Quotes by British Authors - Page 744

[Fiction and poetry] are medicines, they're doses, and they heal the rupture that reality makes on the imagination.
Jeanette Winterson
I love being able to see an un-written future.
Michael Jones
Music resembles poetry, in eachAre nameless graces which no methods teach,And which a master hand alone can reach.
Alexander Pope
For if in careless summer daysIn groves of Ashtaroth we whored,Repentant now, when winds blow cold,We kneel before our rightful lord;The lord of all, the money-god,Who rules us blood and hand and brain,Who gives the roof that stops the wind,And, giving, takes away again;Who spies with jealous, watchful care,Our thoughts, our dreams, our secret ways,Who picks our words and cuts our clothes,And maps the pattern of our days;Who chills our anger, curbs our hope,And buys our lives and pays with toys,Who claims as tribute broken faith,Accepted insults, muted joys;Who binds with chains the poet’s wit,The navvy’s strength, the soldier’s pride,And lays the sleek, estranging shieldBetween the lover and his bride.
George Orwell
...much of poetry in the making is the fiddle with a few items. You lay a word against another and wait. You try another word. And another. Yet another. You wait. You begin again. Listening. Looking. For the elusive inevitable thing which has to arrive before it is recognised. And, like Odysseus, may not be recognised at first.
Craig Raine
A fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.
Rudyard Kipling
The Waves is an extraordinary achievement ... It is trembling on the edge. A little less - and it would lose its poetry. A little more - and it would be over into the abyss, and be dull and arty. It is her greatest book.
E.M. Forster
Now therefore, while the youthful hue Sits on thy skin like morning dew, And while thy willing soul transpiresAt every pore with instant fires, Now let us sport us while we may, And now, like amorous birds of prey, Rather at once our time devour Than languish in his slow-chapt power.
Andrew Marvell
And yet this self, containsTides, continents and stars―a myriad selves,Is small and solitary as one grass-bladePassed over by the windAmongst a myriad grasses on the prairie.
Cecil Day-Lewis
To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape. And my feelings, at the end of that wretched term, were those of a man who knows he's in a cage, exposed to the jeers of all his old ambitions until he dies.
John Fowles
Poetry had always seemed something I could turn to in need - an emergency exit, a lifebuoy, as well as a justification.
John Fowles
Every time your work is read, you die several deaths for every word, and poetry is like being flayed alive.
Mary Stewart
Outside our small safe place flies mystery.
A.S. Byatt
Now a promise made is a debt unpaid, and the trail has its own stern code.
Robert W. Service
Matched with an aged wife, I mete and doleUnequal laws unto a savage race,That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
Alfred Tennyson
The novel is a formidable mass, and it is so amorphous - no mountain in it to climb, no Parnassus or Helicon, not even a Pisgah. It is most distinctly one of the moister areas of literature - irrigated by a hundred rills and occasionally degenerating into a swamp. I do not wonder that the poets despise it, though they sometimes find themselves in it by accident. And I am not surprised at the annoyance of the historians when by accident it finds itself among them.
E.M. Forster
The yard was a little centre of regeneration. Here, with keen edges and smooth curves, were forms in the exact likeness of those he had seen abraded and time-eaten on the walls. These were the ideas in modern prose which the lichened colleges presented in old poetry. Even some of those antiques might have been called prose when they were new. They had done nothing but wait, and had become poetical. How easy to the smallest building; how impossible to most men.
Thomas Hardy
Like poetry, in times of intense emotion the image returns to me. Like poetry, it stroked my soul and, by turns, lulled and stoked my senses.
Lisa St. Aubin de Terán
Deep feeling doesn't make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.
Thom Gunn
Poetry is the sound of the human animal.
Suniti Namjoshi
The poem has a social effect of some kind whether or not the poet wills it to have. It has a kenetic force, it sets in motion...elements in the reader that would otherwise remain stagnant.
Denise Levertov
There’s no money in poetry, but there’s no poetry in money, either
Robert Graves
Mute in that golden silence hung with green,Come down from heaven and bring me in your eyesRemembrance of all beauty that has been,And stillness from the pools of Paradise.
Siegfried Sassoon
Sharing one umbrella,We have to hold each other,Round the waist to keep together,You ask me why I'm smiling-It's because I'm thinking,I want it to rain forever.
Vicki Feaver
When people say, "I've told you fifty times," / They mean to scold, and very often do; / When poets say, "I've written fifty rhymes," / They make you dread that they 'II recite them too;In gangs of fifty, thieves commit their crimes; / At fifty love for love is rare, 't is true, / But then, no doubt, it equally as true is, / A good deal may be bought for fifty Louis.
George Gordon Byron
It is not what they built. It is what they knocked down.It is not the houses. It is the spaces between the houses.It is not the streets that exist. It is the streets that no longer exist.
James Fenton
Mon Dieu, la vie est par trop moche.
Aldous Huxley
Think neither fear nor courage saves us.Unnatural vices are fathered by our heroism. Virtues are forced upon us by our impudent crimes. These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.
T.S Eliot
Only times and places, only names and ghosts.
Aldous Huxley
Everyone should be forcibly transplanted to another continent from their family at the age of three.
