T Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with T. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“The poems in Helena Mesa’s virtuosic first book, Horse Dance Underwater, run with such speed, verve, and alacrity they leave you breathless, exhilarated, and transformed as if the purest kind of song had lifted you into the air. By this quickness of language finding lyric speech, Mesa’s poems remind us of art’s joyous and ecstatic effects.”
“The poems in Katherine Soniat's new collection, The Swing Girl, weave emotion's 'spray going farther than thought' with the 'bedrock things' of the trod-upon world. These poems eddy and pool in unpredictable and often surprising ways, much as the mind moves in its twilight state between waking and sleep. The fluidity of their cadence and the luminosity of their imagery carry the reader to the wellspring of poetry itself, that deep delight of which Robert Penn Warren spoke, whose source is, in Soniat's words, 'beauty on its way to being mystery.'”
“THE POEMS OF OUR CLIMATE
I
Clear water in a brilliant bowl,
Pink and white carnations. The light
In the room more like a snowy air,
Reflecting snow. A newly-fallen snow
At the end of winter when afternoons return.
Pink and white carnations - one desires
So much more than that. The day itself
Is simplified: a bowl of white,
Cold, a cold porcelain, low and round,
With nothing more than the carnations there.
II
Say even that this complete simplicity
Stripped one of all one's torments, concealed
The evilly compounded, vital I
And made it fresh in a world of white,
A world of clear water, brilliant-edged,
Still one would want more, one would need more,
More than a world of white and snowy scents.
III
There would still remain the never-resting mind,
So that one would want to escape, come back
To what had been so long composed.
The imperfect is our paradise.
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.”
“The poems that used to entrance me in the days of Miss Violence now struck me as overdone and sickly. Alas, burthen, thine, cometh, aweary—the archaic language of unrequited love. I was irritated with such words, which rendered the unhappy lovers—I could now see—faintly ridiculous, like poor moping Miss Violence herself. Soft-edged, blurry, soggy, like a bun fallen into the water. Nothing you'd want to touch,”
Source: The Blind Assassin
“the poems to come are for you and for me and are not for mostpeople... you and i are human beings; mostpeople are snobs.”
“The poet alone knows astronomy, chemistry, vegetation, and animation, for he does not stop at these facts, but employs them as signs. He knows why the plain, or meadow of space, was strown with these flowers we call suns, and moons, and stars; why the deep is adorned with animals, with men, and gods; for, in every word he speaks he rides on them as the horses of thought.”
Source: The Portable Emerson: New Edition
“The poet Amanda Nadelberg puts it nicely in an interview when she says "often what I listen for in poems is a sense that the writer is a little lost, not deliberately withholding information or turning on the heavy mystery machines, but honestly confounded - by the world? isn't it so? - and letting others listen in on that figuring." That's what engages me - the mind in motion, the drama of someone in the process of thinking - and it's the elusive mystery of those movements that I hope to capture in my essays.”
“The poet and the painter are only truly great by the mutual influences of their studies, and the jealousy of glory has only produced an idle contest.”
“The poet and the politician have this in common: their greatness depends on the courage with which they face the challenges of life.”
“The poet Archibald MacLeish, then an Assistant Secretary of State, spoke critically of what he saw in the postwar world: "As things are now going, the peace we will make, the peace we seem to be making, will be a peace of oil, a peace of gold, a peace of shipping, a peace, in brief . . . without moral purpose or human interest. . . .”
Source: A People’s History of the United States: 1492 - Present
“The poet begins where the man ends. The man's lot is to live his human life, the poet's to invent what is nonexistent.”
“The poet believed that 'Beauty' first entered the world not at its creation, nor with the first garden, the first sunrise, the birth of the first man and woman and their first sexual act. The poet believed that 'Beauty' entered the world the day the first child blushed.”
“The Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society.”
Source: The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth: Together with a Description of the Country of the Lakes in the North of England, Now First Published with His Works ...
“The poet can only write the poems; it takes the reader to complete the meaning.”
“The poet cannot invent new words every time, of course. He uses the words of the tribe. But the handling of the word, the accent, a new articulation, renew them.”
“The poet casts an eye on what is horrendous, but his truest life is in what sustains, restores, heals. Love, the act of loving, beauty, are first, fundamental truths.”
“The poet craves emotion, and feeds the fire that consumes him, and only under this condition is he baptized with creative power.”
Source: Collected Essays: The torch and other lectures and addresses
“The poet Czesław Miłosz wrote in 1953 that 'only in the middle of the twentieth century did the inhabitants of many European countries come to understand, usually by way of suffering, that complex and difficult philosophy books have a direct influence on their fate.”
Source: The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America
“The poet does not fear death, not because he believes in the fantasy of heroes, but because death constantly visits his thoughts and is thus an image of a serene dialogue.”
“The poet does not know - often he will never know - whom he really writes for.”
“The poet doesn't invent. He listens.”
