Poetic Quotations

Shakespeare's plays were a great Teutonic Valhalla with brilliant sunshine at times and violent tempests at others. The world to him was a battlefield, but his sense of poetic justice, his sublime faith in life and its infinite resources, guided the battles.

First and foremost, I'm an oral storyteller - I'll make a poetic choice over a grammatical choice every single time.

For the most part, works of mine are untitled. There was a brief period where I had poetic titles for works, and they're embarrassing now. I think, for the most part, it's not something that I have talent for.

There is nothing more poetic and terrible than the skyscrapers' battle with the heavens that cover them.

To a poet, silence is an acceptable response, even a flattering one.

The pure work implies the disappearance of the poet as speaker, who hands over to the words.

If you haven't had at least a slight poetic crack in the heart, you have been cheated by nature.

There are no poetic ideas; only poetic utterances.

I think there's something really poetic about using nuclear power to propel us to the stars, because the stars are giant fusion reactors. They're giant nuclear cauldrons in the sky.

Poetic knowledge is born in the great silence of scientific knowledge.

How did I go from 'Menace II Society' to 'Love Jones?' There wasn't a poetic moment or romantic bone in O-Dog's body.

There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.

I have never, ever sought validation from the arbiters of British poetic taste,

Every intelligent person, whether he's an artist or not - a mathematician, a doctor, a scientist - possesses a poetic way of seeing and describing the world.

But Racine's extraordinary powers as a writer become still more obvious when we consider that besides being a great poet he is also a great psychologist.

America was based on a poetic vision. What will happen when it loses its poetry?

Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.

I feel an intense intimacy with those who have this loathing interest in me. Further than this, I know what they mean, I sympathize with them, I understand them. There should be a name (as poetic as love) for this relationship between loather and loathed; it is of the closest and more full of passion than incest.

Every time I sit down to write, I need to commit to a word count goal, otherwise I waste too much time editing and re-editing my previous work, staring dreamily off into space, pretending that I'm thinking profound, poetic thoughts when really I'm just thinking, 'Look at me being a writer! I'm so happy I'm a writer!'

Jazz is not something that can be defined through blunt instruments. It is much more poetic than that.

A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.

Most of my life I have played a lot of famous people but most of them were dead so you have a poetic license.

From the beginning, about the rude altar of the god, to the days of Goethe, of Leopardi, and of Victor Hugo, the poet is the leader in the dance of life; and the phrase by which we name his singularity, the poetic temperament, denotes the primacy of that passion in his blood with which the frame of other men is less richly charged.

A great poet is the most precious jewel of a nation.

English is really free for me; there's no limits to the music and the imagination. And French, it's just I live in Paris, and it's really a poetic language where you can really play with words.

I never thought of myself as a New York poet or as an American poet.

Even a polemic has some justification if one considers that my own first poetic experiments began during a dictatorship and mark the origin of the Hermetic movement.

George Orwell's '1984' frequently tops surveys of our greatest books: it's not a celebration of poetic language. It's decidedly anti-literary, a masterpiece of personal and political narrative sequence. And its subject matter is crucial, because what '1984' shows is that language can be a dirty trick.

It has often been observed that the repercussion of poetic language on prose language can be considered a decisive cut of a whip.

You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you.

Some of the poetic writers who insert passages of realism in their texts have no underlying philosophy to uphold them, and revert to realism.

I found a comfort in trying to solve some poetic problems because there were human ones I just couldn't solve.

Every discourse, even a poetic or oracular sentence, carries with it a system of rules for producing analogous things and thus an outline of methodology.

I often think of the different ways Goethe and Darwin got at evolution. Goethe had the poetic conception of it all right; Darwin worked it out step by step. Who's ahead? And which has any business scoffing at the other?

A born poet knows in his cradle that a poetic life is the only life worth living.

In its truest manifestation, where it gives judgments, poetry is super-luxury. It would be interesting to see what would happen to a High Court judge if he were forced to follow the true poetic formula, doing the job for love, being forced into pubs for relief.

