Karl Shapiro Quotes

#1. The promising young poets, the hopefuls? I'd name Richard Wilbur, Peter Viereck, Karl Shapiro, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, John Ciardi...Leonard Bacon...but it is still too early to assertions. They're all 'in the field.' It remains to be seen how many will cross the finish line.

Robert Frost

#2. The doctor punched my vein, the captain called me Cain, upon my belly sat the sow of fear.

Karl Shapiro

#3. My soul is now her day, my day her night, So I lie down, and so I rise.

Karl Shapiro

#4. The body, what is it, Father, but a sign To love the force that grows us, to give back What in Thy palm is senselessness and mud?

Karl Shapiro

#5. Haul up the flag, you mourners, Not half-mast but all the way; The funeral is done and disbanded; The devil's had the final say.

Karl Shapiro

#6. When God wants to punish us, he gives us just ourselves to care for.

Jonathan Odell

#7. Sometimes, when one person is missing, the whole world seems depopulated

Alphonse De Lamartine

#8. But when I lay wi' Emily - from the first time. I knew. Kent who I was again." He looked up at her then, eyes dark and shadowed by loss. "My soul didna wander while I slept - when I slept wi' her.

Diana Gabaldon

#9. The modern essay has regained a good deal of its literary status in our time, much to the credit of Joseph Epstein.

Karl Shapiro

#10. Lawyers love paper. They eat, sleep and dream paper. They turn paper into gold, and their files are colorful and their language neoclassical and calli-graphically bewigged.

Karl Shapiro

#11. The good poet sticks to his real loves, those within the realm of possibility. He never tries to hold hands with God or the human race.

Karl Shapiro

#12. How something important happens is the business of historians and newspapers, the effect it has is the business of philosophers and writers and especially poets.

Karl Shapiro

#13. Leo Connellan has retained his soul and voice in Provincetown and Other Poems.

Karl Shapiro

#14. Every war is its own excuse. That's why they're all surrounded with ideals. That's why they're all crusades.

Karl Shapiro

#15. To make the child in your own image is a capital crime, for your image is not worth repeating. The child knows this and you know it. Consequently you hate each other.

Karl Shapiro

#16. They're not going to send a crazy man out to be killed, are they?"
"Who else will go?

Joseph Heller

#17. Self-knowledge is a dangerous thing, tending to make man shallow or insane.

Karl Shapiro

#18. Already old, the question Who shall die? Becomes unspoken Who is innocent?

Karl Shapiro

#19. Lastly, his tomb shall list and founder in the troughs of grass. And none shall speak his name.

Karl Shapiro

#20. Poets of course are even more unpredictable than other writers, overwhelmed as they are by the moment they inhabit and finding it difficult to connect yesterday with tomorrow.

Karl Shapiro

#21. A man's house is his stage. Others walk on to play their bit parts. Now and again a soliloquy, a birth, an adultery.

Karl Shapiro

#22. What would it be like to care so little about what other people thought of you?

Cate Tiernan

#23. In the tight belly of the dead, Burrow with hungry head, And inlay maggots like a jewel.

Karl Shapiro

#24. Poetry is innocent, not wise. It does not learn from experience, because each poetic experience is unique.

Karl Shapiro

#25. You are afraid of it because it is stronger than you; you hate it because you are afraid of it; you love it because you cannot subdue it to your will. Only the unsubduable can be loved.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

#26. My next novel will be the third volume in the John Dies at the End series, and in fact may already exist, again depending on when you're reading this.

David Wong

#27. Poetry is not a way of saying things; it's a way of seeing things.

Karl Shapiro

#28. So confident am I in the intentions, as well as wisdom, of the government, that I shall always be satisfied that what is not done, either cannot, or ought not to be done.

Thomas Jefferson

#29. Life is on the wire. The rest is just waiting.

Matt Damon

#30. But with exquisite breathing you smile, with satisfaction of love, And I touch you again as you tick in the silence and settle in sleep.

Karl Shapiro

#31. I know that I basically have the same hair as Beaker from 'the Muppets.'

Brad Goreski

#32. Laughter and grief join hands. Always the heart Clumps in the breast with heavy stride; The face grows lined and wrinkled like a chart, The eyes bloodshot with tears and tide. Let the wind blow, for many a man shall die.

Karl Shapiro

#33. Accuracy to a newspaper is what virtue is to a lady; but a newspaper can always print a retraction.

Adlai E. Stevenson

#34. Keelhaul the poets in the vestry chairs.

Karl Shapiro

#35. The proverbist knows nothing of the two sides of a question. He knows only the roundness of answers.

Karl Shapiro