Quotes About Iambic

#1. Could a literary life be referred to with the iambic pentameter of, say, harnessing wind power, transplanting hearts or saving the whales. Or did it necessitate the sombre and monotonous dirge of software, priority banking or turbine building.

Anita Nair

#2. In an era of human history in which we prize comfort above nearly every other virtue, we have overlooked an important truth: comfort never leads to excellence.

Jeff Goins

#3. Common sense steps in here and says: Separate the parts you want to be mobile from the parts you want to be inert. You have seen the result, and I know many have the skill to apply it.

Lawrence Hargrave

#4. But if all else fails, I can always write her a sonnet." "A sonnet?" said Hugh. "No woman can resist having her name rhymed with a flower in iambic pentameter," said Daniel.

Helen Simonson

#5. The iambic line, with its characteristic forward movement from short to long, or light to heavy, or unstressed to stressed, is the quintessential measure of English verse.

James Fenton

#6. I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.

Howard Nemerov

#7. BLANK-VERSE, n. Unrhymed iambic pentameters - the most difficult kind of English verse to write acceptably; a kind, therefore, much affected by those who cannot acceptably write any kind.

Ambrose Bierce

#8. I even, to my own amusement if no one else's, developed the knack of cursing in iambic pentameters.

Philip Palmer

#9. If I resign any time this year, he [President Obama] could not successfully appoint anyone I would like to see in the court ... [A]nybody who thinks that if I step down, Obama could appoint someone like me, they're misguided.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

#10. The poet Billy Collins once laughingly observed that all babies are born with a knowledge of poetry, because the lub-dub of the mother's heart is in iambic meter. Then, Collins said, life slowly starts to choke the poetry out of us. It may be true with music, too.

Gene Weingarten

#11. I've spent so much time with iambic pentameter that I can now recognize it when I hear it in conversation or a movie - it's like a weird, useless superpower.

Ian Doescher

#12. I really have no interest in delivering the iambic pentameter, I just want to kill myself. I don't mind other people doing it. I say that, but really I don't want to watch other people doing it. I get embarrassed.

Bill Nighy

#13. Man thinks his mind's love for world power and his heart's love for world peace can live together. Indeed, this is the height of man's stupidity.

Sri Chinmoy

#14. The eater becoming the eaten!

A.G. Howard

#15. You know, I used to say, when people say, 'How do you think about what to write about in the poems every week?' And I say, 'Well, I have to turn it in on Monday, so on Sunday nights I turn the shower to iambic pentameter and it sort of works out that way.'

Calvin Trillin

#16. With Shakespeare, if you're not going to do the iambic pentameter, do some other play.

John C. McGinley

#17. The conventional wisdom with David Mamet is, you do not change a word. And that agrees with me. If you want to change any of David's words, it's like wanting to change the iambic pentameter in Shakespeare - you should do something else.

John C. McGinley

#18. Shakespeare wrote his sonnets within a strict discipline, fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, rhyming in three quatrains and a couplet. Were his sonnets dull? Mozart wrote his sonatas within an equally rigid discipline - exposition, development, and recapitulation. Were they dull?.

David Ogilvy

#19. What I like about Sapphics is the music of a non-iambic metric in English.

Marilyn Hacker

#20. Every beginning is only a sequel, after all, and the book of events is always open halfway through.

Wislawa Szymborska

#21. It's good to have a lot of once-in-a-lifetimes in your lifetime. If you get the chance to skydive, go skydiving. If you're offered a part in a weird Shakespeare play in San Diego, slap on some tights and rock out some iambic pentameter.

Neil Patrick Harris

#22. Why didn't vandals ever quote Shakespeare? I'd love to see graffiti in iambic pentameter.

J.A. Konrath

#23. The hardest part of writing 'William Shakespeare's Star Wars' was probably the sheer amount of iambic pentameter and tiptoeing around certain scenes I knew would be hot-button issues for 'Star Wars' fans.

Ian Doescher

#24. He drained a bar dry last night and is managing to speak in iambic pentameter. I have two glasses of wine with dinner and I can barely decipher the TV Guide the next day. I'm so freaking old." "Join

Lucy Parker

#25. The iambic pentameter owes its pre-eminence in English poetry to its genius for variation. Good blank verse does not sound like a series of identically measured lines. It sounds like a series of subtle variations on the same theme.

James Fenton

#26. If you KNOW that you're FUCKED Then you're NOT If you think that you're NOT THEN YOU ARE!
Isn't that lovely? Iambic pentangle?

Martin Atkins

#27. You have to learn a few things, which you do along the way, but basically, poetry is a matter of the ear. Iambic pentameters or what constitutes a stanza comes naturally - your ears will know.

Vikram Seth

#28. In my opinion, it is easier to avoid iambic rhythms, when writing in syllabics, if you create a line or pattern of lines using odd numbers of syllables.

James Fenton

#29. Nor are we the culmination of evolution, except in the sense that there has never been another species so bizarrely ingenious that it could create both iambic pentameter and plutonium.

David Quammen