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Yeats Quotes

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Yeats Quotes

“Those who knew him said it was how he'd have wanted to go. Dieter Hess died in his armchair, surrounded by his books, a half-glass of 2008 Burgundy at his elbow, a half-smoked Montecristo in the ashtray on the floor. In his lap, Yeats's Collected - the yellow-jacketed Macmillan edition - and in the CD tray Pärt's Für Alina, long hushed by the time Bachelor found the body, but its lingering silences implicit in the air, settling like dust on faded surfaces.”

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Book:The List
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“What I affirm is the intuition that where God's presence is no longer a tenable supposition and where His absence is no longer a felt, indeed overwhelming weight, certain dimensions of thought and creativity are no longer attainable. And I would vary Yeats's axiom so as to say: no man can read fully, can answer answeringly to the aesthetic, whose "nerve and blood" are at peace in sceptical rationality, are now at home in immanence and verification. We must read as if.”

IfsMenHomeCertainFeltAnswersCreativityBloodWeightIntuitionAbsenceDimensionsNervesOverwhelmingAestheticRationalityVaryAxiomsGod's PresenceSuppositionVerificationYeats
Book:Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say?
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“Insofar as I think about postmodernism at all, and it doesn't exactly keep me awake at nights, I think of it as something that happens to one, not a style one affects. We're postmoderns because we're not modernists. The modernist writers—Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Stevens, Yeats, Woolf, Williams—spoke with a kind of vatic authority: they were really the last of the Romantics, for whom authorship itself was like being a solitary prophet in the wasteland.”

ThinkingKindHappensLastsNightStyleAuthorityAwakeProphetPoundsSpokesSolitaryPostmodernismAuthorshipJoycePostmodernEliotWastelandWoolfAwake At NightYeats
Author:Jonathan Raban
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“Anyone who has read Yeats's wonderful Autobiography will remember his Sligo shabby, shadowed, half country and half sea, full of confused romance, superstition, poverty, eccentricity, unrecognized anachronism, passion and ignorance and the little boy's misery. Yeats was treated well but was bitterly unhappy; he prayed that he would die, and used often to say to himself: "When you are grown up, never talk as grown-up people do of the happiness of childhood.”

PeopleWellsLittlesCountryRememberRomanceUsedDiesPassionHalfBoysPovertyWonderfulSeaChildhoodIgnoranceMiseryUnhappyTreatedConfusedSuperstitionsAutobiographyLittle BoysEccentricityShabbyYeatsAnachronism
Author:Randall Jarrell
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“... woman is frequently praised as the more "creative" sex. She does not need to make poems, it is argued; she has no drive to make poems, because she is privileged to make babies. A pregnancy is as fulfilling as, say, Yeats' Sailing to Byzantium.... To call a child a poem may be a pretty metaphor, but it is a slur on the labor of art.”

NeedsMayChildrenDoeArtPoetrySexCreativityCreativePoetBabyLaborMetaphorMotherhoodPregnancyFulfillingPrivilegedSailingSlursYeatsByzantium
Author:Cynthia Ozick
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“In the 1970s, for example, I found myself learning to relish the poetry of Andrew Marvell and Sir Thomas Wyatt, and getting a handle on poetry of plainer speech than I had dwelt with heretofore. Which led me into a new appreciation of middle [William Butler ] Yeats, of the short three-beat line and forward-driving syntax, and that paid in, in turn, to a poem like Casualty in Field Work. The traffic, however, was usually the other way. My teaching was animated by what I was reading and being excited by as a poet.”

WayTurnsThreeReadingFoundLinesTeachingMiddleExampleFieldsPoetSpeechBeatsPaidAppreciationExcitedDrivingHandleTrafficAnimatedRelishCasualtiesAndrewButlersSyntaxYeats
Author:Adam Kirsch
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“I think the whole emphasis in England, in universities, on practical criticism (but not that so much as on historical criticism, knowing what period a line comes from) this is almost paralysing. In America, in University, we read - what? - T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Yeats, that is where we began. Shakespeare flaunted in the background. I'm not sure I agree with this, but I think that' for the young poet, the writing poet, it is not quite so frightening to go to university in America as it is in England, for these reasons.”

