T Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with T. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“The poem has a social effect of some kind whether or not the poet wills it to have. It has a kenetic force, it sets in motion...elements in the reader that would otherwise remain stagnant.”
“The poem has to bear the weight with image, language... the screenplay with dialogue, plot.”
“The Poem I Just Wrote
The poem I just wrote is not real.
And neither is the black horse
who is grazing on my belly.
And neither are the ghosts
of old lovers who smile at me
from the jukebox.”
Source: She Had Some Horses
“The poem I want to write is impossible. A stone that floats.”
Source: The Monster Loves His Labyrinth
“The poem in the head is always perfect. Resistance starts when you try to convert it into language. Language itself is a kind of resistance to the pure flow of self.”
“The poem in the head is always perfect. Resistance begins when you try to convert it into language.”
“The poem in Where Good Swimmers Drown are love poems. But love poems that defy the divisions between emotion and intellect, private and public, life and art, writer and reader. To read Elbe's poems is to discover not only what it means to be in love, but what it means to be alive.”
“The poem in which the reader does not feel himself or herself a participant is a lecture, listened to from an uncomfortable chair, in a stuffy room, inside a building.”
Source: Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems
“The poem is a capsule where we wrap up our punishable secrets.”
Source: The William Carlos Williams Reader
“The poem is a confession of faith.”
“The poem is a cry of the unborn heart. Yes, because the poem perfectly embodies the world, there is no world without poem.”
Source: Loon Lake: A Novel
“the poem is a dice throw
on a patch of darkness
that may or may not glow”
“The poem is a form of texting... it's the original text. It's a perfecting of a feeling in language - it's a way of saying more with less, just as texting is.”
“The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful.”
“The poem is a plank laid over the lion's den.”
Source: Collected Poems
“The poem is a process, a way for me to discover questions, to ask them clearly or to discover the results of certain suppositions. Suppositions are a form of questioning.”
“The poem is a structure of signifiers which absorbs and reconstitutes the signified.”
“The poem is always the last resort. In it the poet makes a world in little, and finds peace, even though, under complete focused emotion, the evocation be far more bitter than reality, or far more lovely.”
Source: Journey around my room: the autobiography of Louise Bogan : a mosaic
“The poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages. In all modesty, I confess that it may be the death of literature as we know it.”
“The poem is called: The first glance.
You were standing there
Your presence changing the atmosphere.
I can’t help to stare
Your beauty is so rare.
Watching you
Is like the sunset on the ocean shore.
Hearing your voice
Left me wanting more.
Oh, baby you’re giving me no choice.
I beg you to fulfill my loneliness
With your gracefulness.
I beg you to give me a glimpse
Of your pure soul.
Baby, make me whole,
Make me free
And go out with me.”
Source: Under the Moon
“The poem is important, but not more than the people whose survival it serves.”
Source: The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry
“The poem is in my hands, and can run stories through her hands.”
Source: Unfortunately, it was Paradise: Selected Poems
“The poem is itself a mirror.”
“The poem is lonely. It is lonely and en route. Its author stays with it. Does this very fact not place the poem already here, at its inception, in the encounter, in the mystery of encounter?”
Source: Paul Celan: Selections
“The poem is neither here nor there, and with a girl's breast
it can illuminate the nights.
With the glow of an apple it fills two bodies with light
and with a gardenia's breath it can revive a homeland!”
Source: Unfortunately, it was Paradise: Selected Poems
“The poem is not a physical body. It's a textual body that has life only insofar as it can act symbolically. It cannot physically act.”
“The poem is not a thing we see; it is, rather, a light by which we may see.”
“The poem is not only the point of origin for all the language and narrative arts, the poem returns us to the very social function of art as such.”
“The poem is not, as someone put it, deflective of entry. But the real question is, 'What happens to the reader once he or she gets inside the poem?' That's the real question for me, is getting the reader into the poem and then taking the reader somewhere, because I think of poetry as a kind of form of travel writing.”
