Quotes by Playwrights - Page 181

Most people ignore most poetry because poetry ignores most people.
Adrian Mitchell
Catch from the board of beauty/ Such careless crumbs as fall.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
I have been right, Basil, haven’t I, to take my love out of poetry, and to find my wife in Shakespeare’s plays? Lips that Shakespeare taught to speak have whispered their secret in my ear. I have had the arms of Rosalind around me, and kissed Juliet on the mouth.
Oscar Wilde
At five in the afternoon. It was exactly five in the afternoon. A boy brought the white sheet at five in the afternoon. A frail of lime ready prepared at five in the afternoon. The rest was death, and death alone
Federico García Lorca
Then others for breath of words respect,Me for my dumb thoughts, speaking in effect.
William Shakespeare
Now goes under, and I watch it go under, the sunThat will not rise again.Today has seen the setting, in your eyes cold and senseless as the sea,Of friendship better than bread, and of bright charityThat lifts a man a little above the beasts that run.That this could be!That I should live to seeMost vulgar Pride, that stale obstreperous clown,So fitted out with purple robe and crownTo stand among his betters! Face to faceWith outraged me in this once holy place,Where Wisdom was a favoured guest and huntedTruth was harboured out of danger,He bulks enthroned, a lewd, an insupportable stranger!I would have sworn, indeed I swore it:The hills may shift, the waters may decline,Winter may twist the stem from the twig that bore it,But never your love from me, your hand from mine.Now goes under the sun, and I watch it go under.Farewell, sweet light, great wonder!You, too, farewell,-but fare not well enough to dreamYou have done wisely to invite the night before the darkness came.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
And all at once the heavy nightFell from my eyes and I could see, --A drenched and dripping apple-tree,A last long line of silver rain,A sky grown clear and blue again.And as I looked a quickening gustOf wind blew up to me and thrustInto my face a miracleOf orchard-breath, and with the smell, --I know not how such things can be! --I breathed my soul back into me.Ah! Up then from the ground sprang IAnd hailed the earth with such a cryAs is not heard save from a manWho has been dead, and lives again.About the trees my arms I wound;Like one gone mad I hugged the ground;I raised my quivering arms on high;I laughed and laughed into the sky
Edna St. Vincent Millay
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;Coral is far more red than her lips' red;If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,But no such roses see I in her cheeks;And in some perfumes is there more delightThan in the breath that from my mistress reeks.I love to hear her speak, yet well I knowThat music hath a far more pleasing sound;I grant I never saw a goddess go;My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground: And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare As any she belied with false compare.
William Shakespeare
But drunkenly, or secretly, we swore,Disciples of that astigmatic saint,That we would never leave the islandUntil we had put down, in paint, in words,As palmists learn the network of a hand,All of its sunken, leaf-choked ravines,Every neglected, self-pitying inletMuttering in brackish dialect, the ropes of mangrovesFrom which old soldier crabs slippedSurrendering to slush,Each ochre track seeking some hilltop andLosing itself in an unfinished phrase,Under sand shipyards where the burnt-out palmsInverted the design of unrigged schooners,Entering forests, boiling with life,Goyave, corrosol, bois-canot, sapotille.Days!The sun drumming, drumming,Past the defeated pennons of the palms,Roads limp from sunstroke,Past green flutes of the grassThe ocean cannonading, come!Wonder that opened like the fanOf the dividing frondsOn some noon-struck sahara,Where my heart from its rib cage yelped like a pupAfter clouds of sanderlings rustily wheelingThe world on its ancient,Invisible axis,The breakers slow-dolphining over more breakers,To swivel our easels down, as firmAs conquerors who had discovered home.
Derek Walcott
I rhymeTo see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
Seamus Heaney
I can't even make up a rhyme about an umbrella, let alone death and life and eternal peace.
Knut Hamsun
Honest criticism and sensible appreciation are directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry.
T.S Eliot
Pleasured equallyIn seeking as in finding,Each detail minding,Old Walt went seekingAnd finding.
Langston Hughes
Oh, friend, forget not, when you fain would noteIn me a beauty that was never mine,How first you knew me in a book I wrote,How first you loved me for a written line....
Edna St. Vincent Millay
But now, you are twain, you are cloven apartFlesh of his flesh, but heart of my heart.
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Thus weary of the world, away she hies,And yokes her silver doves; by whose swift aidTheir mistress mounted through the empty skiesIn her light chariot quickly is convey'd;Holding their course to Paphos, where their queenMeans to immure herself and not be seen.
William Shakespeare
World is suddener than we fancy it.
Louis MacNeice
¡Los suspiros son aire y van al aire!¡Las lágrimas son agua y van al mar!Dime, mujer, cuando el amor se olvida¿sabes tú adónde va?
Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer
Till Human voices wake us, and we drown.
T.S Eliot
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
In visions of the night, like dropping rain, Descend the many memories of pain
Aeschylus
Welcome, thou kind deceiver!Thou best of thieves: who, with an easy key,Dost open life, and, unperceived by us,Even steal us from ourselves.
John Dryden
I can't think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people's understanding of what's going on in the world.
Seamus Heaney
Fondling,' she saith, 'since I have hemm'd thee here Within the circuit of this ivory pale, I'll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer; Feed where thou wilt, on mountain or in dale: Graze on my lips, and if those hills be dry, Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.
William Shakespeare
To me, fair friend, you never can be old,For as you were when first your eye I ey'd, Such seems your beauty still.
