Top 100 Sonnet Quotes
#1. The next time you see a person with a composed face and a soft voice, remember that inside her mind she might be solving an equation, composing a sonnet, designing a hat. She might, that is, be deploying the power of quiet.
Susan Cain
#2. You mean you're comparing our lives to a sonnet? A strict form, but freedom within it? Yes. Mrs. Whatsit said. You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. What you say is completely up to you.
Madeleine L'Engle
#3. Wheresoe'er I turn my view,
All is strange, yet nothing new:
Endless labor all along,
Endless labor to be wrong:
Phrase that Time has flung away;
Uncouth words in disarray,
Trick'd in antique ruff and bonnet,
Ode, and elegy, and sonnet.
Samuel Johnson
#4. The sonnet has been the one distinctive characteristic of love present throughout the years.
James Marquess
#5. In a world of bands called Limp Bizkit and Hoobastank, Electric Sheep rolls off the tongue like a Shakespearean love sonnet. Leave me alone.
Tom Morello
#6. The worth of that is that which it contains, and that is this, and this with thee remains. end of Sonnet 74
William Shakespeare
#7. You can't beat a good sonnet, and you can write a sonnet without being married to the damned thing.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
#9. I've been used to consider poetry as the food of love " Mr.Darcy
Of a fine, stout, healthy love it may. Everything nourishes what is strong already. But if it be only a slight, thin sort of inclination, I am convinced that one good sonnet will starve it entirely away." Eliza
Jane Austen
#10. By the time I was seven, I did a sonnet at Shakespeare's Globe theatre for Shakespeare's birthday because my dad had been at the first season of the Globe and was friends with the artistic director. Somehow, that lead to me doing a sonnet!
Alfred Enoch
#11. In a thousand words I can have the Lord's Prayer, the 23rd Psalm, the Hippocratic Oath, a sonnet by Shakespeare, the Preamble to the Constitution, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and almost all of the Boy Scout Oath. Now exactly what picture were you planning to trade for all that?
Roy H. Williams
#12. I have three phobias which, could I mute them,would make my life as slick as a sonnet,but dull as ditch water:I hate to go to bed,I hate to get up and I hate to be alone ...
Tallulah Bankhead
#13. The comparison is perhaps a little bit unfair because a sonnet written by a machine will be better appreciated by another machine.
Walter Isaacson
#14. Anne could not immediately fall into a quotation again. The sweet scenes of autumn were for a while put by - unless some tender sonnet, fraught with the apt analogy of the declining year, with declining happiness, and the images of youth and hope, and spring, all gone together, blessed her memory.
Jane Austen
#15. What is love? Love is not a collection of words, a sonnet, music or art.
Love is the act of you not existing so that someone else can.
IQBAL
#16. The form I most enjoy writing is the sonnet or sonnet-like forms, where you have a - you know, three stanzas or two stanzas that lead into a concluding couplet.
Sherman Alexie
#17. William Shakespeare: I have a wife, yes, and I cannot marry the daughter of Sir Robert De Lesseps. You needed no wife come from Stratford to tell you that, and yet, you let me come to your bed.
Viola De Lesseps: Calf-love. I loved the writer and gave up the prize for a sonnet.
Marc Norman
#18. I prefer assonance and internal rhyme to end rhyme. I mean, the sonnet already looks like a box. Best not to get too boxed in, though.
Anna Journey
#19. I love form, but I'm not interested in forms. I've never written a sonnet or villanelle or sestina or any of that. For me, it's a kind of line. It's a rhythm. It's something musical.
Robert Pinsky
#20. Life ... is like a sonnet: You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself.
Madeleine L'Engle
#21. Abolishing the book is like abolishing the symphony, or sonata form, or the sonnet, or the wall painting.
David Gelernter
#22. You are given the form, but you must write the sonnet for yourself.
Madeleine L'Engle
#23. Sanity is a sonnet with a strict meter and rhyme scheme-and my mind is free verse.
Holly Schindler
#24. Therefore we value the poet. All the argument and all the wisdom is not in the encyclopedia, or the treatise on metaphysics, or the Body of Divinity, but in the sonnet or the play.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#25. The short story is not as restrictive as the sonnet, but, of all the literary forms, it is possibly the most single-minded. ... at the end there has to be the literary equivalent of the magician's puff of smoke, an outcome that is both startling and anticipated.
Louis Menand
#26. A Sonnet is a
moment's
monument,
Memorial from the
Soul's eternity
To one dead
deathless hour.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
#27. Creativity is the result of a struggle between vitality and form. As anyone who has tried to write a sonnet or scan poetry, is aware, the form ideally do not take away from the creativity but may add to it.
Rollo May
#28. The martini: the only American invention as perfect as the sonnet.
H.L. Mencken
#29. Just because science can't in practice explain things like the love that motivates a poet to write a sonnet, that doesn't mean that religion can. It's a simple and logical fallacy to say, 'If science can't do something therefore religion can.'
Richard Dawkins
#30. Life, with its rules, its obligations, and its freedoms, is like a sonnet: You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. - Mrs. Whatsit
Madeleine L'Engle
#31. I will not make a sonnet from
Each little private martyrdom;
Nor out of love left dead with time
Construe a stanza or a rime.
We do not suffer to afford
The searched for and the subtle word:
There is too much that may not be
At the caprice of prosody.
Joseph Auslander
#34. We can die by it, if not live by love, And if unfit for tombs and hearse Our legend be, it will be fit for verse; And if no peace of chronicle we prove, We'll build in sonnet pretty rooms; As well a well wrought urne becomes The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs.
John Donne
#35. 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
#36. Like a Shakespearean sonnet that captures the very essence of love, or a painting that brings out the beauty of the human form that is far more than just skin deep, Euler's Equation reaches down into the very depths of existence.
Keith Devlin
#37. I have been used to consider poetry as "the food of love" said Darcy.
"Of a fine, stout, healthy love it may. Everything nourishes what is
strong already. But if it be only a slight, thin sort of inclination, I
am convinced that one good sonnet will starve it entirely away.
Jane Austen
#38. Leon Theremin's original designs are elegant, ingenious and effective. As electronics goes, the theremin is very simple. But there are so many subtleties hidden in the details of the design. It's like a great sonnet, or a painting, or a speech, that is perfectly done on more than one level.
Robert Moog
#39. A sentimental aphorism is even more a surprise than a hard- boiled sonnet.
Mason Cooley
#40. A true sonnet goes eight lines and then takes a turn for better or worse and goes six or eight lines more.
Robert Frost
#41. 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
#42. And that's why I love you," she said, smiling. "Because occasionally, and quite unexpectedly, you sound like a sonnet.
Scott Wilbanks
#43. Malone's commentary on Sonnet 93 was a defining moment in the history not only of Shakespeare studies but also of literary biography in general. What has emerged in our time as a dominant form of life writing can trace its lineage back to this extended footnote.
James Shapiro
#44. If I ever asked you about love, you'd probably quote me a sonnet. But you've never looked a woman and been totally vulnerable.
Robin Williams
#45. In the poetry of arrival, the garage door is free verse; the front door can be anything from a rhyming couplet to a sonnet.
Akiko Busch
#46. In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
-Sonnet 73
William Shakespeare
#47. There is no objection to the proposal: in order to learn to be a poet, I shall try to write a sonnet. But the thing you must try to write, when you do so, is a real sonnet, and not a practice sonnet.
James Fenton
#48. For it is a perennial puzzle why no woman wrote a word of that extraordinary literature when every other man, it seemed, was capable of song or sonnet.
Virginia Woolf
#49. I was born in the era of the novel. I've written many, as well as collections of poetry, and essays for mouthing off. I've written to inches, word-counts, page-counts, even the sonnet and the screenplay (which I call a plot poem). I write narrative. That's it. I just want to tell it.
Julianna Baggott
#50. Scorn not the sonnet. Critic, you have frowned, Mindless of its just honours; with this key Shakespeare unlocked his heart.
William Wordsworth
#51. I love you as one loves certain dark things - Pablo Neruda, Sonnet XVII
Cassandra Clare
#52. Even if you walk exactly the same route each time - as with a sonnet - the events along the route cannot be imagined to be the same from day to day, as the poet's health, sight, his anticipations, moods, fears, thoughts cannot be the same.
A.R. Ammons
#53. To Sonnet, wearing castoff clothing was just another way to make her different from the other kids at school. As if she needed one more thing to make her different.
Susan Wiggs
#54. When you go to bed, don't leave bread or milk
on the table: it attracts the dead.
[sonnet 6]
Rainer Maria Rilke
#55. But how are you this fine evening? - My arches are falling. - Isn't that the first line of a sonnet?
Patrick Ness
#56. The idea that a student can write a sonnet or a novel without having a sound understanding about its history, and where it fits into literature as a whole, seems to me to be manifestly daft.
Nicholas Royle
#57. If you want to be considered a poet, you will have to show mastery of the petrarchan sonnet form or the sestina. Your musical efforts must begin with well-formed fugues. There is no substitute for craft ... Art begins with craft, and there is no art until craft has been mastered.
Anthony Burgess
#58. The pleasures of love proceed successively from a distich to a quatrain, from a quatrain to a sonnet, from a sonnet to a ballad, from a ballad to an ode, from an ode to a cantata, and from a cantata to a dithyramb. A husband who begins with the dithyramb is a fool.
Honore De Balzac
#60. Adieu, valour: rust, rapier: be still, drum, for your manager is in love: yea, he loveth. Assist me, some extemporal god of rhyme, for I am sure I shall turn sonnet. Devise, wit: write, pen, for I am for whole volumes in folio.
William Shakespeare
#61. What is it about a secret love that makes everything they do shine, everything they say sound like a sonnet and every expression they make perfect, when to everyone else you speak to they're quite ordinary. It's a cruel sort of thing.
