Fenton Quotes

#1. Host: What say you to young Master Fenton? he capers, he
dances, he has eyes of youth, he writes verses, he
speaks holiday, he smells April and May: he will
carry't, he will carry't; 'tis in his buttons; he
will carry't.

William Shakespeare

#2. For every woman who's ever wondered about the path not taken, Fenton and Steinke mine - with tremendous humor and insight - the mixed blessing of unexpected second chances.

Emma McLaughlin

#3. Time to release the kraken, Mr Fenton,

A.W. Exley

#4. It is not your memories which haunt you. It is not what you have written down. It is what you have forgotten, what you must forget. What you must go on forgetting all your life. James Fenton, "A German Requiem

Viet Thanh Nguyen

#5. Alice was deemed too young for the events that catered to their guests, and too nervous to sing or perform as an excuse to be among them, so her interactions with Lord Fenton were reserved for a few picnics and ... one grass fire.

Anonymous

#6. I don't see that a single line can constitute a stanza, although it can constitute a whole poem.

James Fenton

#7. Windbags can be right. Aphorists can be wrong. It is a tough world.

James Fenton

#8. At somewhere around 10 syllables, the English poetic line is at its most relaxed and manageable.

James Fenton

#9. My biggest mentor has been the Benchmark partnership. We have six partners and a flat structure, and everyone is paid the exact same paycheck. It's a team model versus an individual model.

Peter Fenton

#10. Wouldn't it be nice if we could get rid of hurtful feelings and memories the same way we so easily send a bad picture sailing into our computer's trash can?

Liz Fenton

#11. The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation.

James Fenton

#12. A really interesting and happy time was when I first went to Florence as a student and studied Italian. I was living in a pensione on an allowance of £40 a month, which was princely. I did a lot of work and enjoyed myself immensely.

James Fenton

#13. One does not become a guru by accident.

James Fenton

#14. A very wise person once told me marriage is hard, that you have to keep fighting for it everyday.

Liz Fenton

#15. thank him. We can't have him forgetting about you." "But

Charlie Fenton

#16. O blissful poverty!
Nature, too partial! to thy lot assigns
Health, freedom, innocence, and downy peace,
Her real goods; and only mocks the great,
With empty pageantries!

Elijah Fenton

#17. The Italian word 'stanza' means 'a room', and a room is a good way to conceive of a stanza. A room, generally speaking, is sufficient for its own purposes, but it does not constitute a house. A stanza has the same sense of containment, without being complete or independent.

James Fenton

#18. Free verse seemed democratic because it offered freedom of access to writers. And those who disdained free verse would always be open to accusations of elitism, mandarinism. Open form was like common ground on which all might graze their cattle - it was not to be closed in by usurping landlords.

James Fenton

#19. A poem with grandly conceived and executed stanzas, such as one of Keats's odes, should be like an enfilade of rooms in a palace: one proceeds, with eager anticipation, from room to room.

James Fenton

#20. You make all your mistakes with your own children so by the time your grandchildren arrive, you know how to get it right. Plus, once you turn fifty, you kind of stop giving a shit what others think.

Liz Fenton

#21. At four lines, with the quatrain, we reach the basic stanza form familiar from a whole range of English poetic practice. This is the length of the ballad stanza, the verse of a hymn, and innumerable other kinds of verse.

James Fenton

#22. Hearing that the same men who brought us 'South Park' were mounting a musical to be called 'The Book of Mormon,' we were tempted to turn away, as from an inevitable massacre.

James Fenton

#23. Metrics are not a device for restraining the mad, any more than 'open form' or free verse is a prairie where a man can do all kinds of manly things in a state of wholesome unrestrictedness.

James Fenton

#24. The voice is raised, and that is where poetry begins. And even today, in the prolonged aftermath of modernism, in places where 'open form' or free verse is the orthodoxy, you will find a memory of that raising of the voice in the term 'heightened speech.'

James Fenton

#25. The one I have the most angst towards would be YouTube. We had an opportunity to invest, and I just got nervous about the media industry's response to the unlicensed content on the site.

Peter Fenton

#26. Composers need words, but they do not necessarily need poetry. The Russian composer, Aleksandr Mossolov, who chose texts from newspaper small ads, had a good point to make. With revolutionary music, any text can be set to work.

James Fenton

#27. The composer does not want the self-sufficiency of a richly complex text: he or she wants to feel that the text is something in need of musical setting.

James Fenton

#28. In the writing of poetry we never know anything for sure. We will never know if we have 'trained' or 'practised' enough. We will never be able to say that we have reached grade eight, or that we have left the grades behind and are now embarked on an advanced training.

James Fenton

#29. In my opinion, it is easier to avoid iambic rhythms, when writing in syllabics, if you create a line or pattern of lines using odd numbers of syllables.

