A Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with A. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.”
Source: Selected Letters
“A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.”
“A poem begins with a lump in the throat”
Source: The Collected Prose of Robert Frost
“A poem begins with a lump in the throat; a homesickness or a love sickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.”
Source: The Collected Prose of Robert Frost
“A poem by Rudyard Kipling says derisively of people who despise soldiers and police that they make ‘mock o’ uniforms that guard you while you sleep.’ You are likely to have a strong reaction pro or con to this sentiment and how Kipling expressed it, but you will not be able to defend your view with arguments that would convince someone who has the opposite reaction. If you are intellectually sophisticated you mare recognize that your conviction, however strong, cannot be shown to be ‘right,’ but at most reasonable. Yet that recognition will not weaken the strength of your conviction or its influence on your behavior.” 105-06 (quoting Rudyard Kipling, Tommy.)”
Source: How Judges Think
“A poem can't do its work if you only read snippets of it.”
Source: Paper Towns
“A poem can't free us from the struggle for existence, but it can uncover desires and appetites buried under the accumulating emergencies of our lives, the fabricated wants and needs we have had urged on us, have accepted as our own. It's not a philosophical or psychological blueprint; it's an instrument for embodied experience.”
Source: What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics
“A poem can use anything to talk about anything.”
“A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning.”
Source: In the Words of E.B. White: Quotations from America's Most Companionable of Writers
“A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning. The city is like poetry: it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines. The island of Manhattan is without any doubt the greatest human concentrate on earth, the poem whose magic is comprehensible to millions of permanent residents but whose full meaning will always remain elusive.”
“A poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites, by elevating the soul.”
Source: Essays and Reviews
“A Poem does not grow by jerks. As trees in Spring produce a new ring of tissue, so does every poet put forth a fresh outlay of stuff at the same season.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Wilfred Owen (Illustrated)
“A poem doesn't do everything for you.
You are supposed to go on with your thinking.
You are supposed to enrich
the other person's poem with your extensions,
your uniquely personal understandings,
thus making the poem serve you.”
Source: In Montgomery, and Other Poems
“A poem doesn’t come out and tell you what it has to say. It circles back on itself, eating its own tail and making you guess what it means.”
Source: Chime
“A poem either makes you alone or accompanied.
It is either Self-Expedition or Global-Expression.”
“A poem employs both the sound and the sense of language, it treats words not just as signifiers but as a plastic medium of artistic expression.”
“A poem for the rulers of nations.
"Heavy lies the head that bears the crown,
A weight of power, from dusk to dawn.
In regal halls, with scepter and throne,
The ruler's heart carries burdens unknown.
Heavy lies the head, but it bears the weight,
Of destiny's hand, of a kingdom's fate.
Through trials and triumphs, they must lead,
For the crown they wear is the nation's need.
Served with platters of rumours and hate,
Still they feed our nations from a selfless plate.
Endless gossip and selfish press,
Yet they take the punch with no regret.
With grace and strength, they rise above,
Their duty to cherish, their people to love.
In the realm they govern, their hearts resound,
For heavy lies the head that wears the crown.”
“A Poem from Edna St. Vincent Millay: Grown-up Was it for this I uttered prayers, And sobbed and cursed and kicked the stairs, That now, domestic as a plate, I should retire at half-past eight?”
Source: Edna St. Vincent Millay: selected poems : the centenary edition
“A poem generated by its own laws may be unrealized and bad in terms of so-called objective principles of taste, judgement, deduction.”
Source: Set in motion: essays, interviews, and dialogues
“A poem has a certain - a different time. For instance, a poem is a very private experience, and it doesn't have a driving tempo. In other words, you know, you can go back and forward; you can comeback; you can linger. You know, it's a completely different time reference.”
“A poem has secrets that the poet knows nothing of.”
“A poem in form still has to have voice, gesture, a sense of discovery, a metaphoric connection, as any poetry does.”
“A poem in my opinion, is opposed to a work of science by having for its immediate object, pleasure, not truth.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe (Illustrated)
“A poem in the heart is worth
more than a million dollars
in the bank account.”
“A poem is a box, a thing, to put other things in. For safe keeping.”
Source: The Little Death of Self: Nine Essays Toward Poetry
“A poem is a construction of inner space.
Language is to inner space as light is to material space.”
“A poem is a cup of words open to the sky and wind in a bucket.”
“A poem is a finished work of the mind, it is not the work of a finished mind.”
Source: Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures
“A poem is a flexible thing, and a poem is a poem.”
“A poem is a form of refrigeration that stops language going bad.”
“A poem is a frozen moment
melted by each reader for themselves
to flow into the here and now.”
“A poem is a hand, a hook, a prayer. It is a soul in action.”
“A poem is a liminal space that can offer a sensation of belonging. A poem won't bring you a cold beer, but it may offer you a stool where you can sit down and feel momentarily at home. LGBT folks need intergenerational spaces where their lives and experiences are foregrounded.”
“A poem is a meteor.”
“A poem is a naked person.”
Source: The Lyrics: Since 1962
“A poem is a naked person... Some people say that I am a poet.”
Source: The Lyrics: Since 1962
“A poem is a neutrino - mainly nothing - it has no mass and can pass through the earth undetected.”
Source: Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures
“A poem is a painting with imagery and words; a painting is a poem of color on a reflecting mirror.”
“A poem is a place where the conditions of beyondness and withinness are made palpable, where to imagine is to feel what it is to be. It allows us to have the life we are denied because we are too busy living. Even more paradoxically, poetry permits us to live in ourselves as if we were just out of reach of ourselves.”
“A poem is a private story, after all, no matter how apparently public. The reader is always overhearing a confession.”
“A poem is a record of a discovery.”
“A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu.”
Source: Writing the Australian Crawl: Views on the Writer's Vocation
“A poem is a small machine made of words.”
“A poem is a small machine made of words. . .Its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character.”
“A poem is a small machine made out of words.”
“A poem is a spider web
Spun with words of wonder,
Woven lace held in place
By whispers made of thunder.”
“A poem is a verbal artifact which must be as skillfully
and solidly constructed as a table or a motorcycle.”
“A poem is a window that hangs between two or more human beings who otherwise live in darkened rooms.”
“A poem is an instant of lucidity in which
the entire organism participates.”
Source: The Uncertain Certainty: Interviews, Essays, and Notes on Poetry
“A poem is an invitation to a voyage. As in life, we travel to see fresh sights.”
Source: The Monster Loves His Labyrinth