Helen Vendler Quotes

#1. Soul or Intelligence destined to possess the sense of Identity.

Helen Vendler

#2. I do not give the honorific name of 'poetry' to the primitive and the unaccomplished.

Helen Vendler

#3. I would like to spend more time with Spanish poetry. I know French better than Spanish, but Spanish was my first language, and my father spoke it to us.

Helen Vendler

#4. I liked teaching Henry James. When you look down at a Henry James novel from a helicopter height, you find an intricate spider web that all clings together.

Helen Vendler

#5. Nobody notices postmen, yet they have passions like other men.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#6. I used to have really bad skin, and when I was younger, I had a lazy eye. I had to wear a patch and pink-rimmed glasses.

Georgia Salpa

#7. The non-artists among us are always terribly busy, but finally disappear without a trace.

Helen Vendler

#8. I like art history and art criticism. Leo Steinberg has always been my favorite. He's very original, very accurate and acute.

Helen Vendler

#9. Each poem leads you to the questions it makes sense to ask it.

Helen Vendler

#10. The computer offers another kind of creativity. You cannot ignore the creativity that computer technology can bring. But you need to be able to move between those two different worlds.

Tadao Ando

#11. Liam's hands are curled into fists, as if he is ready to throw punches right in the middle of IHOP, which is of course a dumb place to fight. There are children here, and polyester booths, and smiley-face pancakes. Multiple kinds of syrup. Some of the drinks even come with maraschino cherries.

Julie Buxbaum

#12. There are not many poets whose fame rests on a single work.

Helen Vendler

#13. I didn't come back for the money. I just got sick of beating people up for free.

George Foreman

#14. I was unnerved to learn in my twenties that the poems of Emily Dickinson that I had memorized as a girl were not the poems as she had written them.

Helen Vendler

#15. Study yourself. Find your strong points and make them stronger as well as your weak ones and strengthen them. Study yourself carefully and you will see yourself as you really are.

William Walker Atkinson

#16. I always write after I think for quite a long time, so the actual writing time is rather short. I think a lot of the work gets done when you have something on your mind while you're doing many other things.

Helen Vendler

#17. I gradually became persuaded that the subjects, without intending to, had revealed to me a basic truth about markets that was foreign to the literature of economics.

Vernon L. Smith

#18. If you like the precision and concision of poetry, a page of prose is unsatisfying in a certain way. And poetry is so direct.

Helen Vendler

#19. Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. If you can bend space you can bend time also, and if you knew enough and could move faster than light you could travel backward in tie and exist in two places at once.

Margaret Atwood

#20. I wouldn't be very happy if a poet read what I had written and said, 'What a peculiar thing to say about this work of mine.'

Helen Vendler

#21. All good poets of the past, almost without exception, were at least bilingual if not trilingual.

Helen Vendler

#22. A poem needs imaginative rhythms as well as imaginative transformation of content.

Helen Vendler

#23. The door opens and the tiger leaps.

Virginia Woolf

#24. I believe that poems are a score for performance by the reader, and that you become the speaking voice. You don't read or overhear the voice in the poem - you are the voice in the poem.

Helen Vendler

#25. Twentieth-century American poetry has been one of the glories of modern literature.

Helen Vendler

#26. There's only one ball game for any writer, and it's to keep you turning the pages. That's the whole ball game. That's what I have to do.

Mike Lupica

#27. For the critic, criticism is a form of natural self-expression, as poetry is to the poet. So, for a critic, criticism is a true thing. Criticism isn't written for poets, it's written for other readers. One hopes it is true for other readers if it's true for oneself.

Helen Vendler

#28. The art of utterance persuades initially by its music and its rhythm, before semiotic or personal characteristics come into play.

Helen Vendler

#29. This is what I wanted tonight. Time away from the tribe with Liv and Perry, and even with Brooke. With no responsibilities and nothing to do except be.

Veronica Rossi

#30. When I first heard Wallace Stevens' voice, it was by chance: a friend wanted to listen to the recording he had made for the Harvard Vocarium Series.

Helen Vendler

#31. Without play at many levels of language, from phonemes to logical structures, a poem is merely prose with linebreaks added.

Helen Vendler

#32. One could say that artists are people who think naturally in highly patterned ways.

Helen Vendler

#33. In the final analysis, it is not critics who create literary canons, it is other writers who create them ... A writer can have published thirty-seven volumes, but if that writer doesn't interest other writers, they will all molder in the library and nobody will ever want to read them again.

Helen Vendler

#34. Lukewarm people call "radical" what Jesus expected of all His followers.

Francis Chan