Best poetry & reading Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings

“Not reading poetry amounts to a national pastime here.”

Poetry Reading Amount Pastime Reading Poetry

“The poet should try to give his poem the quiet swiftness of flame, so that the reader will feel and not think while he is reading. But the thinking will come afterwards.”

Thinking Giving Feels Should Trying Poetry Reading Poet Reader Quiet Flames Swiftness

Author:Sara Teasdale

“So we start with an oversignifying reader. Those texts that appear to reward this reader for this additional investment - text that we find exceptionally suggestive, apposite, or musical - are usually adjudged to be 'poetic'. ... The work of the poet is to contribute a text that will firstly invite such a reading; and secondly reward such a reading.”

Art Poetry Reading Poet Reader Investment Rewards Musical Poetic Invites

Author:Don Paterson

“Two opposing forces inhabit the poem: one of elevation or up-rooting, which pulls the word from the language: the other of gravity, which makes it return. The poem is an original and unique creation, but it is also reading and recitation: participation. The poet creates it; the people, by recitation, re-create it. Poet and reader are two moments of a single reality.”

Source: The Bow and the Lyre: The Poem, The Poetic Revelation, Poetry and History

“I've learned that my readings of others' work often has little connection to their intentions. This doesn't mean that my response is wrong, and it doesn't make the author's views less right. Poets, like their poems, are "hopeful monsters".”

Mean Littles Poetry Reading Literature Views Poet Connections Intention Response Monsters I've Learned Hopeful

Book:Feeling as a Foreign Language: The Good Strangeness of Poetry

Source: Feeling as a Foreign Language: The Good Strangeness of Poetry

“This capacity for oversignifying, for reading in, is precisely what poets tap into, both in their own practice and in the poem the give to the reader; and in doing so they turn language against its own project of conceptual division, and use it to heal itself - and in the process - paradoxically - to articulate new concepts that it can't yet accommodate.”

Giving Use Poetry Turns Reading Literature Language Process Practice Poet Reader Projects Concepts Capacity Heal Division Accommodate Heal Itself

Author:Don Paterson

“The one man who should never attempt an explanation of a poem is its author. If the poem can be improved by it's author's explanations it never should have been published, and if the poem cannot be improved by its author's explanations the explanations are scarcely worth reading.”

Ifs Men Should Has Beens Poetry Reading Should Have Explanation One Man Should Have Been Worth Reading

Author:Archibald MacLeish

“All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.”

Writing Book Feelings Poetry Reading Spring Genuine Reading Poetry Poetry Reading

Book:The Prose of Oscar Wilde

Source: The Prose of Oscar Wilde

“I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.”

Life Humor Funny Poetry Reading Reading Books Dictionary

Author:Steven Wright

“Don’t you love the Oxford Dictionary? When I first read it, I thought it was a really really long poem about everything.”

Firsts Long Book Poetry Reading Reading Books Dictionary Singer Songwriters Rock Music Oxford Really Long Big Book

Author:David Bowie

“It is absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to listen to a stranger reading poetry when you want to learn to construct buildings, or to sit with a stranger discussing the construction of buildings when you want to read poetry.”

“Children read to learn - even when they are reading fantasy, nonsense, light verse, comics or the copy on cereal packets, they are expanding their minds all the time, enlarging their vocabulary, making discoveries - it is all new to them.”

“I don't believe any of you have ever read Paradise Lost, and you don't want to. That's something that you just want to take on trust. It's a classic ... something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.”

Want Believe Book Poetry Reading Lost Trust Don't Believe Classic Paradise Reading Books Big Book Blind Trust Book Titles

Author:Mark Twain

“It is absurd to think that the only way to tell if a poem is lasting is to wait and see if it lasts. The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken an immortal wound-that he will never get over it.”

Ifs Thinking Way Writing Moments Lasts Poetry Reading Waiting Taken Reader Strikes Wounds Absurd Immortal Over It Lasting Touching Get Over

Author:Robert Frost

“There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry.”

Book Poetry Reading Land Pages Literacy Emily Books And Reading Libraries Books And Reading Prancing

Author:Emily Dickinson

“People who read poetry have heard about the burning bush, but when you write poetry, you sit inside the burning bush.”

People Writing Poetry Reading Heard Burning Reading Books Burning Bush

Author:Li-Young Lee

“Poetry is for me Eucharistic. You take someone else's suffering into your body, their passion comes into your body, and in doing that you commune, you take communion, you make a community with others.”

Inspirational Book Body Poetry Suffering Passion Reading Community Compassion Empathy Your Body Poetry Is Sympathy Reading Books Communion Essayists Communes Eucharistic

Author:Mary Karr

“The success of the poem is determined not by how much the poet felt in writing it, but by how much the reader feels in reading it.”