“The poet dreams of the classroom I dreamed I stood up in class And I said aloud: Teacher, Why is algebra important? Sit down, he said. Then I dreamed I stood up And I said: Teacher, I’m weary of the turkeys That we have to draw every fall. May I draw a fox instead? Sit down, he said. Then I dreamed I stood up once more and said: Teacher, My heart is falling asleep And it wants to wake up. It needs to be outside. Sit down, he said.”
Source: Swan: Poems and Prose Poems
“The poet dreams of the mountain
Sometimes I grow weary of the days, with all their fits and starts.
I want to climb some old gray mountains, slowly, taking
The rest of my lifetime to do it, resting often, sleeping
Under the pines or, above them, on the unclothed rocks.
I want to see how many stars are still in the sky
That we have smothered for years now, a century at least.
I want to look back at everything, forgiving it all,
And peaceful, knowing the last thing there is to know.
All that urgency! Not what the earth is about!
How silent the trees, their poetry being of themselves only.
I want to take slow steps, and think appropriate thoughts.
In ten thousand years, maybe, a piece of the mountain will fall.”
Source: Swan: Poems and Prose Poems
“The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself and others, as he wishes.”
“The poet exposes himself to the risk. All that has been said about poetry, all that he has learned about poetry, is only a partial assurance.”
Source: Set in motion: essays, interviews, and dialogues
“The poet gives his whole life such a voluntarily steep incline that it is impossible for it to exist in the vertical line of biography where we expect to meet it. It is not to be found under his own name and must be sought under those of others, in the biographical columns of his followers. The more self-contained the individuality from which the life derives, the more collective, without any figurative speaking, is its story.”
Source: Safe Conduct: An Autobiography and Other Writings
“The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mould of the body and mind entire.”
“The poet has to make a synthesis out of the moral life of our time, and this life is lived at this moment on a political plane.”
“the poet I saw once...
but whose words have long been
in my mind, windows of invincible candles...”
Source: The Neverfield: Poem
“The Poet in his ArtMust intimate the whole, and say the smallest part.”
Source: Poems ...
“The poet in prose or verse - the creator - can only stamp his images forcibly on the page in proportion as he has forcibly felt, ardently nursed, and long brooded over them.”
“The poet is a bird of strange moods. He descends from his lofty domain to tarry among us, singing; if we do not honor him he will unfold his wings and fly back to his dwelling place.”
“The poet is a brother speaking to a brother of "a moment of their other lives" - a moment that had been buried beneath the dust of the busy world.”
“The poet is a creator, not an iconoclast, and never will tamely endeavor to say in prose what can only be expressed in song.”
Source: VICTORIAN POETS
“The poet is a faker / Who's so good at his act / He even fakes the pain / Of pain he feels in fact.”
“The Poet is a kinsman in the clouds Who scoffs at archers, loves a stormy day; But on the ground, among the hooting crowds, He cannot walk, his wings are in the way.”
Source: The Flowers of Evil
“The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.”
“The poet is a madman lost in adventure.”
“The poet is a master of language, the schizophrenic is a slave to it.”
“The poet is a pretender. / He pretends so completely, / that he even pretends that it is pain / the pain he really feels.”
“The poet is always our contemporary.”
Source: The Essays of Virginia Woolf: 1929-1932
“The poet is an untier of knots, and love without words is a knot, and it drowns.”
“The poet is at the disposal of the night. His role is humble, he must clean house and await its due visitation.”
“The poet is at the edge of our consciousness of the world, finding beyond the suspected nothingness which we imagine limits our perception another acre or so of being worth our venturing upon.”
Source: The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays
“The poet is born with the capacity of arranging words in such a way that something of the quality of the graces and inspirations he has received can make itself felt to other human beings in the white spaces, so to speak, between the lines of his verse. This is a great and precious gift; but if the poet remains content with his gift, if he persists in worshipping the beauty in art and nature without going on to make himself capable, through selflessness, of apprehending Beauty as it is in the divine Ground, then he is only an idolater.”
“The poet is called a creator because he creates in an ideal world, according to our desires, what is lacking in the world of reality.”
Source: The Poetic Mind
“The poet is happiest with the simplest of things: sourdough toast and apricot jam, an etymology dictionary, and a biography of Josef Stalin (also a poet, in his younger pre-purge days).
He is interested and amused by just about anything lying around: last month’s light bill (especially the four-color chart explaining hot water usage), the Thai menu (with typos) at lunch, an old airplane boarding pass. His ADD serves him well.
The poet is an introvert, but not really. He reaches out to every parcel of the planet, because everything is subject to him (he delights in this double meaning).”
“The poet is he who fights on the passionate
Side and whoever loses he wins; when he
Is defeated it is hard to say who wins.”
Source: Collected Poems, 1919-1976
“The poet is he who inspires, rather than he who is inspired.”
“The poet is in command of his fantasy, while it is exactly the mark of the neurotic that he is possessed by his fantasy.”
Source: The Liberal Imagination