Poetry Quotes
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I tended to find lines of poetry beautiful only when I encountered them quoted in prose, in the essays my professors had assigned in college, where the line breaks were replaced with slashes, so that what was communicated was less a particular poem than the echo of poetic possibility. Insofar as I was interested in the arts, I was interested in the disconnect between my experience of actual artworks and the claims made on their behalf; the closest I'd come to having a profound experience of art was probably the experience of this distance, a profound experience of the absence of profundity.
Ben Lerner
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I love words; I love poetry.
Jessica Steen
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Poetry isn't as relevant in the Western world as it is in Afghanistan. And not many people make time for something that doesn't feel relevant.
Eliza Griswold
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Poetry is a street fighter. It has sharp elbows. It can look after itself. Poetry can't be used for manipulation; it's why you never see good poetry in advertising.
David Whyte
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Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.
William Wordsworth
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I think it's really hard to move between genres, and I think, especially in Britain, we're very judgmental about it - me included. I know that when an actor comes out with some poetry or an album, I think, 'Oh crikey, what's this going to be like?'
Andrea Riseborough
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I wonder if children don't begin to reject both poetry and religion for similar reasons, because the way both are taught takes the life out of them.
Kathleen Norris
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When I rap, I get to express myself in a way where putting words together is like poetry, and sometimes it's better to talk in certain expressions than sing, you know? So I love, I love to rhyme when I want to express certain things.
Wyclef Jean
Fugees
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Poetry's unnat'ral; no man ever talked poetry 'cept a beadle on boxin' day, or Warren's blackin' or Rowland's oil, or some o' them low fellows; never you let yourself down to talk poetry, my boy.
Charles Dickens
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We must never underestimate our power to be wrong when talking about God, when thinking about God, when imagining God, whether in prose or in poetry. A generous orthodoxy, in contrast to the tense, narrow, or controlling orthodoxies of so much of Christian history, doesn't take itself too seriously. It is humble. It doesn't claim too much. It admits it walks with a limp.
Brian D. McLaren
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Actually I'd always thought he sat in the library with a slim volume of metaphysical poetry until the commissioner called him on the bat phone and summoned him into action. Holy paranormal activity, Nightingale - to the Jag mobile.
Ben Aaronovitch
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What, after all, is mathematics but the poetry of the mind, and what is poetry but the mathematics of the heart?
David Eugene Smith
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Poetry is about as much a 'criticism of life' as red-hot iron is a criticism of fire.
Ezra Pound
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I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
Seamus Heaney
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I think poetry workshops get a bad rap. I'm sure some aren't good, but in general, I like the format. I try and keep mine pretty informal. Sometimes we have wine or sake, and we read aloud, and we talk.
Elaine Equi
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Bringing science into poetry is one way of acknowledging some of the richest stuff that is in my cultural moment.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
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In science, one tries to say what no one else has ever said before. In poetry, one tries to say what everyone else has already said, but better. This explains, in essence, why good poetry is as rare as good science.
Anthony Zee
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We know the surrealist solution: concrete irrationality, objective risk. Poetry is the conquest, the only possible conquest, of the 'supreme position', 'a certain position of the mind from where life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future... cease to be perceived in a contradictory sense.'
Albert Camus