James Fenton

#30. 'Love' is so short of perfect rhymes that convention allows half-rhymes like 'move.' The alternative is a plague of doves, or a kind of poem in which the poet addresses his adored both as 'love' and as 'guv' - a perfectly decent solution once, but only once, in a while.

James Fenton

#31. What Google did in Web 1.0 was take a feature, which was search, and built an entire business around that utility. In Web 2.0, Twitter took a feature, which is sharing, and built a utility that allowed people to do that on a massive scale.

Peter Fenton

#32. The iambic pentameter owes its pre-eminence in English poetry to its genius for variation. Good blank verse does not sound like a series of identically measured lines. It sounds like a series of subtle variations on the same theme.

James Fenton

#33. Babies are not brought by storks and poets are not produced by workshops.

James Fenton

#34. Rhyme is a mnemonic device, an aid to the memory. And some poems are themselves mnemonics, that is to say, the whole purpose of the poem is to enable us to remember some information.

James Fenton

#35. Apologizing with grace

Nicole Fenton

#36. It is one thing to read scandalous verse, quite another to disguise it behind lofty pretension.

Maggie Fenton

#37. Madame Arnauld made a little face. 'I did not think they were so aristocratic,' she said, 'even if they come from Boston, which is supposed to be the most refined place in America.

Edward Fenton

#38. It's an unwritten rule that best friends take care of each other, and best friends' husbands understand.

Liz Fenton

#39. Poetry carries its history within it, and it is oral in origin. Its transmission was oral. Its transmission today is still in part oral, because we become acquainted with poetry through nursery rhymes, which we hear before we can read.

James Fenton

#40. 'What is this', and 'How is this done?' are the first two questions to ask of any work of art. The second question immediately illuminates the first, but it often doesn't get asked. Perhaps it sounds too technical. Perhaps it sounds pedestrian.

James Fenton

#41. My feeling is that poetry will wither on the vine if you don't regularly come back to the simplest fundamentals of the poem: rhythm, rhyme, simple subjects - love, death, war.

James Fenton

#42. Bailing on a company is just something you don't do.

Peter Fenton

#43. Be careful what you wish for, people. You just might get it.

Liz Fenton

#44. 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

#45. My sonnet asserts that the sonnet still lives. My epic, should such fortune befall me, asserts that the heroic narrative is not lost - that it is born again.

James Fenton

#46. God, A Poem
'I didn't exist at Creation,
I didn't exist at the Flood,
And I won't be around for Salvation
To sort out the sheep from the cud-
'Or whatever the phrase is. The fact is
In soteriological terms
I'm a crude existential malpractice
And you are a diet of worms

James Fenton

#47. The lullaby is the spell whereby the mother attempts to transform herself back from an ogre to a saint.

James Fenton

#48. What happened to poetry in the twentieth century was that it began to be written for the page.

James Fenton

#49. We actually tried to invest in Twitter in April 2007, right when it launched. At the time, the company was wary of having a classic, tier-one traditional venture firm involved.

Peter Fenton

#50. English poetry begins whenever we decide to say the modern English language begins, and it extends as far as we decide to say that the English language extends.

James Fenton

#51. A nasty surprise in a sandwich

James Fenton

#52. In song the same rule applies as in dramatic verse: the meaning must yield itself, or yield itself sufficiently to arouse the attention and interest, in real time.

James Fenton

#53. The rise of Twitter defined 2011. Once every 5-7 years, a company emerges that changes not just the technology industry, but the world ... after what some viewed as a rocky start, in 2011 Twitter broke through into the elite group of companies that profoundly shape our world.

Peter Fenton

#54. In open-source in general, the power lies in connecting the author of the software directly to users, eliminating the middleman.

Peter Fenton

#55. The 1960s was a period when writers in the West began to be aware of the extraordinary eloquence and popular attraction of the Russian poets such as Yevtushenko and Voznesensky - oppositional figures who could draw crowds. The Russian poets recited from memory as a matter of course.

James Fenton

#56. No poet is required to write in stanzas, or indeed in regular forms at all. Coleridge's 'Dejection: An Ode' has a rhyme scheme and sequence of long and short lines that goes without regular pattern, following the mood and whim of the poet. Such a form is known as an irregular ode.

James Fenton

#57. Wedded love is founded on esteem.

Elijah Fenton

#58. A true best friend loves you even when it seems like you've gone off the deep end.

Liz Fenton

#59. We approached Yahoo and Jerry Yang and said that Hadoop is going to continue to be popular, and as it does, more and more of your team is going to get poached by other companies and come under pressure to leave. This way, you can control your own fate and destiny.

