Elegiac Quotes

#1. 'Memory.' 'Race.' 'Murder.' That's what they say about me. I am an elegiac poet. I have some historical questions, and I'm grappling with ways to make sense of history; why it still haunts us in our most intimate relationships with each other, but also in our political decisions.

Natasha Trethewey

#2. To think that she had read the same elegiac prose he now beheld with such quiet awe made his heart sing.

David S.E. Zapanta

#3. Blumenthal goes straight to the heart in these poems. Gorgeously wrought, surprising, true, wise, elegiac, they leave me with a sense of having listened to Mozart's Ave Verum Corpus. Who could ask for more?

Lynn Freed

#4. I was in L.A. in '08. It was a cold Saturday night. I had spread my phone number out to a score of women and was just indulging this sweet, sad, elegiac, bale loneliness - don't tell me you haven't been there.

James Ellroy

#5. As he enters his final term, with the elegiac music playing out there in the distance, Barack Obama will use the history that he has come to embody and, perhaps, even to fulfill, as part of a larger project that never will be completed but only finished, over and over again.

Charlie Pierce

#6. My books are elegiac in the sense that they're odes to a nation that even I sometimes think may not exist anymore except in my memory and my imagination.

Richard Russo

#7. Delightful, tragic, gloriously elegiac and riddled with puns-Close to Hugh is just like life, only so much more beautiful for being art.

Lynn Coady

#8. Beauty is lyrical. Ugliness is elegiac.

Mason Cooley

#9. Mandelstam's style is not singular. He could be stately and traditional, ribald and funny, hectic, elegiac. He could handle abstractions and ideas as well as Pope or Browning but then be so musical that other poems approach pure sound.

Christian Wiman

#10. I am not unique in my elegiac sadness at watching reading die, in the era that celebrates Stephen King and J.K. Rowling rather than Charles Dickens and Lewis Carroll.

Harold Bloom

#11. Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos.

Susan Sontag

#12. Because I'm a walker, natural history is my subject; I've always been obsessed with landscape, and I have an elegiac tone in most of my books.

Jim Crace

#13. Most people think that a widow is inhabiting some elegiac world of - it's like Mozart's 'Requiem Mass.' You know, it's very beautiful and elevated thoughts and some measure of dignity. I didn't have that experience at all. I had one pratfall after another.

Joyce Carol Oates

#14. A deep distress hath humanised my soul.

William Wordsworth

#15. Once life is finished it acquires a sense; up to that point it has not got a sense; its sense is suspended and therefore ambiguous.

Pier Paolo Pasolini

#16. Lies, my dear boy, can easily be recognized. There are two kind of them: those with short legs, and those with long noses. Your kind have long noses.

Carlo Collodi

#17. That's why teenage dating is so dumb, because it's doomed to fail. You'd think people would have learned that by now, but I guess they haven't. They go right on falling in love and thinking it's going to survive high school.

Michael Thomas Ford

#18. Those are my enemies: they want to overthrow and to construct nothing themselves. They say: "All that is worthless"
and want to create no value themselves.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#19. The one: how it is (what it, Being, is) and also how not-Being (is) impossible. This is the pathway of grounded trust,

Martin Heidegger

#20. Civility and etiquette, gentlemen, are all important.

Hal Duncan