Quotes by Novelists - Page 131

an English girl might well believethat time is how you spend your love.
Nick Laird
It was a scary thought. A man could be surrounded by poetry reading and not know it.
Richard Russo
Here they have no time for the fine gracesof poetry, unless it freely growsin deep compulsion, like water in the well,woven into the texture of the soilin a strong pattern.
Iain Crichton Smith
Alles wat ik van het leven weet maakte ik me buiten de muren van de school eigen, en zodra ik me binnen die muren bevond leek het of ik achterwaarts leefde.
Gerrit Komrij
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
Where joy in an old pencil is not absurd.
May Sarton
Poetry had always seemed something I could turn to in need - an emergency exit, a lifebuoy, as well as a justification.
John Fowles
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
There’s no money in poetry, but there’s no poetry in money, either
Robert Graves
How can the confessor teach/ those who are lost and sick at heart,/ when he himself, among the sinners,/ is worst, and most forsaken?/ It is only a game we play/ with other people's sins./ Besides, everyone knows/ that everyone lies confessing.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Laser technology has fulfilled our people's ancient dream of a blade so fine that the person it cuts remains standing and alive until he moves and cleaves. Until we move, none of us can be sure that we have not already been cut in half, or in many pieces, by a blade of light. It is safest to assume that our throats have already been slit, that the slightest alteration in our postures will cause the painless severance of our heads.
Ben Lerner
Read for yourselves, read for the sake of your inspiration, for the sweet turmoil in your lovely head. But also read against yourselves, read for questioning and impotence, for despair and erudition, read the dry sardonic remarks of cynical philosophers like Cioran or even Carl Schmitt, read newspapers, read those who despise, dismiss or simply ignore poetry and try to understand why they do it. Read your enemies, read those who reinforce your sense of what's evolving in poetry, and also read those whose darkness or malice or madness or greatness you can't understand because only in this way will you grow, outlive yourself, and become what you are.
Adam Zagajewski
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
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
It’s not the word made flesh we want in writing, in poetry and fiction, but the flesh made word
William H. Gass
And wonder, dread and warhave lingered in that landwhere loss and love in turnhave held the upper hand.
Simon Armitage
The muffled syllables that Nature speaksFill us with deeper longing for her word; She hides a meaning that the spirit seeks,She makes a sweeter music than is heard.
George Santayana
At first first nothing will happen to usand later on it will happen to us again.
Leonard Cohen
She's always looking for poetry and passion and sensitivity, the whole Romantic kitchen. I live on a rather simpler diet.' 'Prose and pudding?''I don't expect attractive men necessarily to have attractive souls.
John Fowles
...if you do not even understand what words say, how can you expect to pass judgement on what words conceal?
H.D.
My heart was full of softening showers,I used to swing like this for hours,I did not care for war or death,I was glad to draw my breath.
Stevie Smith
I drink from a small spring, my thirst exceeds the ocean.
Adam Zagajewski
What happens to a dream deferred?
Langston Hughes
A way of using words to say things which could not possibly be said in any other way, things which in a sense do not exist till they are born … in poetry.
Cecil Day-Lewis
There is such a shelter in each other.
Nick Laird
Most people ignore most poetry because poetry ignores most people.
Adrian Mitchell
When one does something, one must do it wholly and well. Those bastard existences where you sell suet all day and write poetry at night are made for mediocre minds – like those horses that are equally good for saddle and carriage, the worst kind, that can neither jump a ditch nor pull a plow.
Gustave Flaubert
I will meet you on the nape of your neck one day, on the surface of intention, word becoming act.We will breathe into each other the high mountain tales, where the snows come from, where the waters begin.”-In the yellow time of pollen
Luke Davies
Stars in the night,' he said. 'Something something something something, some delight
Philippa Gregory
I began composing the next poem, the one that was to be written next. Not the last poem of those I had read, but the poem written in the head of someone who may never have existed but who had certainly written another poem nonetheless, and just never had the chance to commit it to ink and the page.
Steve Erickson
Freud thought that a psychosis was a waking dream, and that poets were daydreamers too, but I wonder if the reverse is not as often true, and that madness is a fiction lived in like a rented house
William H. Gass
You can learn more by going to the opera than you ever can by reading Emerson. Like that there are two sexes.
David Markson
Pleasured equallyIn seeking as in finding,Each detail minding,Old Walt went seekingAnd finding.
Langston Hughes
My Muse sits forlornShe wishes she had not been bornShe sits in the coldNo word she says is ever told.
Stevie Smith
If poets often commit suicide, it is not because their poems are bad but because they are good. Whoever heard of a bad poet committing suicide? The reader is only a little better off. The exhilaration of a good poem lasts twenty minutes, an hour at most.Unlike the scientist, the artist has reentry problems that are frequent and catastrophic.
