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Shelley Quotes

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Shelley Quotes

“The seasonal urge is strong in poets. Milton wrote chiefly in winter. Keats looked for spring to wake him up (as it did in the miraculous months of April and May, 1819). Burns chose autumn. Longfellow liked the month of September. Shelley flourished in the hot months. Some poets, like Wordsworth, have gone outdoors to work. Others, like Auden, keep to the curtained room. Schiller needed the smell of rotten apples about him to make a poem. Tennyson and Walter de la Mare had to smoke. Auden drinks lots of tea, Spender coffee; Hart Crane drank alcohol. Pope, Byron, and William Morris were creative late at night. And so it goes.”

WritingMayPoetryNightFallSpringSeasonsWinterAlcoholCoffeeTeaApplesWritersAutumnPoetsSeptemberPopeInsomniaAprilMiltonSeasonByronAppleNocturnalMorrisShelleyWordsworthAudenTennysonBurnsKeatsSchillerLongfellowHart CraneDe La MareSpender
Book:When Found, Make a Verse of
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“The book was Shelley, and it opened at a passage that he had cherished greatly two years before, and marked as “very good.” “I never was attached to that great sect, Whose doctrine is, that each one should select Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend, And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend To cold oblivion, though it is in the code Of modern morals, and the beaten road Which those poor slaves with weary footsteps tread, Who travel to their home among the dead By the broad highway of the world, and so With one chained friend, perhaps a jealous foe, The dreariest and the longest journey go.”

MarriageIsolationShelleyPercy Bysshe ShelleyFutility Of MarriagesEpipsychidionLongest Journey
Book:The Longest Journey
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“The neo-conservative critics of leftist critics of mass culture ridicule the protest against Bach as background music in the kitchen, against Plato and Hegel, Shelley and Baudelaire, Marx and Freud in the drugstore. Instead, they insist on recognition of the fact that the classics have left the mausoleum and come to life again, that people are just so much more educated. True, but coming to life as classics, they come to life as other than themselves; they are deprived of their antagonistic force, of the estrangement which was the very dimension of their truth.”

PeopleFactsCultureLeftForceMassCriticsConservativeBackgroundsEducatedRecognitionKitchenDimensionsProtestPlatoRidiculeDeprivedLeftistsHegelEstrangementMass CultureBaudelaireShelleyBackground MusicMausoleum
Book:One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society
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“The war between authors and publishers has been a conflict of ages. On the one side, the publisher has been looked upon as a species of Wantley dragon, whose daily food was the brain and blood of hapless writers. ... On the other side, the author has been considered, like Shelley, 'an eternal child,' in all that relates to practical matters, and a terrible child at that, - incapable of comprehending details, and unreasoanably dissatisfied with results.”

ChildrenHas BeensWarMatterAgeSidesResultsBrainBloodTerribleConflictEternalSpeciesDetailsPracticalsRelateDragonsIncapablePublishersDissatisfiedComprehendingShelley
Author:Mary Abigail Dodge
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“The second volume of Reiner Stach's epic biography of Franz Kafka . . . [is] a tangle of counter-grained and often under-sourced life stories, but reading Stach's magnificent narrative (wonderfully translated by Shelley Frisch) straight through brings death, not life, to the forefront. Stach is a compulsively readable writer. . . . [A]s in the previous volume, the prose in The Years of Insight is supple and very appealingly complex--all of which, once again, is perfectly rendered by Frisch.”

YearsStoriesReadingComplexesInsightNarrativeProseVolumeMagnificentEpicBiographiesLife StorySuppleShelley
Author:Steve Donoghue
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“One of the things in the Mary Shelley [Frankenstein] is that the creature tells his story, so this begins with the creature's point of view. So, it literally starts with the creature opening his eyes and is born - but is obviously in his 30s. But because they're the creator and the created we thought it would be really interesting if they could look at each other every other night and play each other's roles.”

IfsLooksPlayStoriesWould BeEyeNightBornInterestingViewsRolesCreaturesCreatorPoint Of ViewOpeningHis EyesMaryReally InterestingShelley
Author:Danny Boyle
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“I think our grandparents were Victor Frankenstein. I basically am the kind of deeply unnatural creature that Mrs Shelley instinctively dreaded. I not only eat her sacred cows but I eat them with ketchup. While I take her point, I think that transgressive monstrosity and tampering with the life force are both a lot more fun than she suspected.”

