Quotes About Literature And Poetry

#1. We can sum up the surrealist distinction between 'literature' and 'poetry' by saying where the former is artificial, fictive and elusive, the latter is natural, real, direct and spontaneous.

Michael Richardson

#2. One thing I discovered is that the book world is vast. It's easy to walk around the store - even the room with literature and poetry, where I work most often - and feel overwhelmed.

Kevin Sampsell

#3. As a filmmaker coming from one of the youngest lands in the world, New Zealand - safe, green and democratic - I was intrigued by Afghanistan, with its literature and poetry, its old land and its deep history.

Pietra Brettkelly

#4. In reading, in literature and poetry, I found an artistic freedom that I didn't see at Woolworth's. I would read everything from Shakespeare to science fiction ... sometimes a book a day.

Frederick Lenz

#5. Only the very weak-minded refuse to be influenced by literature and poetry.

Cassandra Clare

#6. Nothing is part of everything.

Dejan Stojanovic

#7. Serious affairs and history are carefully laid snares for the uninformed.

Dejan Stojanovic

#8. American poetry is always about defining oneself individually,claiming one's right to be different and often to break taboos.

Diane Wakoski

#9. He knows he will be born again,
And start fresh anew.

Dejan Stojanovic

#10. And the bush hath friends to meet him, and their kindly voices greet him
In the murmur of the breezes and the river on its bars,
And he sees the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended,
And at night the wond'rous glory of the everlasting stars.

A.B. Paterson

#11. In The End The Words Are The All And The Nothing.

R.M. Engelhardt

#12. At home the bookshelves connected heaven and earth.

Lisel Mueller

#13. I visited many places,
Some of them quite
Exotic and far away,
But I always returned to myself.

Dejan Stojanovic

#14. How does one say something new and not retell?

Dejan Stojanovic

#15. When he is most powerful, nothing does he become.

Dejan Stojanovic

#16. There is a line of poetry, a sentence in a fable, a word in an essay, by which my existence is justified; find that line, and immortality is assured.

Alberto Manguel

#17. When my words are concealed
With lies and disguises, truth and beyond
Insecurities in the veil of trust
Betrayal in bounds of lies
It's just the charm of words darling
Giving the illusion of happiness inside misery

Irum Zahra

#18. If emptiness is endless, then everything rests in emptiness.

Dejan Stojanovic

#19. Therapy is to make one happy. What is the point of that? Happy people are not interesting. Better to accept the burden of unhappiness and try to turn it into something worthwhile, poetry or music or painting: that is what he been believes.

J.M. Coetzee

#20. The only people who have trouble with poetry are the people who link it with literature. It's much more akin to mountain-walking, and dancing by yourself at 2 A.M.

Theo Dorgan

#21. You ask how it is possible to be your own father and son. You should seek answers, although it is better to anticipate some, to be the light and dream.

Dejan Stojanovic

#22. Poetry is not a mere expression of a poet's self, but an enchantment, a spell of the muse, the inspiration. Poetry is thus magic and magic is poetry.

Shilpa Sandesh

#23. If I was a poet, I had become one because poetry, more intensely than any other practice, could not evade its anachronism and marginality and so constituted a kind of acknowledgment of my own preposterousness, admitting my bad faith in good faith, so to speak.

Ben Lerner

#24. Poetry is the most concentrated form of literature; it is the most emotionalized and powerful way in which thought can be presented ...

Amy Lowell

#25. Earth is the source of light.

Dejan Stojanovic

#26. Instead of trying to come up and pontificate on what literature is, you need to talk with children, to teachers, and make sure they get poetry in the curriculum early.

Rita Dove

#27. Cut quarrels out of literature, and you will have very little history or drama or fiction or epic poetry left.

Robert Staughton Lynd

#28. Calico Kitty

My calico kitty
was painted and primed
she could prowl
the night away ~
without spending a dime...

Muse

#29. My feelings are too loud for words and too shy for the world.

Dejan Stojanovic

#30. I imagined I was God for a millisecond
And became speechless for a long time.

Dejan Stojanovic

#31. Our desire to say more grows bigger and what to say about it, except that saying is not always about saying, growing is not always about growing.

Dejan Stojanovic

#32. We traveled long and forgot why poetry was invented.

Dejan Stojanovic

#33. Not that the writers weren't good. I believe in those books and those writers very much. It's just that in the climate it's really hard to keep the lights on and the doors open when you're selling poetry and literature that appeals to a fringe audience.

Henry Rollins

#34. The world cannot be translated;
It can only be dreamed of and touched.

Dejan Stojanovic

#35. Reading great works of literature, discovering poetry, and listening to the best composers are all ways that we learn to love the Creator more.