Philip Larkin
Dear, I can't write, it's all a fantasy: a kind of circling obsession.
Philip Larkin
There is bad in all good authors: what a pity the converse isn't true!
Philip Larkin
Saki says that youth is like hors d'oeuvres: you are so busy thinking of the next courses you don't notice it. When you've had them, you wish you'd had more hors d'oeuvres.
Philip Larkin
Sexual intercourse began in nineteen sixty-three (Which was rather late for me) between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles' first LP.
Philip Larkin
no poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it.
W.H. Auden
When words lose their meaning, physical force takes over.
W.H. Auden
The element of craftsmanship in poetry is obscured by the fact that all men are taught to speak and most to read and write, while very few men are taught to draw or paint or write music.
W.H. Auden
He'd been let down so oftenHis brow was on the floorBut then they foundA small hole in the groundAnd let him down some more
David Thewlis
IMPROVIDENCEThe other lives I might have ledAll now might as well beDead. Survived by no one.Barren, without issue of any sort:This withered bud, failedIn art and love. With no time leftTo change my course. But time enoughfor infinite remorse.
John Tottenham
I have been used to consider poetry as the food of love
Jane Austen
No matter the disappointment, you simply cannot divorce your favorite team.
Kevin Walker
Hate flows from a broken spirit.
Kevin Walker
Blackadder was fifty-four and had come to editing Ash out of pique. He was the son and grandson of Scottish schoolmasters. His grandfather recited poetry on firelight evenings: Marmion, Childe Harold, Ragnarok. His father sent him to Downing College in Cambridge to study under F. R. Leavis. Leavis did to Blackadder what he did to serious students; he showed him the terrible, the magnificent importance and urgency of English literature and simultaneously deprived him of any confidence in his own capacity to contribute to, or change it. The young Blackadder wrote poems, imagined Dr Leavis’s comments on them, and burned them.
A.S. Byatt
I wasn’t reading poetry because my aim was to work my way through English Literature in Prose A–Z.But this was different.I started to cry.(…)The unfamiliar and beautiful play made things bearable that day, and the things it made bearable were another failed family—the first one was not my fault, but all adopted children blame themselves. The second failure was definitely my fault.I was confused about sex and sexuality, and upset about the straightforward practical problems of where to live, what to eat, and how to do my A levels.I had no one to help me, but the T.S. Eliot helped me.So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn’t be read at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language—and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is.It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place.
Jeanette Winterson
Imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it. Do not think it up laboriously, as if you were working out mental arithmetic. Just look at it, touch it, smell it, listen to it, turn yourself into it. When you do this, the words look after themselves, like magic.
Ted Hughes
Thus, though we cannot make our sunStand still, yet we will make him run.
Andrew Marvell
Had we but world enough, and time...
Andrew Marvell
Poetry is nobody’s business except the poet’s, and everybody else can fuck off.
Philip Larkin
My true-love hath my heart and I have his, By just exchange one for the other given: I hold his dear, and mine he cannot miss; There never was a bargain better driven.
Philip Sidney
Have you suffered, starved and triumphed, grovelled down, yet grasped at glory,Grown bigger in the bigness of the whole? 'Done things' just for the doing, letting babblers tell the story,Seeing through the nice veneer the naked soul? Have you seen God in His splendours, heard the text that nature renders?(You'll never hear it in the family pew.) The simple things, the true things, the silent men who do things–Then listen to the wild–it's calling you.
Robert W. Service
Later that night she picked the polish offwith her front teeth until the bed you sharedfor seven years seemed speckled with glitterand blood.
Warsan Shire
I sometimes think you despise poetry,' said Phineas. 'When it is false I do. The difficulty is to know when it is false and when it is true.
Anthony Trollope
I was not sorrowful, but only tiredOf everything that ever I desired.
Ernest Dowson
I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind,Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind;But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,Yea, all the time, because the dance was long;I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.I cried for madder music and for stronger wine,But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire,Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine;And I am desolate and sick of an old passion,Yea, hungry for the lips of my desire:I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.
Ernest Dowson
Gather ye rose-buds while ye may,Old Time is still a-flying;And this same flower that smiles today,tTomorrow will be dying.
Robert Herrick
As she laughed I was aware of becoming involved in her laughter and being part of it, until her teeth were only accidental stars with a talent for squad-drill.
T.S Eliot
She dotes on poetry, sir. She adores it; I may say that her whole soul and mind are wound up, and entwined with it. She has produced some delightful pieces, herself, sir. You may have met with her 'Ode to an Expiring Frog,' sir.
Charles Dickens
To evade such temptations is the first duty of the poet. For as the ear is the antechamber to the soul, poetry can adulterate and destroy more surely then lust or gunpowder. The poet's, then, is the highest office of all. His words reach where others fall short. A silly song of Shakespeare's has done more for the poor and the wicked than all the preachers and philanthropists in the world.
Virginia Woolf
Therefore, since the world has stillMuch good, but much less good than ill,And while the sun and moon endureLuck's a chance, but trouble's sure,I'd face it as a wise man would,And train for ill and not for good.
A.E. Housman
I have to live with myself and so, I want to be fit for myself to know.
Edgar A. Guest