Lascelles Abercrombie Quotes

#1. I was so naive I didn't even know about agents. I telephoned the William Morris agency and asked to speak to Mr. Morris. I expected Bill Morris to be waiting for my call.

Kirstie Alley

#2. Epic poetry exhibits life in some great symbolic attitude. It cannot strictly be said to symbolize life itself, but always some manner of life.

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#3. It is more difficult to keep the attention of hearers than of readers.

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#4. Nothing that comes easy is worth a dime.

Woody Hayes

#5. Even if you don't believe in any God, you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious.

Michael Crichton

#6. How to tell students what to look for without telling them what to see is the dilemma of teaching.

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#7. The balance of private good and general welfare is at the bottom of civilized morals; but the morals of the Heroic Age are founded on individuality, and on nothing else.

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#8. The light that never was, on sea or land; The consecration, and the Poet's dream.

William Wordsworth

#9. While the people retain their virtue and vigilance, no administration, by any extreme of wickedness or folly, can very seriously injure the government in the short space of four years.

Abraham Lincoln

#10. The epic poet collaborates with the spirit of his time in the composition of his work. That is, if he is successful; the time may refuse to work with him, but he may not refuse to work with his time.

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#11. if we allow our thoughts to stink, that smell will leak out of every bit of us - our words, our actions, and especially our reactions.

Lysa TerKeurst

#12. There is only one thing which can master the perplexed stuff of epic material into unity; and that is, an ability to see in particular human experience some significant symbolism of man's general destiny.

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#13. Basically we are always educating for a world that is or is becoming out of joint, for this is the basic human situation, in which the world is created by mortal hands to serve mortals for a limited time as home.

Hannah Arendt

#14. One element of Madonna's career that really takes center stage is how many times she's reinvented herself. It's easier to stay in one look, one comfort zone, one musical style. It's inspiring to see someone whose only predictable quality is being unpredictable.

Taylor Swift

#15. Traditional matter must be glorified, since it would be easier to listen to the re-creation of familiar stories than to quite new and unexpected things; the listeners, we must remember, needed poetry chiefly as the re-creation of tired hours.

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#16. That is to say, epic poetry has been invented many times and independently; but, as the needs which prompted the invention have been broadly similar, so the invention itself has been.

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#17. An epic is not made by piecing together a set of heroic lays, adjusting their discrepancies and making them into a continuous narrative.

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#18. But the development of human society does not go straight forward; and the epic process will therefore be a recurring process, the series a recurring series - though not in exact repetition.

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#19. No poet will ever take the written word as a substitute for the spoken word; he knows that it is on the spoken word, and the spoken word only, that his art is founded.

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#20. But the gravest difficulty, and perhaps the most important, in poetry meant solely for recitation, is the difficulty of achieving verbal beauty, or rather of making verbal beauty tell.

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#21. It was officially known as Kwan-li-so Number 18. That meant Penal Labor Colony in Korean. It was a concentration camp. It was a gulag. It actually was hell, near the Taedong River in North Korea's P'yongan-namdo province.

David Baldacci

#22. The reason can only be this: heroic poetry depends on an heroic age, and an age is heroic because of what it is, not because of what it does.

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#23. I ride my bike almost every day here in New York. It's getting safer to do so, but I do have to be fairly alert when riding on the streets as opposed to riding on the Hudson River bike path or similar protected lanes.

David Byrne

#24. If epic poetry is a definite species, the sagas do not fall within it.

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#25. The first epics were intended for recitation; the literary epic is meant to be read.

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#26. By the general process of epic poetry, I mean the way this form of art has constantly responded to the profound needs of the society in which it was made.

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#27. Gage sighed. "This team was a whole hell of a lot easier to run before any of us had ever heard about The One. You know that, right?"
Maybe." Becker grinned. "But it wasn't nearly as interesting.

Paige Tyler

#28. The world knows of a vast stock of epic material scattered up and down the nations; sometimes its artistic value is as extraordinary as its archaeological interest, but not always.

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#29. It's gotten to a point where everybody is concerned about their rights and nobody is concerned about their duties.

Zadie Smith

#30. For the stage displays the first vigorous expression, as the natural thing and without conspicuous restraint, of private individuality.

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#31. Poetry is the work of poets, not of peoples or communities; artistic creation can never be anything but the production of an individual mind.

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#32. Horror stories give us a way of exhausting our emotions around social issues, like a woman's right to an abortion, which I always thought was the core of 'Rosemary's Baby,' or the backlash against feminism which I always thought was the core to 'Stepford Wives.'

Chuck Palahniuk

#33. The epic poet has behind him a tradition of matter and a tradition of style; and that is what every other poet has behind him too; only, for the epic poet, tradition is rather narrower, rather more strictly compelling.

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#34. The Border Ballads, for instance, and the Robin Hood Ballads, clearly suppose a state of society which is nothing but a very circumscribed and not very important heroic age.

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#35. With several different kinds of poetry to choose from, a man would decide that he would like best to be an epic poet, and he would set out, in conscious determination, on an epic poem.

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#36. It is necessary to recover the primeval force of the shock taking place at the moment when opposite a man (the viewer) there stood for the first time a man (the actor) deceptively similar to us, yet at the same time infinitely foreign, beyond an impassable barrier.

Tadeusz Kantor

#37. It seems difficult, sometimes, to believe that there was a time when sentiments now become habitual, sentiments that imply not only the original imperative of conduct, but the original metaphysic of living, were by no means altogether habitual.

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