Jennifer A. Marshall

#36. To many writers and thinkers, though not to all, another text is, or can be, the most naked and charged of life-forces ... The concept of allusion or analogue is totally inadequate. To Dante these other texts are the organic context of identity. They are as directly about life as life is about them.

George Steiner

#37. An aphorism is a synthesis of poetry and prose, it is a narrative precipitate, a didactic parable, an ideological concept, in practice it 's compressed and zipped philosophy . It is literature that adapts itself to the digital age.

William C. Brown

#38. What does infinity mean to you?
Are you not infinity and yourself?

Dejan Stojanovic

#39. Dream by making and make by dreaming.

Dejan Stojanovic

#40. A hidden spark of the dream sleeps
In the forest and waits
In the celestial spheres of the brain.

Dejan Stojanovic

#41. You've got to love libraries. You've got to love books. You've got to love poetry. You've got to love everything about literature. Then, you can pick the one thing you love most and write about it.

Ray Bradbury

#42. To not say all that can be said is the secret of discipline and economy.

Dejan Stojanovic

#43. One way or another, all the poets of the thirties and forties reacted to Auden, either by rejecting him or trying to absorb him.

Clive James

#44. People cannot stand the saddest truth I know about the very nature of reading and writing imaginative literature, which is that poetry does not teach us how to talk to other people: it teaches us how to talk to ourselves.

Harold Bloom

#45. In the biggest and the smallest I sleep but at the same place I stay.

Dejan Stojanovic

#46. I often imagine that the longer he studies English literature the more the Japanese student must be astonished at the extraordinary predominance given to the passion of love both in fiction and in poetry.

Lafcadio Hearn

#47. From the beginnings of literature, poets and writers have based their narratives on crossing borders, on wandering, on exile, on encounters beyond the familiar. The stranger is an archetype in epic poetry, in novels. The tension between alienation and assimilation has always been a basic theme.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#48. We live mindfully by harvesting evocative scenes to pay attention to including the mountains and oceans, flowers and trees, love and friendship, music and literature, art and poetry.

Kilroy J. Oldster

#49. If we were to understand how important it is to say something and say it well, maybe we wouldn't write a single word, but that would be tragic.

Dejan Stojanovic

#50. Well-wrought poems and works of imaginative literature can do for us what stone-cold prose can never do. They can help us grasp the full dimension of ways of life other than our own.

James W. Sire

#51. Poetry and visions, springing as they do from an ever-present sense of mortality, might easily appear morbid to the sturdy
common sense of a burgher-class in the making.

Hope Mirrlees

#52. Get close to grass and you'll see a star.

Dejan Stojanovic

#53. I do not write for the public. You are my public and I hope to convert you.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

#54. I was miserable, of course, for I was seventeen, and so I swung into action and wrote a poem, and it was miserable, for that's how I thought poetry worked: you digested experience and shat literature. [from "Mingus at the Showplace"]

William Matthews

#55. Beyond all vanities, fights, and desires, omnipotent silence lies.

Dejan Stojanovic

#56. Every man needs his Siren
To check his courage and strength
When he hears her song
In his travels through the unknown.

Dejan Stojanovic

#57. Artistic simplicity is more complex than artistic complexity for it arises via the simplification of the latter and against its backdrop or system.

Yuri Lotman

#58. I lose faith in mathematics, logical and rigid. What with those that even zero doesn't accept?

Dejan Stojanovic

#59. Just because I've extricated myself from religion doesn't mean I'm not interested in the scriptures. I look at the Bible as itself. It's a holy book, it has incredible literature in it and beautiful poetry.

Patti Smith

#60. If emptiness is empty, how can something be borne or awaken from it?

Dejan Stojanovic

#61. I want to
peel away all the labels
I had once given to others
and place them
upon the fabric
of my own identity.

They have reflected back to me,
everything that I refuse
to See in myself.

Meraaqi

#62. I teach Zen, tantric mysticism, jnana yoga, bhakti yoga, Tibetan mysticism, occultism and psychic development. I also teach poetry and literature, film and many other different things.

Frederick Lenz

#63. Gilds the crenelated towers of the churches here and there, Intensifies the hue of flowers makes thy lovely face more fair.

Marguerite De Angeli

#64. If the religious experience were simply some naive impression of the uninformed it would not have resulted in such intellectual insight, such spiritual exaltation, such spectacular religious ritual, or in the immense volume of song and poetry and literature and dance that humans have produced.

Thomas Berry

#65. The world is God's salvation.

Dejan Stojanovic

#66. There is always the question why
And there is always life,
Which doesn't need an answer.

Dejan Stojanovic

#67. I am the girl who spends hours huddled in a corner of a library, trying to find what you love the most about Marlowe, just so I can write you a poem worthy of Shakespeare. I've made books my lovers, hours my enemies and you the only story.

Nikita Gill

#68. The Waves is an extraordinary achievement ... It is trembling on the edge. A little less - and it would lose its poetry. A little more - and it would be over into the abyss, and be dull and arty. It is her greatest book.

E. M. Forster

#69. We dreamt of a crappy apartment somewhere
Making love while we let the midnight air
Flow through the open window, into our closed hearts
Left bitter from heartbreak and too much time apart

Jessica-Lynn Barbour

#70. It is beautiful to talk about beautiful things and even more beautiful to silently gaze at them.

Dejan Stojanovic

#71. To come to nothing through something is the way to outside from both sides.

Dejan Stojanovic

#72. Perhaps it's my destiny to remain a book-keeper for ever and for poetry and literature to remain simply butterflies that alight on my head and merely underline my own ridiculousness by their very beauty.

Fernando Pessoa

#73. Poetry, Shakespeare and opera, are like mumps and should be caught when young. In the unhappy event that there is a postponement to mature years, the results may be devastating.

Dimitris Mita

#74. Arrival in the world is really a departure and that, which we call departure, is only a return.

Dejan Stojanovic

#75. The Bible should be taught, but emphatically not as reality. It is fiction, myth, poetry, anything but reality. As such it needs to be taught because it underlies so much of our literature and our culture.

Richard Dawkins

#76. Unborn eternity does not die; existence is dying and falls asleep in the eternity beyond existence.

Dejan Stojanovic

#77. Pay attention, and use your imagination.

R.M. Engelhardt

#78. I called it a baptism in flaming ink that forced me to shed my shyness about recognizing myself as a poet and to accept the fact that life had never given me any choice in the matter. And then I had to discover exactly what that meant.

Aberjhani

#79. Though [Abraham Lincoln] never would travel to Europe, he went with Shakespeare's kings to Merry England; he went with Lord Byron poetry to Spain and Portugal. Literature allowed him to transcend his surroundings.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

#80. What is hell to a writer? Hell is being too busy to find the time to write or being unable to find the inspiration. Hell is suddenly finding the words but being away from your notebook or typewriter. Hell is when the verses slip away through your fingers and they never return again.

R.M. Engelhardt

#81. Real poetry is art at its purest sense. It is never a commodity, but a breath of eternity.

Subhan Zein

#82. The same word we love and hate, leaves in different directions, taking different paths.

Dejan Stojanovic

#83. Every star was once darker than the night, before it awoke.

Dejan Stojanovic

#84. The River Mogami has drowned
Far and deep
Beneath its surging waves
The flaming sun of summer

Matsuo Basho

#85. Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language.

Steven Pinker

#86. Different languages, the same thoughts; servant to thoughts and their masters.

Dejan Stojanovic

#87. I loved everything. I read everything. Art and poetry and literature and trash and sci fi. I didn't know what I would become yet and I needed to read to figure it out.

Margaret Cho

#88. If you can't focus then how do you expect to make your dreams come true?

The Prolific Penman

#89. Ultimately I have learned more about poetry, from music and magic than from literature.

James Broughton

#90. In trying to be perfect,
He perfected the art of anonymity,
Became imperceptible
And arrived nowhere from nowhere.

Dejan Stojanovic

#91. You are hurrying to the sweet place,
To the nonsense chasing your spirit
And in the nonsense you look for answers.

Dejan Stojanovic

#92. I liked painting and drawing, and I liked humanities mainly - poetry, literature - this speculative attitude toward life.

Rafael Moneo

#93. Poetry is simply literature reduced to the essence of its active principle. It is purged of idols of every kind, of realistic illusions, of any conceivable equivocation between the language of "truth" and the language of "creation.

Paul Valery

#94. The burning off and the gathering together are one.

Billy Marshall Stoneking

#95. I am constantly torn between the will to be seen and still hidden so god damn well,
a contradiction I never figured out.

Charlotte Eriksson

#96. The best work in literature is always done by those who do not depend upon it for their daily bread, and the highest form of literature, poetry, brings no wealth to the singer. For producing your best work also you will require some leisure and freedom from sordid care.

Oscar Wilde

#97. Tell me something only you know and make a new friend.

Dejan Stojanovic

#98. Not only every great poet, but every genuine, but lesser poet, fulfils once for all some possibility of language, and so leaves one possibility less for his successors.

T. S. Eliot

#99. These capacities for randomness may have been amplified into human creativity through sexual and social selection.

Geoffrey Miller

#100. From everything, nothing looks to nothing.

Dejan Stojanovic