Peter Fenton

#60. Imitation, if it is not forgery, is a fine thing. It stems from a generous impulse, and a realistic sense of what can and cannot be done.

James Fenton

#61. Generally speaking, rhyme is the marker for the end of a line. The first rhyme-word is like a challenge thrown down, which the poem itself has to respond to.

James Fenton

#62. The reason that one person rejects you will be the exact same reason someone else is drawn to you.

Richard Fenton

#63. You can only hurt a person so much and then he doesn't feel the pain anymore. A hard man can take a kicking and not whine about it.

John Fenton

#64. Oh let us not be condemned for what we are. It is enough to account for what we do.

James Fenton

#65. The Mormon mission to Africa, as to other dark-skinned parts of the world, was for a long time hobbled by the racism of the movement's scripture.

James Fenton

#66. Yes is the destination, No is how you get there!

Richard Fenton

#67. The basic rhymes in English are masculine, which is to say that the last syllable of the line is stressed: 'lane' rhymes with 'pain,' but it also rhymes with 'urbane' since the last syllable of 'urbane' is stressed. 'Lane' does not rhyme with 'methane.'

James Fenton

#68. Sometimes you have to fight like hell for something, even when you doubt you deserve it.

Liz Fenton

#69. If you don't have the best product, you're not going to make it in open-source.

Peter Fenton

#70. A cabaret song has got to be written - for the middle voice, ideally - because you've got to hear the wit of the words. And a cabaret song gives the singer room to act, more even than an opera singer.

James Fenton

#71. When Mr Ackroyd says that in the 18th century, stranglers bit off the noses of their victims, I feel that he probably knows what he is talking about. I just wish he hadn't told me.

James Fenton

#72. There is no objection to the proposal: in order to learn to be a poet, I shall try to write a sonnet. But the thing you must try to write, when you do so, is a real sonnet, and not a practice sonnet.

James Fenton

#73. Nobody really knows whether they are a poet. I knew I was interested from the age of 15.

James Fenton

#74. A man that will take back a move at Chess will pick a pocket

Richard Fenton

#75. It normally happens that if you put two words together, or two syllables together, one of them will attract more weight, more emphasis, than the other. In other words, most so-called spondees can be read as either iambs or trochees.

James Fenton

#76. One problem we face comes from the lack of any agreed sense of how we should be working to train ourselves to write poetry.

James Fenton

#77. Working alone on a poem, a poet is of all artists the most free. The poem can be written with a modicum of technology, and can be published, in most cases, quite cheaply.

James Fenton

#78. Beware of flattery, 'tis a weed
Which oft offends the very idol
vice,
Whose shrine it would perfume.

Elijah Fenton

#79. The Ideal
This is where I came from.
I passed this way.
This should not be shameful
Or hard to say.
A self is a self.
It is not a screen.
A person should respect
What he has been.
This is my past
Which I shall not discard.
This is the ideal.
This is hard.

James Fenton

#80. Those elegant delights of jig and vaulting.

Elijah Fenton

#81. your fear of hearing the word 'no' is the only thing standing between you and greatness.

Richard Fenton

#82. Modernism in other arts brought extreme difficulty. In poetry, the characteristic difficulty imported under the name of modernism was obscurity. But obscurity could just as easily be a quality of metrical as of free verse.

James Fenton

#83. Sometimes the truth has to hit us over the head before we can see it.

Liz Fenton

#84. In rap, as in most popular lyrics, a very low standard is set for rhyme; but this was not always the case with popular music.

James Fenton

#85. In open source, you really have to be near the watershed to have an impact on the source code. Customers want to be near the key contributors to the code, not a level removed.

Peter Fenton

#86. As humans, we often let our egos rule our decisions. We let fear stop us from reaching our true potential. We forget about love. But the heart, it never forgets. No matter what happens, no matter how hard things get, it always remembers.

Liz Fenton

#87. I prefer writing in the mornings, so to that extent I have a routine. I do reading and other things in the afternoon.

James Fenton

#88. Considering the wealth of poetic drama that has come down to us from the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, it is surprising that so little of any value has been added since.

James Fenton

#89. Rather than setting goals for the number of yes's you are planning to get each week, you set goals for the number of no's you're going to collect.

Richard Fenton

#90. The difference between a bad programmer and a good programmer is understanding. That is, bad programmers don't understand what they are doing and good programmers do. - Max Kanat-Alexander

Steve Fenton

#91. Great poetry does not have to be technically intricate.

James Fenton

#92. The iambic line, with its characteristic forward movement from short to long, or light to heavy, or unstressed to stressed, is the quintessential measure of English verse.

James Fenton

#93. Sometimes I have thought that a song should look disappointing on the page - a little thin, perhaps, a little repetitive, or a little on the obvious side, or a mixture of all of these things.

James Fenton