Kathleen Raine Quotes

#1. The icon is transparent as a representation of the special reality it depicts; an idol replaces and obscures that reality ... but the difference between icon and idol is purely subjective.

Kathleen Raine

#2. If you lead a simple life, and that story is written, then that story will not satisfy. It needs an angle. Suppose there is no angle?

Audrey Hepburn

#3. Sensing us, the trees tremble in their sleep, The living leaves recoil before our fires, Baring to us war-charred and broken branches, And seeing theirs, we for our own destruction weep.

Kathleen Raine

#4. The poem reminds us of what we ourselves know, but did not know we knew; reminds us, above all, of what we are.

Kathleen Raine

#5. I make no apology for writing in nature's age-old and unaging language, of whose images we build our paradises, Broceliande and Brindavan, the Forest of Arden, Xanadu, Shelley's Skies, or even Wordsworth's Grasemere, which can be found on no map.

Kathleen Raine

#6. Academia is a graveyard of poets.

Kathleen Raine

#7. It happens all the time. Sometimes the most obvious choices are the hardest to see.

Jessica Brody

#8. Of all the arts the living of a life is perhaps the greatest; to live every moment of life with the same imaginative commitment as the poet brings to a special field.

Kathleen Raine

#9. And see the peaceful trees extend
their myriad leaves in leisured dance
they bear the weight of sky and cloud
upon the fountain of their veins.

Kathleen Raine

#10. Don't even know why, but I got to that part, and I...God, it hit me, you know? The truth of those damn words the Skin Horse spoke. Being real could hurt. That's what...what living is all about and the opposite is unimaginable.

Jennifer L. Armentrout

#11. For [W. B.] Yeats magic was not so much a kind of poetry as poetry a kind of magic, and the object of both alike was evocation of energies and knowledge from beyond normal consciousness.

Kathleen Raine

#12. Intent on one great love, perfect, Requited and for ever, I missed love's everywhere Small presence, thousand-guised.

Kathleen Raine

#13. The air is full of a farewell- deserted by the silver lake lies the wild world, overturned. Cities rise where the mountains fell, the furnace where the phoenix burned

Kathleen Raine

#14. Meanings, moods, the whole scale of our inner experience, finds in nature the 'correspondences' through which we may know our boundless selves.

Kathleen Raine

#15. The work of the artist is to heal the soul.

Kathleen Raine

#16. I feel more fellowship with the defeated than with saints.

Albert Camus

#17. The chief internal enemies of any state are those public officials who betray the trust imposed upon them by the people.

Dalton Trumbo

#18. Strangers have crossed the sound, but not the sound of the dark oarsmen Or the golden-haired sons of kings, Strangers whose thought is not formed to the cadence of waves, Rhythm of the sickle, oar and milking pail

Kathleen Raine

#19. I couldn't claim that I have never felt the urge to explore evil, but when you descend into hell you have to be very careful.

Kathleen Raine

#20. Nature is the common, universal language, understood by all.

Kathleen Raine

#21. Chemistry dissolves the goddess in the alembic,
Venus, the white queen, the universal matrix,
Down to the molecular hexagons and carbon-chains.

Kathleen Raine

#22. I was in New York City for September 11th, and I was there for the 2003 blackout. I think in hindsight, you get a real perspective as to how unique those moments of crisis are in a place like New York City.

Casey Neistat

#23. Perhaps thought really is prayer.

Ellis Peters

#24. He called her "my love," and for a minute she wished it was true. But calling her "my way to get a piece of land and ass" probably didn't slip off the tongue as easily, or translate as well to Greek.

Alexia Adams

#25. Be the best at whatever you do, but first make sure that what you are doing is for the best.

Shon Mehta

#26. In the expression of the emotions, originality merits the first consideration ... The words used, however, should be old ones.

Fujiwara No Teika

#27. Within the ring there lies an O,
Within the O there looks an eye,
In the eye there swims a sea,
And in the sea reflected sky,
And in the sky there shines the sun,
Within the sun a bird of gold.

Kathleen Raine

#28. Being a poet is not a job or a profession but a way of life.

Kathleen Raine

#29. As a child I became a confirmed believer in the ancient gods simply because as between the reality of fact and the reality f myth, I chose myth ... Myth is the truth of fact, not fact the truth of myth.

Kathleen Raine

#30. Whiteness of moonlight builds a house that is not there

Kathleen Raine

#31. It was not the purpose of poetry to record anything and everything, to merely describe either the outer world or some subjective mood, but to speak from the imagination of the poet to the imagination of the reader.

Kathleen Raine

#32. Poetry is not an end in itself but in the service of life; of what use are poems, or any other works of art, unless to enable human lives to be lived with insight of a deeper kind, with more sensitive feelings, more intense sense of the beautiful, with deeper understanding?

Kathleen Raine

#33. I've read all the books but one
Only remains sacred: this
Volume of wonders, open
Always before my eyes.

Kathleen Raine

#34. A country that fails to value its teachers, fails to value its future.

David Puttnam

#35. When the money dries up, the sites die off. That's the way to go after piracy.

Jared Polis