Stefanie Schneider
#63. She was wearing a sleeveless top that held her breasts in the most marvelous way, the balance between what it revealed and what it left to the imagination as poetic as a Shakespearean sonnet.
E.E. Giorgi
#64. To me there's no creativity without boundaries. If you're gonna write a sonnet, it's 14 lines, so it's solving the problem within the container.
Lorne Michaels
#65. How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea, Whose action is no stronger than a flower? - Sonnet LXV
William Shakespeare
#66. No, I am that I am, and they that level
At my abuses, reckon up their own;
I may be straight, though they themselves be bevel.
Sonnet 121
William Shakespeare
#67. 'Cue for Treason,' by Geoffrey Trease, radicalized my young girl brain and made me want to be a gender-bending, sonnet-writing anarchist. It really made something roar to life inside of me.
Miriam Toews
#68. [He who can describe how his heart is ablaze is burning on a small pyre] ~ Petrarch, Sonnet 137
(from Montaigne, On sadness)
Francesco Petrarca
#69. The perfect pop song is a 20th-century creation; it's not a sonnet, it's not an opera, it's something short - three and a half minutes by nature - and has this ability to travel and to defy class and economic structures.
Doug Aitken
#70. If I asked you about love, you'd probably quote me a sonnet. But you've never looked at a woman and been totally vulnerable. Known someone that could level you with her eyes, feeling like God put an angel on earth just for you. Who could rescue you from the depths of hell.
Robin Williams
#71. My sonnet asserts that the sonnet still lives. My epic, should such fortune befall me, asserts that the heroic narrative is not lost - that it is born again.
James Fenton
#72. When a sonnet is mediocre it is bad, for it should be sublime.
Giacomo Casanova
#73. If I wrote in a sonnet form, I would be distorting. Or if I had some great new idea for line breaks and I used it in a poem, but it's really not right for that poem, but I wanted it, that would be distorting.
Sharon Olds
#74. An intellectual's weapon is writing, but sometimes people react as if it were a firearm. A writer can do a lot to change the situation, but as far as I know, no dictatorship has fallen because of a sonnet.
Mario Benedetti
#75. The list of side effects was lengthy and horrible. Sonnet had pored over it, along with all the other literature she'd hastily devoured, searching for grains of hope. The worst part of chemo started after the drugs were administered.
Susan Wiggs
#76. The true self seeks release, not constraint. It doesn't want to be corseted in a sonnet or made to learn a system of musical notations. It wants liberation, which is why very often it fastens on the novel, for the novel seems spacious, undefined, free.
Rachel Cusk
#77. Has anyone ever been more lovesick than a zombie, that pale, dull metaphor for love, all animal craving and lurching, outstretched arms, his very existence a sonnet about how much he wants those brains?
Jess Walter
#78. Profound subject matter can be encompassed in small space - for proof, look at any sonnet by Shakespeare!
Cynthia Ozick
#79. You became the sonnet that was etched in my minds eye. Existing outside the dreams we shared in the presence of our eternal love.
Truth Devour
#80. What is a 'thing'? All is movement, a flowing. How stupid it is to speak of the 'mind'. There is a body; there is a mind: they are mixed up together. Shakespeare with a hole in his sock will not write the sonnet of a Shakespeare with socks intact.
Kenneth Patchen
#81. Every time I get happy
the Nana-hex comes through.
Birds turn into plumber's tools,
a sonnet turns into a dirty joke,
a wind turns into a tracheotomy,
a boat turns into a corpse ...
Anne Sexton
#82. Now Autumn's fire burns slowly along the woods and day by day the dead leaves fall and melt.
William Allingham
#83. But, love, hate on; for now I know thy mind.
Those that can see, thou lov'st; and I am blind.
William Shakespeare
#84. 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
#85. So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
William Shakespeare
#89. Therefore I lie with her and she with me,
And in our faults by lies we flatter'd be.
William Shakespeare
#90. Tisiphone: the avenger (voice of revenge)
"Women guardians of the natural order"
Think of the morning dream with ghosts
Why draw the widow's card and wear the gorgeous
Queen of Swords crown
Hoa Nguyen
#91. 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
#92. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
#93. But thou art all my art, and dost advance
As high as learning my rude ignorance.
William Shakespeare
#95. 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
#97. O benefit of ill! Now I find true
That better is by evil still made better;
And ruin'd love, when it is built anew,
Grows fairer than at first, more strong, far greater.
So I return rebuk'd to my content,
And gain by ills thrice more than I have spent.
William Shakespeare
#98. Waiting for dusk and someone dear to come and whip him down the street, gently home
Donald Justice
#99. For summer and his pleasures wait on thee,
And, thou away, the very birds are mute:
Or, if they sing, 'tis with so dull a cheer,
That leaves look pale, dreading the winter's near.
William Shakespeare
#100. To me, fair friend, you never can be old,
For as you were when first your eye I ey'd,
Such seems your beauty still.
William Shakespeare