ThinkingKindFunForceCreaturesSacredCowsGrandparentUnnaturalMonstrosityKetchupShelleySacred Cows
Author:Bruce Sterling
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“The first thing that got to me was seeing David Bowie on a children's TV show, but Bowie was way beyond my aspirations. The Buzzcocks' Spiral Scratch came out in 1977 and it had a breakdown of the recording costs, then you saw Pete Shelley playing a broken guitar from Woolworths. We already had an idea of the kind of music we wanted to do, but punk showed us a way to do it.”

WayFirstsKindChildrenIdeasShowsWantedSawsSeeingTvsBrokenCostGuitarAspirationPunkTv ShowsScratchesBreakdownSpiralsBowieShelley
Author:Edwyn Collins
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“It seems all "protection" has to be monitored, considered, weighed and justified - I am suggesting we do that (but it's something Mary Shelley (and Gertrude Stein) also suggest). "Torch Song," the book's final section, looks at an arson committed by someone hired to protect the wilderness from fires, a catastrophic failure of protection!”

LooksBookSeemsSongFireProtectFinalsCommittedProtectionWildernessMarySectionsJustifiedTorchesSuggestingGertrudeShelleyArson
Author:Laura Mullen
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“I think of myself primarily as a reader, then also a writer, but that's more or less irrelevant. I think I'm a good reader, I'm a good reader in many languages, especially in English, since poetry came to me through the English language, initially through my father's love of Swinburn, of Tennyson, and also of Keats, Shelley and so on - not through my native tongue, not through Spanish. It came to me as a kind of spell. I didn't understand it, but I felt it.”

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Author:Jorge Luis Borges
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“In The Shining, you love Shelley Duvall. You love Jack Nicholson. You're let into the intimacy of that violence and it's emotional and it's physical. We're let in very close. So I think a good horror film has to pull you in very deeply inside. Halloween is a good horror film because we love Jamie Lee Curtis, we're brought very deeply in right when she's babysitting the kids. She's going from house to house, all those houses have windows that you can look in. We're a very vulnerable and exposed audience.”

ThinkingKidsFilmHouseAudienceViolenceEmotionalHorrorWindowShiningVulnerableIntimacyHalloweenVery DeepHorror FilmNicholsonShelleyBabysitting
Author:Kimberly Peirce
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“The greatest feminists have also been the greatest lovers. I'm thinking not only of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley, but of Anais Nin, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and of course Sappho. You cannot divide creative juices from human juices. And as long as juicy women are equated with bad women, we will err on the side of being bad.”

ThinkingHumansLongMotherCoursesWomenSidesCreativeLoversDaughterFeministDividesMaryJuiceJuicyShelleyBeing BadBad WomanCreative Juices
Author:Erica Jong
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“Well, you've done it now," was her sisterly opening shot. Jaine rubbed between her eyebrows; a definite headache was forming. After the exchange with David, she waited to see where this one was going. "I won't be able to hold up my head in church." "Really? Oh, Shelley, I'm so sorry," Jaine said sweetly. "I didn't realize you have the dreaded Limp Neck disease. When were you diagnosed?”

WellsSaidDoneAbleRealizingChurchDiseaseShotsSorryOpeningNecksDefiniteEyebrowsHeadacheShelleyI'm So SorrySisterly
Book:Mr Perfect
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“Odonianism is anarchism. Not the bomb-in-the-pocket stuff, which is terrorism, whatever name it tries to dignify itself with, not the social-Darwinist economic 'libertarianism' of the far right; but anarchism, as prefigured in early Taoist thought, and expounded by Shelley and Kropotkin, Goldman and Goodman. Anarchism's principal target is the authoritarian State (capitalist or socialist); its principle moral-practical theme is cooperation (solidarity, mutual aid). It is the most idealistic, and to me the most interesting, of all political theories.”

TryingStatesPoliticalNamesSocialStuffInterestingMoralPrinciplesEconomicTheoryTerrorismAidsPracticalsThemeBombsPocketsMutualTargetCooperationCapitalistLibertarianismPrincipalSocialistSolidarityAnarchismMost InterestingIdealisticGoodmanPolitical TheoryShelleyMutual Aid
Author:Ursula K. Le Guin
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“Have not Manet and Monet, Cézanne and Matisse, rendered to painting something of the same service which Keats and Shelley gave to poetry after the solemn and ceremonious literary perfections of the eighteenth century? They have brought back to the pictorial art a new draught of joie de vivre; and the beauty of their work is instinct with gaiety, and floats in sparkling air. I do not expect these masters would particularly appreciate my defence, but I must avow an increasing attraction to their work.”

ArtAirCenturyPaintingMastersAppreciatePerfectionInstinctAttractionLeisureFloatsDefenceSolemnSparklingDraughtPictorialGaietyShelleyMonetMatisseJoie De Vivre
Author:Winston Churchill
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