William Shakespeare
Love is the poetry of the senses!
Honoré de Balzac
Love me in actions, not in words.
Dee Dee M. Scott
Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.
T.S Eliot
A FEATHER.A feather is trimmed, it is trimmed by the light and the bug and the post, it is trimmed by little leaning and by all sorts of mounted reserves and loud volumes. It is surely cohesive.
Gertrude Stein
All days are nights to see till I see thee, And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me.
William Shakespeare
On I’ll pass,dragging my huge love behind me.On whatfeverish night, deliria-ridden,by what Goliaths was I begot – I, so bigand by no one needed?
Vladimir Mayakovsky
The poet doesn't invent. He listens.
Jean Cocteau
Every poem is a coat of arms. It must be deciphered. How much blood, how many tears in exchange for these axes, these muzzles, these unicorns, these torches, these towers, these martlets, these seedlings of stars and these fields of blue!
Jean Cocteau
Verde que te quiero verde. Verde viento. Verdes ramas. El barco sobre la mar y el caballo en la montaña.
Federico García Lorca
The first rose on my rose-tree Budded, bloomed, and shattered, During sad days when to me Nothing mattered. Grief of grief has drained me clean; Still it seems a pity No one saw,—it must have been Very pretty.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
But far more numerous was the herd of such,Who think too little, and who talk too much.
John Dryden
A lover goes toward his beloved as enthusiastically as a schoolboy leaving his books, but when he leaves his girlfriend, he feels as miserable as the schoolboy on his way to school. (Act 2, scene 2)
William Shakespeare
Errors, like straws, upon the surface flow; He who would search for pearls, must dive below.
John Dryden
I am sore wounded but not slainI will lay me down and bleed a whileAnd then rise up to fight again
John Dryden
And must I then, indeed, Pain, live with youall through my life?-sharing my fire, my bed,Sharing-oh, worst of all things!-the same head?-And, when I feed myself, feeding you too?
Edna St. Vincent Millay
No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.
T.S Eliot
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
All I know is a door into the dark
Seamus Heaney
...But...to sing,to dream, to smile, to walk, to be alone, be free,with a voice that stirs and an eye that still can see!To cock your hat to one side, when you pleaseat a yes, a no, to fight, or- make poetry!To work without a thought of fame or fortune,on that journey, that you dream of, to the moon!Never to write a line that's not your own...
Edmond Rostand
LightLightThe visible reminder of Invisible Light.
T.S Eliot
The poet must always, in every instance, have the vibrant word... that by it's trenchancy can so wound my soul that it whimpers.... One must know and recognize not merely the direct but the secret power of the word; one must be able to give one's writing unexpected effects. It must have a hectic, anguished vehemence, so that it rushes past like a gust of air, and it must have a latent, roistering tenderness so that it creeps and steals one's mind; it must be able to ring out like a sea-shanty in a tremendous hour, in the time of the tempest, and it must be able to sigh like one who, in tearful mood, sobs in his inmost heart.
Knut Hamsun
TO what purpose, April, do you return again? Beauty is not enough. You can no longer quiet me with the redness Of little leaves opening stickily. I know what I know. The sun is hot on my neck as I observe The spikes of the crocus. The smell of the earth is good. It is apparent that there is no death. But what does that signify? Not only under ground are the brains of men Eaten by maggots. Life in itself Is nothing, An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs. It is not enough that yearly, down this hill, April Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;tThey called me the hyacinth girl.'t —Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,t Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could nott Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neithert Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,t Looking into the heart of light, the silence.t Od' und leer das Meer.
T.S Eliot
Under the greenwood tree,Who loves to lie with meAnd tune his merry note,Unto the sweet bird's throat;Come hither, come hither, come hither.Here shall he seeNo enemyBut winter and rough weather.
William Shakespeare
Listen! If stars are litIt means there is someone who needs it,It means someone wants them to be,That someone deems those specks of spitMagnificent!
Vladimir Mayakovsky
I will come back to you, I swear I will;And you will know me still.I shall be only a little tallerThan when I went.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
September has come, it is hersWhose vitality leaps in the autumn,Whose nature prefersTrees without leaves and a fire in the fireplace.So I give her this month and the nextThough the whole of my year should be hers who has rendered alreadySo many of its days intolerable or perplexedBut so many more so happy.Who has left a scent on my life, and left my wallsDancing over and over with her shadowWhose hair is twined in all my waterfallsAnd all of London littered with remembered kisses.
Louis MacNeice
Come live with me and be my Love, And we will all the pleasures prove
Christopher Marlowe
Stranger, pause and look;From the dust of agesLift this little book,Turn the tattered pages,Read me, do not let me die!Search the fading letters findingSteadfast in the broken bindingAll that once was I!
Edna St. Vincent Millay
You do not know how much they mean to me, my friends,And how, how rare and strange it is, to findIn a life composed so much, so much of odds and ends,(For indeed I do not love it ... you knew? you are not blind! How keen you are!)To find a friend who has these qualities,Who has, and givesThose qualities upon which friendship lives.How much it means that I say this to you-Without these friendships-life, what cauchemar!
T.S Eliot
My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.t 'Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak.t 'What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?t 'I never know what you are thinking. Think.
T.S Eliot
My head is full of fireand grief and my tongueruns wild, piercedwith shards of glass.
Federico García Lorca
So I find words I never thought to speakIn streets I never thought I should revisitWhen I left my body on a distant shore.
T.S Eliot
All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.
Oscar Wilde