Poem Quotes (page 21)
-
-
-
Here in the United States, we speak with reverence of authentic experience. We write poems about our daddies taking us fishing and breaking our hearts by making us throw the little fish back into the river. We even tell the reader the kind of car we were driving, the year and the model, to give the impression that it’s all true. It’s because we think of ourselves as journalists of a kind. Like them, we’ll go anywhere for a story. Don’t believe a word of it. As any poet can tell you, one often...
Charles Simic
Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother...
Jim Jarmusch
Words... They're innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they're no good any more... I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead.
Tom Stoppard
Despite his title, the Secretary of the Interior was a shallow man. He was given to surfaces, not depths; to cortex, not medulla; to the puff, not the cream. He didn't understand the interior of anything: not the interior of a tenor sax solo, a painting or a poem; not the interior of an atom, a planet, a spider or his wife's body; not the interior, least of all, of his own heart and head.
Tom Robbins
...If we surrendered
to earth’s intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.
Instead we entangle ourselves
in knots of our own making
and struggle, lonely and confused.
So like children, we begin again...
to fall,
patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.
(from the poem "How Sure Gravity's Law")
Rainer Maria Rilke