Poetry is not Irish or any other nationality; and when writers such as Messrs. Clarke, Farren and the late F. R. Higgins pursue Irishness as a poetic end, they are merely exploiting incidental local colour.

The poetic notion of infinity is far greater than that which is sponsored by any creed.

My secrets must be poetic to be believable.

The challenge for a nonfiction writer is to achieve a poetic precision using the documents of truth but somehow to make people and places spring to life as if the reader was in their presence.

Poetry; a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.

As to London we must console ourselves with the thought that if life outside is less poetic than it was in the days of old, inwardly its poetry is much deeper.

The poet's spoken discourse often depends on a mystique, on the spiritual freedom that finds itself enslaved on earth.

Mostly the thought and the verse come inseparably. In my poem Poetics, it's as close as I come to telling how I do it.

Books have always helped me make sense of things. With any life experience, you can find someone who has documented it in a poetic way.

In each verse, a decision awaits us, and we can't choose to close our eyes and let instinct work on its own. Poetic instinct consists of an alert tension.

The poetry of this one is called philosophical, of that one philological, of a third rhetorical, and so on. Which is then the poetic poetry?

I would love to be the poet laureate of Coney Island.

Could a man live by it, it were not unpleasant employment to be a poet.

'Therefore' is a word the poet must not know.

A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects.

No one could ad lib like Peter. You would think that it was all scripted, he was so poetic, but it wasn't.

To be a poet is as serious, long-term and natural as the effort to be the best human you can be. To express something well is not a question of having a top-class education and understanding poetic forms: rather, it's a question of paying attention.

You know, rap is sort of like a form of talking, right? So it's like you can hear, you know, the slaves doing it. You can hear, like, you know, Africans and Jamaicans doing it just kind of as, like, a rhythmic, poetic conversation, you know, to a rhythm.

As to the pure mind all things are pure, so to the poetic mind all things are poetical.

New York cops are very specific in terms of the way they talk and the way they handle themselves. All these cliches that, as an Englishman, I thought were from a bygone era or were a bit of poetic license with cop shows - the more you hang out with them, the more you realize how real that jargon is.

I have never considered myself a poet. I have no interest in poetic artistry.

The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood.

That willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.

Strictly speaking, the idea of a scientific poem is probably as nonsensical as that of a poetic science.

Personally, speaking as a historian and a storyteller, when it comes to inaccuracy in historical fictioneering, I follow the Shakespeare principle: I'm willing to overlook gobs of mistaken detail if the poetic valence is basically correct.

Humor has justly been regarded as the finest perfection of poetic genius.

Like, I took no poetic license with 'Schindler's List' because that was historical, factual documents.

Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.

In America, to be ID'd - sorted, tagged, and permanently filed - is to lose a bit of one's soul. To die a little. This sounds like a subtle, poetic notion. It's not. In American legal and cultural tradition, one essential privilege of citizenship is not having to prove it on demand.

The object of poetic activity is essentially language: whatever his beliefs and convictions, the poet is more concerned with words than with what these words designate.

I think a poet is anybody who wouldn't call himself a poet.

I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.

A noble soul and real poetic talent are almost always inseparable.

Of course I would not presume to rank myself with the poetic genius Yeats. I am merely a humble follower living in a country far removed from his.

Maybe it was poetic justice. We were finally able to get over the hurdle.

Poetry is a form of necessary speech... I have sought to restore the aura of sacred practice that accompanies true poetic creation, to honor both the rational and the irrational elements of poetry.

Poetry is one of the destinies of speech. . . . One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.

New Jersey is the most poetic state: close enough to New York to be urban and cosmopolitan, far enough to be desirous and unsure; densely populated, but full of farms and woods, with the most deer of any state.

I go to the water with a good idea and the water gives it back to me great. Half of what is totally magic in my work isn't me, and I don't say that out of humility, it's just that the water itself is this extraordinary, lyrical, poetic force and when you're working with it, it's there, it's your partner in creativity and it knows more than I do, I swear.

Let first the onion flourish there, Rose among the roots, the maiden-fair Wine scented and poetic soul of the capacious salad bowl.

Have not all poetic truths been already stated? The essence of a poetic truth is that no statement of it can be final.