Walker Percy
With you a part of me hath passed away; For in the peopled forest of my mind A tree made leafless by this wintry wind Shall never don again its green array. Chapel and fireside, country road and bay, Have something of their friendliness resigned; Another, if I would, I could not find, And I am grown much older in a day. But yet I treasure in my memory Your gift of charity, and young hearts ease, And the dear honour of your amity; For these once mine, my life is rich with these. And I scarce know which part may greater be,-- What I keep of you, or you rob from me.
George Santayana
But now, you are twain, you are cloven apartFlesh of his flesh, but heart of my heart.
Algernon Charles Swinburne
I've written some poetry I don't understand myself
Carl Sandburg
This, this indeed is to be accursed, For if we mortals love, or if we sing, We count our joys not by what we have, But by what kept us from that perfect thing.
Paul Laurence Dunbar
I heard of a manwho says words so beautifullythat if he only speaks their namewomen give themselves to him.If I am dumb beside your bodywhile silence blossoms like tumors on our lipsit is because I hear a man climb stairsand clear his throat outside our door.
Leonard Cohen
Love is the poetry of the senses!
Honoré de Balzac
there anybody there?' said the Traveller,Knocking on the moonlit door;And his horse in the silence champed the grassesOf the forest's ferny floor.And a bird flew up out of the turret,Above the Traveller's head:And he smote upon the door again a second time;'Is there anybody there?' he said.But no one descended to the Traveller;No head from the leaf-fringed sillLeaned over and looked into his grey eyes,Where he stood perplexed and still.But only a host of phantom listenersThat dwelt in the lone house thenStood listening in the quiet of the moonlightTo that voice from the world of men:Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,That goes down to the empty hall,Hearkening in an air stirred and shakenBy the lonely Traveller's call.And he felt in his heart their strangeness,Their stillness answering his cry,While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,'Neath the starred and leafy sky;For he suddenly smote on the door, evenLouder, and lifted his head:--'Tell them I came, and no one answered,That I kept my word,' he said.Never the least stir made the listeners,Though every word he spakeFell echoing through the shadowiness of the still houseFrom the one man left awake:Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,And the sound of iron on stone,And how the silence surged softly backward,When the plunging hoofs were gone.
Walter de la Mare
Tears upon the dry sponge of heartdo not prove I am Promethean.
Adrian C. Louis
Marriage I thinkFor womenIs the best of opiates.It kills the thoughtsThat think about the thoughts,It is the best of opiates.So said Maria.But too long in solitude she'd dwelt,And too long her thoughts had feltTheir strength. So when the man drew near,Out popped her thoughts and covered him with fear.Poor Maria! Better that she had kept her thoughts on a chain,For now she's alone again and all in pain;She sighs for the man that went and the thoughts that stayTo trouble her dreams by night and her dreams by day.
Stevie Smith
What wretched poverty of language! To compare stars to diamonds!
Gustave Flaubert
so much of the world is plunged in darkness and chaos...So ring the bells that still can ringForget your perfect offeringThere is a crack in everythingThat’s how the light gets in.
Leonard Cohen
Who could have foretoldthe heart grows oldfrom touching others
Leonard Cohen
...if you do not even understand what words say,how can you expect to pass judgementon what words conceal?
H.D.
Out of love,No regrets--Though the goodnessBe wasted forever.Out of love,No regrets--Though the returnBe never.
Langston Hughes
Cheap little rhymesA cheap little tuneAre sometimes as dangerousAs a sliver of the moon.
Langston Hughes
Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.
Carl Sandburg
Deprivation is the mother of poetry.
Leonard Cohen
Gather the stars if you wish it soGather the songs and keep them.Gather the faces of women.Gather for keeping years and years.And then...Loosen your hands, let go and say good-bye.Let the stars and songs go.Let the faces and years go.Loosen your hands and say good-bye.
Carl Sandburg
They are not long, the days of wine and roses:Out of a misty dreamOur path emerges for awhile, then closesWithin a dream.
Ernest Dowson
Poetry is an echo asking a shadow to dance.
Carl Sandburg
My heart born nakedwas swaddled in lullabies.Later alone it worepoems for clothes.Like a shirtI carried on my backthe poetry I had read.So I lived for half a centuryuntil wordlessly we met.From my shirt on the back of the chairI learn tonighthow many yearsof learning by heartI waited for you.
John Berger
I'm at that place I grew up to leave.
Adrian C. Louis
When the immense drugged universe explodesIn a cascade of unendurable colourAnd leaves us gasping naked,This is no more than the ectasy of chaos:Hold fast, with both hands, to that royal loveWhich alone, as we know certainly, restoresFragmentation into true being.Ecstasy of Chaos
Robert Graves
A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko