Quotes About Poetica

#1. Every great and deep difficulty bears in itself it's own solution. It forces us to change our thinking in order to find it.

Niels Bohr

#2. Now What?" Kerensky said. "We wait," Dahl said. "For how long?" Kerensky said, " As long as dramatically appropriate," Dahl said.

John Scalzi

#3. She will want things to stay just as they are. She will never have the fun of hoping something wonderful and exiting may be just around the corner.

Dodie Smith

#4. Optimism is not the ability to live on the highest branch. It is the faith to learn to fly.

Wes Fesler

#5. Freedom is essentially a condition of inequality, not equality. It recognizes as a fact of nature the structural differences inherent in man - in temperament, character, and capacity - and it respects those differences. We are not alike and no law can make us so.

Frank Chodorov

#6. For the poet, the world is word. Words. Not that precisely. Precisely: the world and words fuck each other.

Kathy Acker

#7. Watching my parents, I watched the meaning change, of what it was that undertakers do: From something done with the dead, to something done for the living, to something done by the living - everyone of us.

Thomas Lynch

#8. I was born in Cuba, and my parents were tropical agronomists.

Italo Calvino

#9. Don't ever turn down pleasure because you were afraid of what other people might say.

Belle De Jour

#10. Consciousness is the materia poetica that Shakespeare sculpts as Michelangelo sculpts marble. We feel the consciousness of Hamlet or Iago, and our own consciousness strangely expands.

Harold Bloom

#11. Some things can never be left behind.

Brom

#12. That isn't how I've always felt. As a congressman, and more recently as a senator, I opposed marriage for same-sex couples. Then something happened that led me to think through my position in a much deeper way.

Rob Portman

#13. Horace, when he wrote the Ars Poetica, recommended that poets keep their poems home for ten years; don't let them go, don't publish them until you have kept them around for ten years: by that time, they ought to stop moving on you; by that time, you ought to have them right.

Donald Hall

#14. & we cannot separate the roof from the heart
from the trees that were there, standing.
& so it is, when I say "night,"
it is your name I am calling,
when I say "field,"
your thousand, thousand names,
your million names.

Aracelis Girmay

#15. I tend to view the superstitions or fragments of myth as triggers for lyric inquiry. I also find I think of this kind of language as ars poetica - if we can find the right combination of words, we can make something improbably or extraordinary happen.

Anna Journey