John Drinkwater Quotes

#1. This play John Drinkwater's Abraham Lincoln holds the season's record, thus far, with a run of four evening performances and one matinee. By an odd coincidence, it ran just five performances too many.

Dorothy Parker

#2. This be my pilgrimage and goal Daily to march and find The secret phrases of the soul, The evangels of the mind.

John Drinkwater

#3. Great men are rare, poets are rarer, but the great man who is a poet, transfiguring his greatness, is the rarest of all events.

John Drinkwater

#4. How odd to be made of flesh, balanced on bone, and filled with a soul you've never met.

Tarryn Fisher

#5. They called him John Storm: John after his grandfather, but Storm after his father and his mother.

John Crowley

#6. To know anything of a poet but his poetry is, so far as the poetry is concerned, to know something that may be entertaining, even delightful, but is certainly inessential.

John Drinkwater

#7. The musician - if he be a good one - finds his own perception prompted by the poet's perception, and he translates the expression of that perception from the terms of poetry into the terms of music.

John Drinkwater

#8. The poet's perfect expression is the token of a perfect experience; what he says in the best possible way he has felt in the best possible way, that is, completely.

John Drinkwater

#9. After we have calmly stood by and allowed monopolies to grow fat, we should not be asked to make them bloated.

John Griffin Carlisle

#10. Poetry is the communication through words of certain experiences that can be communicated in no other way.

John Drinkwater

#11. When you defile the pleasant streams,
And the wild bird's abiding place,
You massacre a million dreams,
And cast your spittle in God's face

John Drinkwater

#12. Don't let sex make you a mother before love makes you a wife.

Kemi Edonmi

#13. Poe's saying that a long poem is a sequence of short ones is perfectly just.

John Drinkwater

#14. Universal suffrage should rest upon universal education. To this end, liberal and permanent provision should be made for the support of free schools by the State governments, and, if need be, supplemented by legitimate aid from national authority.

Rutherford B. Hayes

#15. So it is in poetry. All we ask is that the mood recorded shall impress us as having been of the kind that exhausts the imaginative capacity; if it fails to do this the failure will announce itself either in prose or in insignificant verse.

John Drinkwater

#16. In the corridors under tehre is nothing but sleep. And stiller than ever on orchard boughs they keep Tryst with the moon, and deep is the silence, deep On moon-washed apples of wonder.

John Drinkwater

#17. A sub-division's predictable patterns, rigid lines, and ordered structure might feel calming. Normally, they feel segregating and stifling, but for once, I'm scared of this infinite disorder and I'm afraid I might get lost in this place where anything is possible.

Blair Mastbaum

#18. To take an analogy: if we say that a democratic government is the best kind of government, we mean that it most completely fulfills the highest function of a government - the realisation of the will of the people.

John Drinkwater

#19. For while the subjects of poetry are few and recurrent, the moods of man are infinitely various and unstable. It is the same in all arts.

John Drinkwater

#20. When the poet makes his perfect selection of a word, he is endowing the word with life.

John Drinkwater

#21. We recognise in the finished art, which is the result of these conditions, the best words in the best order - poetry; and to put this essential poetry into different classes is impossible.

John Drinkwater

#22. There can be no proof that Blake's lyric is composed of the best words in the best order; only a conviction, accepted by our knowledge and judgment, that it is so.

John Drinkwater

#23. I know only one method of operation: to be as honest with others as I am with myself.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

#24. Godless as I am, I pray she's got away with it. It's like ripples in a pond, isn't it? It doesn't stop in one place.

Elizabeth Wein

#25. He who knows himself to be profound endeavors to be clear; he who would like to appear profound to the crowd endeavors to be obscure.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#26. And not a girl goes walking Along the Cotswold lanes But knows men's eyes in April Are quicker than their brains.

John Drinkwater

#27. The medium is as unimportant as I myself. Essential is only the forming.

Kurt Schwitters

#28. Being a sci-fi geek, it was just lovely to be on a show where I pretend I'm in outer space. That's always been my dream: to pretend to be out in space or actually be out in space.

Ming-Na Wen

#29. But in the finished art of the song the use of words has no connection with the use of words in poetry.

John Drinkwater

#30. A lyric, it is true, is the expression of personal emotion, but then so is all poetry, and to suppose that there are several kinds of poetry, differing from each other in essence, is to be deceived by wholly artificial divisions which have no real being.

John Drinkwater

#31. Grant us the wil1 to fashion as we feel, Grant us the strength to labor as we know, Grant us the purpose, ribbed and edged with steel, To strike the blow.

John Drinkwater

#32. Eliminate all unnecessary negativity from your life and watch it change for the better.

Tanya Masse

#33. It should here be added that poetry habitually takes the form of verse.

John Drinkwater

#34. Any long work in which poetry is persistent, be it epic or drama or narrative, is really a succession of separate poetic experiences governed into a related whole by an energy distinct from that which evoked them.

John Drinkwater

#35. The written word is everything.

John Drinkwater

#36. Maybe I didn't try as hard as I ought when he started calling you
names. Serves him right, the nasty old turd. Punch him again, Moth - Peaseblossom

Lisa Mantchev

#37. In my most menacing tone, I firmly told her, I will drag your sleeping ass out into the sun, if you so much as drop a fang at my sister. Play nice.

S.C. Stephens

#38. Poetry being the sign of that which all men desire, even though the desire be unconscious, intensity of life or completeness of experience, the universality of its appeal is a matter of course.

John Drinkwater

#39. If it is an imperfect word, no external circumstance can heighten its value as poetry.

John Drinkwater

#40. God, he thought, her eyes are so bright, flashing, deep, full of promise, all those things eyes are in books but never are in life, and she was his.

John Crowley

#41. You won't talk to anybody who breaks lyrics down more thoroughly. It's just a complete deconstruction, and when you start to rebuild, nobody has the capacity to do it like me. Which is not to say I'm better, it's just that there's a unique quality to everyone.

Harry Connick Jr.

#42. It is commonly asserted and accepted that Paradise Lost is among the two or three greatest English poems; it may justly be taken as the type of supreme poetic achievement in our literature.

John Drinkwater