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Quote by Bret Lott

“Learning to write . . . is a desperately idiosyncratic, eccentric, single-souled, lifelong quest.”

Quote by Bret Lott

Author

Bret Lott
Bret Lott

Bret Lott is an American author born on October 8, 1958. His works are known for their profound character development and delicate emotional portrayal. His representative works include 'Remembering the Lord Bird' and 'Light from the Dark'. Lott's writing often focuses on themes such as family, identity, and memory, and is highly appreciated by readers. more

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“I've never been able to write poetry without having vast tracts of dead time. Poetry requires a certain kind of disciplined indolence that the world, including many prose writers, doesn't recognize as discipline. It is, though. It's the discipline to endure hours that you refuse to fill with anything but the possibility of poetry, though you may in fact not be able to write a word of it just then, and though it may be playing practical havoc with your life. It's the discipline of preparedness.”

“Poetry has its uses for despair. It can carve a shape in which a pain can seem to be; it can give one’s loss a form and dimension so that it might be loss and not simply a hopeless haunting. It can do these things for one person, or it can do them for an entire culture. But poetry is for psychological, spiritual, or emotional pain. For physical pain it is, like everything but drugs, useless.”

“One of the qualities essential to being good at reading poetry is also one of the qualities essential to being good at life: a capacity for surprise. It’s easy to become so mired in our likes or dislikes that we can no longer recall that person who once responded to poems—and to people—without any preconceived notions of what we wanted them to be.”