Top 78 Quotes About Sonnets
#1. Quiet book-learning in monasteries and ethereal music, sonnets and courtly lovethat stuff is all fantasyand veneer? You couldn't afford to let the beauty of the thing seduce you too far or you forgot the truth and the truth was always hard as iron bloody bars.
Janice Galloway
#3. My double drags his coffin, humble slave,
I, at least, am real, though changed to flesh.
Far-off, I build me a church no hand can shape
("Winter Sonnets: III")
Vyacheslav Ivanov
#4. Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch's wife, He would have written sonnets all his life?.
Lord Byron
#5. So, some of the most difficult formal poems that I've written, say one sentence sonnets, I've been able to do those fairly quickly whereas some of the clearest, simplest lyrics that I've written have taken me the longest to get to the clarity of feeling that you're looking for.
Edward Hirsch
#6. Muse's creations are predominately lyrical often resulting in poetic sonnets and fairytale like art.
Earl M. Coleman
#7. There is a special department of Hell for students of probability. In this department there are many typewriters and many monkeys. Every time that a monkey walks on a typewriter, it types by chance one of Shakespeare's sonnets.
Bertrand Russell
#8. 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
#9. I write quite a lot of sonnets, and I think of them almost as prayers: short and memorable, something you can recite.
Carol Ann Duffy
#10. It is curious that I always want to group things, a series of sonnets, a series of photographs; whatever rationalizations appear, they originate in urges that are rarely satisfied with single images.
Minor White
#11. I strive for what you do find in Shakespeare's work - that there is a definite humanity and a definite character behind the writing in the sonnets, and it's very real because it's so deeply personal. I try to aspire to that in what I do.
Rufus Wainwright
#12. I came from a white middle class neighborhood. Was I expected to go back there and teach the woman next door about Renaissance sonnets? The embarrassing truth of the matter was that I was being chosen because Yale University had some peculiar idea about what my skin color or ethnicity signified.
Richard Rodriguez
#13. I'm working now on a collection of Shakespearean sonnets, about 100 of them, that I may publish if anyone's interested. My take on life is a little different from the bard's.
Jack Prelutsky
#14. Elinor Lipman is to tweets what Shakespeare is to sonnets.
Firoozeh Dumas
#15. I write ... sonnets ... and writing sonnets is boring. You have to find rhymes; you have to write hendecasyllables; so after a while, I get bored and my drawer is overflowing with unfinished short poems.
Italo Calvino
#16. It's often assumed that British actors read Shakespeare and sonnets as we're going to bed at night and we're all very familiar with it.
Kate Winslet
#17. The Sonnets of Shakespeare have the fascination of an autobiography, without its clarity. It is like reading an important document in a cave by the light of matches which keep blowing out.
Gilbert Highet
#18. Culture, of course, is an extremely vague word, covering everything from the shaping of hand-axes to corporate mission statements, as well as the finer appreciation of the sonnets of Shakespeare and the paintings of Hokusai;
Nicholas Ostler
#19. Application when it comes to understanding the mysteries of creation or the fact that light can enter the eye and form an image in the brain and send a poetic tendril down the arm into a clutch of fingers that could write the Shakespearean sonnets.
James Lee Burke
#20. Love. The stuff of sonnets and madrigals and fairy tales and novels.
Love. The elusive emotion that made men weep and sing and ache with desire and passion.
Love. The life-altering feeling that made everything bright and warm and wonderful. The emotion all the world was desperate to discover.
Sarah MacLean
#21. Sometimes, when you are in a really constrained situation, it makes you more focused about what you want to say and where you're heading. The most beautiful love poems that were ever written are sonnets, composed in a very constraining form.
Etgar Keret
#22. The ordinary detective discovers from a ledger or a diary that a crime has been committed. We discover from a book of sonnets that a crime will be committed.
G.K. Chesterton
#23. There might be symphonies of perfume, Mozarts of musk. Novelists might construct nasal narratives, versifiers sonnets of scent. Sculpture would entail subtleties of shape that only fingers trained through hundreds of millions of years of tactile evolution could discriminate.
Richard Fortey
#24. Sonnets are guys writing in English, imitating an Italian song form. It was a form definitely sung as often as it was recited.
Steve Earle
#25. Want to talk about Shakespeare's sonnets?" asked Orphu of Io.
