850 private quotes tagged poetry

“This career essentially chased me down while I was on the spoken-word scene in New York. I kept hearing that my delivery of my poetry - which was very personal and cathartic at the time- was very moving to folks. People thought that I was an actress because of my delivery, when I was just dropping into the work and really pouring out my soul.” — Sonja Sohn

0 favs

“I have written some songs, but I would really call what I've done poetry at the end of the day, because I'll sit with my guitar for hours and hours on end for, like, a week and then I won't touch it for a month. I also just have no confidence. And you know what? I don't have time, because I'd rather be doing other things, like knitting.” — Amanda Seyfried

0 favs

“Those who say we should dismantle the role of Poet Laureate altogether, the trick they miss is that being called this thing, with the weight of tradition behind it, and with the association of the Royal family, does allow you to have conversations and to open doors, and wallets, for the good of poetry in a way that nothing else would allow.” — Andrew Motion

0 favs

“At the age when Bengali youth almost inevitably writes poetry, I was listening to European classical music.” — Satyajit Ray

0 favs

“Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language.” — Lucille Clifton

0 favs

“Maybe it is something to do with age, but I have become fonder of poetry than of prose.” — Aung San Suu Kyi

0 favs

“Most poetry in the modern age has retreated to the private sphere, turning its back on the political realm.” — Terry Eagleton

0 favs

“The young people have MTV and rock and roll. Why would they go to read poetry? Poetry belongs to the Stone Age. It awakens in us perceptions that go back to those times.” — Robert Morgan

0 favs

“An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.” — Raymond Chandler

0 favs

“The reason can only be this: heroic poetry depends on an heroic age, and an age is heroic because of what it is, not because of what it does.” — Lascelles Abercrombie

0 favs

“If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.” — Thomas Hardy

0 favs

“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

0 favs

“It's necessary to start most work alone. But I'm tickled to death when I can pull somebody in or join someone, whether it's borrowing poetry or traveling with an associate.” — Jenny Holzer

0 favs

“In politics, as in poetry, it is sometimes true that it is darkest before dawn.” — Lawrence Summers

0 favs

“Poetry is not only dream and vision it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.” — Audre Lorde

0 favs

“Poetry is the deification of reality.” — Edith Sitwell

0 favs

“Every one who has a heart, however ignorant of architecture he may be, feels the transcendent beauty and poetry of the mediaeval churches.” — Goldwin Smith

0 favs

“I see architecture not as Gropius did, as a moral venture, as truth, but as invention, in the same way that poetry or music or painting is invention.” — Michael Graves

0 favs

“Poetry is a beautiful way of spoiling prose, and the laborious art of exchanging plain sense for harmony.” — Horace Walpole

0 favs

“A verbal art like poetry is reflective it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.” — W. H. Auden

0 favs

“Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That's how I get my kicks.” — Edward Koch

0 favs

“The idea of avant-garde art is a very suspicious thing to me, the idea that poetry is new and it keeps being new the way Chevrolets every year are new.” — Robert Morgan

0 favs

“Alchemy is the art of far and near, and I think poetry is alchemy in that way. It's delightful to distort size, to see something that's tiny as though it were vast.” — Robert Morgan

0 favs

“Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art.” — Thomas Hardy

0 favs

“A lot happens by accident in poetry.” — Howard Nemerov

0 favs