ThinkingWritingReasonWholeAmericaYoungLinesKnowingPoetPeriodsCriticismEnglandAgreeHistoricalUniversityPracticalsBackgroundsNot SureFrighteningEmphasisDylanEliotYeats
Author:Sylvia Plath
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“I always thought old age would be a writer’s best chance. Whenever I read the late work of Goethe or W. B. Yeats I had the impertinence to identify with it. Now, my memory’s gone, all the old fluency’s disappeared. I don’t write a single sentence without saying to myself, ‘It’s a lie!’ So I know I was right. It’s the best chance I’ve ever had.”

KnowsWritingWould BeAgeLyingMemoriesChanceGoneLateSentencesOld AgeFluencySingle SentenceYeatsImpertinence
Author:Samuel Beckett
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“To be the father of growing daughters is to understand something of what Yeats evokes with his imperishable phrase 'terrible beauty.' Nothing can make one so happily exhilarated or so frightened: it's a solid lesson in the limitations of self to realize that your heart is running around inside someone else's body. It also makes me quite astonishingly calm at the thought of death: I know whom I would die to protect and I also understand that nobody but a lugubrious serf can possibly wish for a father who never goes away.”

KnowsHeartSelfBodyRunningDiesFatherWishRealizingGrowingAtheismTerribleLessonsProtectDaughterCalmAtheistLimitationPhrasesFrightenedFatherhoodEvokeBeing A DadSerfsYeatsThoughts Of Death
Author:Christopher Hitchens
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“And I love Jane Austen's use of language too--the way she takes her time to develop a phrase and gives it room to grow, so that these clever, complex statements form slowly and then bloom in my mind. Beethoven does the same thing with his cadence and phrasing and structure. It's a fact: Jane Austen is musical. And so's Yeats. And Wordsworth. All the great writers are musical.”

WayGivingMindDoeFactsUseFormLanguageGrowsRoomsStructureComplexesMusicalCleverStatementsPhrasesJaneGreat WritersAustenCadenceWordsworthUse Of LanguageYeats
Book:Things Hoped For
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“There is a part of me that will forever want to be walking under autumn leaves, carrying a briefcase containing the works of Shakespeare and Yeats and a portable chess set. I will pass an old tree under which once on a summer night I lay on the grass with a fragrant young woman and we quoted e.e. cummings back and forth.”

WantYoungNightForeverTreeWalkingSummerLaysChessGrassAutumnYoung WomenBack And ForthContainingSummer NightsAutumn LeavesOld TreesYeatsBriefcases
Author:Roger Ebert
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“One day while studying a Yeats poem I decided to write poetry the rest of my life. I recognized that a single short poem has room for history, music, psychology, religious thought, mood, occult speculation, character, and events of one's own life. I still feel surprised that such various substances can find shelter and nourishment in a poem. A poem in fact may be a sort of nourishing liquid, such as one uses to keep an amoeba alive. If prepared right, a poem can keep an image or a thought or insights on history or the psyche alive for years, as well as our desires and airy impulses.”

IfsFeelsWritingYearsWellsMayStillsCharacterFactsUseDesirePoetryReligiousRoomsStudyPsychologyAliveEventsOne DayDecidedPreparedVariousInsightMoodImpulseSubstanceShelterSpeculationLiquidNourishmentOccultAiryYeatsAmoeba
Author:Robert Bly
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“The best people in a dying culture are the outcasts considered crazy by the leaders; the ones most disillusioned with their own culture. In Yeats' phrase, "the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." Intense emotional attachment to any value, any virtue, any set of "shoulds" is a disease, a mental illness, a condition of self-murder and cultural assassination.”

PeopleSelfValuesCultureLeaderVirtueCrazyWorstConditionsDyingEmotionalDiseaseMurderPassionateIllnessConvictionIntenseMental IllnessPhrasesAttachmentIntensityAssassinationOutcastDisillusionedYeats
Book:Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth
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