Are you shitting me?" The moravecs loved the ancient human colloquial phrases, the more scatological the better.
Yes," said Orphu. "I am most definitely shitting you, my friend.
Dan Simmons
#27. I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head.
Sylvia Plath
#28. Because God the Sonnets is made of the energy of the Holy Spirit, He is the door for us to enter the Kingdom of Heaven...The Buddha is also described as a door, a teacher, who shows us the way in this life.
Thich Nhat Hanh
#29. Like a Passover Poet gliding from house to house and from trembling soul to trembling soul the wind scribbled sonnets of first time love and weeping haikus of last hours on earth.
Aberjhani
#30. Some say that Cusk has no sense of humour, but expecting giggles from this writer would be akin to expecting sonnets from Benny Hill.
Julie Burchill
#31. Shakespeare had all these sonnets where what he said came down to this: Youth is fleeting and you'd better get married and have children and make a copy of the beauty you own because the world owns it too.
Elizabeth Knox
#32. Even now, Dickon was upstairs, writing sonnets to his new love, while back at Seadown House, Marianne was writing 'Ella' on scraps of paper and then burning them.
Jessica Day George
#33. Christopher Marlowe or Francis Bacon The author of Lear remains unshaken Willie Herbert or Mary Fitton What does it matter? The Sonnets were written.
Noel Coward
#34. What is the deepest loss that you have suffered? If drinking is bitter, change yourself to wine. - from Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29 Rainer Maria Rilke
Kate Bernheimer
#35. I used to write sonnets and various things, and moved from there into writing prose, which, incidentally, is a lot more interesting than poetry, including the rhythms of prose.
Shelby Foote
#36. I'm thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art, And this is the only immortality that you and I may share, my Lolita.
Vladimir Nabokov
#37. I can't pray or weigh my words right; doomsday
is here my friend, but you're immune. We suffer
for you. I'm weaving crowns of sonnets, dreads;
a souvenir so you'll never forget your friends.
Jalina Mhyana
#38. There had been romances in my schooldays
but all my friends had had those; we were forever sending each other Valentines, writing sonnets on the prefect's eyes ... This wasn't like that. It was a thing of the heart and the head and the body. A real, true thing, grown-up.
Sarah Waters
#39. Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets.
Oscar Wilde
#40. Characters to me are like sonnets, they have limits that you obey which allow a force to enter in, an invention that makes the novel possible. Change the limits and the force leaves. The novel becomes impossible.
Alexander Chee
#41. O friendship, I too will press flowers between the pages of Shakespeare's sonnets!
Virginia Woolf
#42. When I was an undergraduate I had very badly annotated editions of Shakespeare's sonnets, all of which left out the important fact that will has a sexual sense in Shakespeare's sonnets.
Thom Gunn
#43. Human bipolarity was both the binding force and the driving energy for all human behavior, from sonnets to nuclear equations. If any being thinks that human psychologists exaggerate on this point, let it search Terran patent offices, libraries, and art galleries for creations of eunuchs.
Robert A. Heinlein
#44. After you kind of find your footing, sonnets are what comes easiest.
Marilyn Nelson
#46. I've stopped acting, but I don't think I've finished using my voice. I could, and probably will, record the whole of Shakespeare's sonnets. They live at the side of my bed and are my constant companions.
Peter O'Toole
#47. Ode to the Chamber
... linger here amidst the chamber
in which we embrace our love
talk to me of sonnets
and call me turtledove ...
Muse
#48. He had the "Love-sonnets from the Portuguese" in mind as he wrote, and he wrote under the best conditions for great work, at a climacteric of living, in the throes of his own sweet love-madness. The
Jack London
#49. I love it when you talk clean to me, quoting training manuals like sonnets.
Amanda Hocking
#50. You didn't mind me being sweet a few hours ago," he reminds me. I roll my eyes as I pull my hand back. "That's because you were giving me my third orgasm. I would've let you recite sonnets as long as you kept doing that thing with your tongue.
Corinne Michaels
#51. On a winter night I hear the Easter bell:
I knock on graves and quicken the dead,
Until at last in a grave I see - myself.
(Winter Sonnets: XI)
Vyacheslav Ivanov
#52. I am a close friend of Robert Loggia. And I just love how, with actors, there's the screen persona. Here is Robert, known for his portrayal of many characters, including gangsters. But in real life, he is elegant and erudite. He sits in the garden reading the sonnets of William Shakespeare.