En ge ne ral, plus un peuple est civilise , poli, moins ses moeurs sont poe tiques; tout s'affaiblit en s'adoucissant. Ingeneral, themore civilized and refinedthepeople, the less poetic are its morals; everything weakens as it mellows.

The only thing that I will do that will annoy some people is I am taking poetic license a little bit with time and space onstage,

God lurks everywhere. That's the fundamental Catholic instinct on the imaginative and poetic level-that God is lurking everywhere. Right down the street, right around the corner, there's God.

People need to be a little more lenient with him. There is a lot being thrown at him. There's no fear, which is good, and he's doing a nice job with the analysis. We're trying to work in the play-by-play, and people might think it's easy, but it's not. It's not molecular science, either, but it's not easy. And he's getting the pacing. It's almost a poetic measure of speech. You get the rhythm, and people get into the rhythm with you. I'll be very surprised if he isn't doing two innings of play-by-play by the end of the season.

Just as I do not want my students to imitate my style, I admire authors who write differently from me. Lewis and Dreiser didn't try to write in a poetic style.

I think the way the season is going, I'm not sure if it would be poetic justice because, back then, you'd win one and be in the semis. It would be great to win no matter who it was. It's just ironic that it is Monessen.

Kennedy knows how to use traditional poetic forms to give us both joyful and truthful observations about the human condition. His sketches of people and experiences combine playful irreverence with language full of sound and rhythm, and refreshing bites of irony.

Trinidadians love speaking their own English; it's full of poetic forms and can be playful and lyrical and comical. Trinidadians are verbal acrobats, and I love being on the island just to hear the people speak.

To know fully even one field or one land is a lifetime's experience. In the world of poetic experience it is depth that counts, not width. A gap in a hedge, a smooth rock surfacing a narrow lane, a view of a woody meadow, the stream at the junction of four small fields - these are as much as a man can fully experience.

I've got mixed feelings about poetry cause done well poetry is fantastic. But not many people are capable of doing it well. I think you should have some kind of license to perform poetry. A poetic license perhaps.

There is something beautiful, touching and poetic when one person loves more than the other, and the other is indifferent.

Mr. Rihani is a man of ardent poetic temperament, a clever poet, and a man of unworldly ideals.

I've read there is no such thing as a single tear, that old poetic trope. And perhaps there isn't, since hers was simply a companion to my own.

One man's piss-soaked sadomasochistic orgy is another man's poetic ecstasy.

The poetic side of me is Scottish.

Sappho and Emily Dickinson are the only woman geniuses in poetic history.

Judy Blume excels at describing how it feels to be invisible. So how poetic is it that Blume herself is suddenly everywhere?

Yes, I heard my people singing!--in the glow of parlor coal-stove and on summer porches sweet with lilac air, from choir loft and Sunday morning pews--and my soul was filled with their harmonies. Then, too, I heard these songs in the very sermons of my father, for in the Negro's speech there is much of the phrasing and rhythms of folk-song. The great, soaring gospels we love are merely sermons that are sung; and as we thrill to such gifted gospel singers as Mahalia Jackson, we hear the rhythmic eloquence of our preachers, so many of whom, like my father, are masters of poetic speech.

Fights in movies are either real or they're cool. This is a comic-book movie, and so the movements and fights have to be exaggerated but also poetic and different.

A large part of this story took place a while back. And quite a bit of it tomorrow. Such is the poetic license of liturgical drama.

Perhaps the more benign and poetic sense of God is established when we are babies in the moments of primal joy we might call 'the epiphanies of infancy' - the sensation of being blissfully held and feeling complete and at one with everything - yet having no words or no need to say it but instead to just assimilate the feeling.

If you're a writer, you know there are ways in which we don't know what we're doing at all. We're working out mysteries in a sort of poetic realm, and hoping that if a story is honest, if you're dragging the deep truth out of yourself, then something good and profound might come out of it.

No band on 21st-century radio has mined pre-grunge hair-metal's sleaze like L.A.'s Buckcherry. So it makes poetic sense that they'd spend their sixth album tallying all seven deadly sins.