me; they are about questions.
Lucille Clifton