Luanne Rice
#53. Why people fall in love has been debated since before Shakespeare's sonnets.
Joe Bruno
#54. Not even the tallest mountain of raccoon droppings could ever get in the way of my love for you.'
'That might be the most romantic thing you've ever said to me.'
'It's Shakespeare. One of the sonnets.
Gina Damico
#55. The Sonnets to Orpheus, Part Two, XII
Want the change. Be inspired by the flame
where everything shines as it disappears.
The artist, when sketching, loves nothing so much
as the curve of the body as it turns away.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#56. No, I can't stop for sonnets; my mother is sitting up. I'll look you up tomorrow, sometime or other, and do for goodness' sake try and realise that you're a pestilential scourge, or your find yourself in a most awful fix. Good-night!
Kenneth Grahame
#57. Don't they feed you at Navarre house?"
"They throw out some gruel between the indoctrination sessions and propaganda films. Then we're off marching around the grounds and the recitation of sonnets to Celina's loveliness.
Chloe Neill
#58. A witty and informative professor posits that more authors do not choose titles borrowed from Shakespeare's sonnets and plays for the reason some people claim not to have partners: "All the good ones are taken."
Thomas C. Foster
#59. I presented him with an African violet, which I saw as symbolically useful, though I'm not sure the others understood the subtleties. (African violets must be watered from the bottom, not the top, and this, I believe, is analogous to the writing of sonnets in the twenty-first century.)
Carol Shields
#60. I have always wanted what I have now come to call the voice of personal narrative. That has always been the appealing voice in poetry. It started for me lyrically in Shakespeare's sonnets.
Diane Wakoski
#61. My beloved husband goes through radiation, and a book of sonnets is my passionate response. And then after he dies, I write another book of poems as a farewell. The two keywords here are passion and joy. I simply have a passion for writing, and I do it with joy.
Jane Yolen
#62. Most girls want love sonnets, and you want a song about a cowboy wanted dead of alive- Jax Stone
Abbi Glines
#63. I've seen many strange things in my work, my friend, but a wealthy lawyer who leaves everything to go write sonnets is not part of the repertoire.
-Ricardo Salvador
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#64. You're not going to start screaming sonnets outside my bedroom window, are you?"
He winked. "I just might.
Kenya Wright
#65. The public is absolutely fascinated by aging. They don't want to get old. And you can see - read Shakespeare. Read the sonnets. They're all about aging.
Cynthia Kenyon
#66. There is hope for a man who has never read Malory or Boswell or Tristam Shandy or Shakespeare's Sonnets: but what can you do with a man who says he "has read" them, meaning he has read them once, and thinks that this settles the matter?
C.S. Lewis
#67. No decent man ought to read Shakespeare's sonnets because it was like listening at keyholes.
Virginia Woolf
#68. Some people lusted after cars, which had never made sense to me. For me, bookshelves could inspire whole spontaneous sonnets, so maybe it was an each to her own scenario.
Megan Crane
#70. Disperse the sorrow of my sadden'd mind
O Lord, help me some blessed peace to find!
Timothy Salter
#71. Then, were not summer's distillation left
A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,
Beauty's effect with beauty were bereft,
Nor it nor no remembrance what it was.
But flowers distilled, though they with winter meet,
Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet.
William Shakespeare
#72. With a sugared tongue I whispered goodnight,
Kissed your eyelids, and set thoughts to light.
Selina A. Mahmood
#73. A gaze to stop still, wonder at the shimmering depths.
A memory near the amygdala stored, an unforgettable tune,
Such an image did it impress, your sweet nostalgic scents.
Selina A. Mahmood
#74. To give yourself away keep yourself still,
And you must live drawn by your own sweet skill.
William Shakespeare
#76. A sonnet might look dinky, but it was somehow big enough to accommodate love, war, death, and O.J. Simpson. You could fit the whole world in there if you shoved hard enough.
Anne Fadiman
#77. For all that beauty that doth cover thee
Is but the seemly raiment of my heart,
Which in thy breast doth live, as thine in me.
How can I then be elder than thou art?
William Shakespeare
#78. Then of thy beauty do I question make,
That thou among the wastes of time must go,
Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake,
And die as fast as they see others grow.
William Shakespeare
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