“The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot be.”
Source: Selected poems
“The poem is the device through which the ordinary world is seen in a new way - engaging, compelling, even beautiful.”
Source: The Poetry Home Repair Manual: Practical Advice for Beginning Poets
“The poem might come to you as you're preparing to teach a lecture, right? And when you say, "no" to that occasion, that poem is gone.”
“The poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully.”
Source: Selected poems
“The poem of the understanding is philosophy.”
Source: Novalis: Philosophical Writings
“The poem or the discovery exists in two moments of vision: the moment of appreciation as much as that of creation; for the appreciator must see the movement, wake to the echo which was started in the creation of the work. In the moment of appreciation we live again the moment when the creator saw and held the hidden likeness. When a simile takes us aback and persuades us together, when we find a juxtaposition in a picture both odd and intriguing, when a theory is at once fresh and convincing, we do not merely nod over someone else's work. We re-enact the creative act, and we ourselves make the discovery again...
...Reality is not an exhibit for man's inspection, labeled: "Do not touch." There are no appearances to be photographed, no experiences to be copied, in which we do not take part. We re-make nature by the act of discovery, in the poem or in the theorem. And the great poem and the deep theorem are new to every reader, and yet are his own experiences, because he himself re-creates them. They are the marks of unity in variety; and in the instant when the mind seizes this for itself, in art or in science, the heart misses a beat.”
“The poem should provide that break, that vision into reality which relieves and makes alive.”
Source: Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke
“The poem springs from the half spoken words of the patient.... When asked, how I have for so many years continued an equal interest in medicine and the poem, I reply that they amount for me to nearly the same thing.”
“The poem that comes closest to saying what I think is the one in Human Wishes called "Rusia en 1931." This poem is about [Osip] Mandelstam, who was a great poet and an anti-Stalinist, and [Cesar] Vallejo, who was a great poet and a Stalinist.”
“The Poem That Took The Place Of A Mountain
There it was, word for word,
The poem that took the place of a mountain.
He breathed its oxygen,
Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table.
It reminded him how he had needed
A place to go to in his own direction
How he had recomposed the pines,
Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds
For the outlook that would be right,
Where he would be complete in an unexplained completion:
The exact rock where his inexactness
Would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged
Where he could lie and gazing down at the sea,
Recognize his unique and solitary home.”
“The poem was made not just to exist, but to speak—to be company. It was everything that was needed, when everything was needed.”
Source: Upstream: Selected Essays
“The poem you sent me was as fiery and virile as anything you've ever written - or anybody else, for that matter. Especially the second part went to my brain like the flaming liquor of insanity. No one else besides Jack London has the power to move me just that way.”
“The poem you write, becomes the temple of your soul. With every word that falls, you flower inside as the pain is let loose, light fills and the river shows the first signs of flowing.”
“The poem, for me, is simply the first sound realized in the modality of being.”
Source: Muthologos: the collected lectures & interviews
“The poem, in a sense, is no more or less than a little machine for remembering itself ... Poetry is therefore primarily a commemorative act.”
“The poem, the song, the picture, is only water drawn from the well of the people, and it should be given back to them in a cup of beauty so that they may drink - and in drinking understand themselves.”
“The poems ... are moments when I had the intensity to see, and the energy to build, some careful analog that completed the seeing. ... All I have been left is the exhausting habit of trying to tack up the slack in my life with words.”
“The poems are all wrong. It's a bang, a really big bang. Not a whimper. And sometimes gold can stay.”
“The poems are part of my attempt to understand being in the world in an honest way.”
“The poems are processional, station after station, a writing life. You write what's been handed out to you by life. You do not choose the itinerary.
- "What You Write Is Nobody's Business": An Interview With Wong May (The Believer, May 2014)”
“The poems I did write there [in Harvard] include Alphabets the 1984 Phi Beta Kappa poem and A Sofa in the Forties. And, of course, the John Harvard poem for the 350th anniversary Villanelle for an Anniversary.”