Feels Writing Poetry Reading Felt Poet Reader Determined

Author:John Ciardi

“The truth, I am convinced, is that there is no longer a poetical audience among the higher class of minds, that moral, political, and physical science have entirely withdrawn from poetry the attention of all whose attention is worth having; and that the poetical reading public being composed of the mere dregs of the intellectual community, the most sufficing passport to their favour must rest on the mixture of a little easily-intelligible portion of mawkish sentiment with an absolute negation of reason and knowledge.”

Source: Four Ages of Poetry: Shelley's Defence of Poetry. Browning's Essay on Shelley. Edited by H.F.B. Brett-Smith

“If a poet has any obligation toward society, it is to write well. Being in the minority, he has no other choice. Failing this duty, he sinks into oblivion. Society, on the other hand, has no obligation toward the poet. A majority by definition, society thinks of itself as having other options than reading verses, no matter how well written. Its failure to do so results in its sinking to that level of locution at which society falls easy prey to a demagogue or a tyrant. This is society's own equivalent of oblivion.”

“The poem was made not just to exist, but to speak—to be company. It was everything that was needed, when everything was needed.”

Poetry Reading Friendship Healing Books Friends Poem Power Of Words

Book:Upstream: Selected Essays

Source: Upstream: Selected Essays

“Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor. Eagerly I wished the morrow; — vainly I had sought to borrow From my books surcease of sorrow — sorrow for the lost Lenore.”

Poetry Reading Books Heartbreak Words

Book:The Complete Stories and Poems

Source: The Complete Stories and Poems

“When a poet settled down to write a poem, could he foresee the lines he would write? Did his head constantly spin with riddles and rhymes and was his only job to put them down? What if he couldn’t get them to make sense, and no one, not even the person he cared for most, could have pleasure in reading it? What would he do?”

Love Care Poetry Reading Pleasure Poet Person Read Write

Book:Sharden

Source: Sharden

“And then beautiful things grow rich with the emotion that they have aroused in succeeding generations. That is why old things are more beautiful than modern. The Ode on a Grecian Urn is more lovely now than when it was written, because for a hundred years lovers have read it and the sick at heart taken comfort in its lines.”

Art Poetry Reading Pleasure Beauty Books

Book:Of Human Bondage

Source: Of Human Bondage

“Philosophy eulogises death, perturbs lives.”

Life Writing Philosophy Death Poetry Reading Literature Academic Dr Alok Mishra

Author:Alok Mishra

“Haiku does not express emotion from the inside out by displaying the mind of a character. Haiku builds the emotional thrust, makes the artistic statement from the outside in, from the physical world to the mind of the reader.”

Poetry Reading Emotion Expression Reader Haiku Japanese

Book:Mother, Don't Lock Me In That Closet!

Source: Mother, Don't Lock Me In That Closet!

“Always write exactly what you’re feeling at the exact moment when writing something like poetry or an emotional novel. Put yourself, pour all emotions into your work…make yourself cry, feel joy if you are writing joyful things, feel lovey if it calls for it…just put your heart and soul into all that you do…then you will be a good writer when you can make whoever reads your work, feel." -Nina Jean Slack”

Writing Soul Feelings Poetry Quotes Reading Work Emotion Emotional Poem Thoughts Emotions Quote Words Author Poems Writer Writers Feeling Poets Read Authors Feel Emo Nina

Author:Nina Jean Slack

“There is a miracle in your mess, don't let the mess make you miss the miracle.”

Source: Why Does an Orderly God Allow Disorder

“Do you know where your breakthrough begins? Your breakthrough begins where your excuses ends.”

Source: Why Does an Orderly God Allow Disorder

“I found a room, both quiet and slow, a room where the walls are thick. Where pixie dust is kept in jars, and paper rockets soar to Mars, and battles leave no lasting scars as clocks forget to tick. I guard this room, both small and bare, this room in which stories live. Where Peter Pan and Alice play, and Sinbad sails at dawn of day, and wolves cry 'boy' to get their way when ogres won’t forgive. With you I’ll share my hiding place, this room under cloak and spell. We’ll snuggle up inside a nook, and read a venturous story book, that makes us question in a look what nonsense fairies tell. In fictive plots and fabled ends, Our happy-e’er-afters dwell!”

Poetry Reading Imagination Storytelling Richelle Goodrich Poems Richelle E Goodrich Love Of Reading Storybooks

Book:A Heart Made of Tissue Paper

Source: A Heart Made of Tissue Paper

“Reading helps me escape to another world - any world that I want to be in.”

Poetry Reading Imagination Books Books Reading Verse Novel

Book:On Track

Source: On Track

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