All Quotes By Tag: Books

“Scarlett has another hit series on her hands. — Donna”

“Indescribable. Raunchy and Unforgettable. — Margaret Smith”

“A life without books is a thirsty life, and one without poetry is…like a life without pictures.”

“Next o’er his books his eyes began to roll,In pleasing memory of all he stole.”

“I am beginning to be sorry that I ever undertook to write this book. Not that it bores me; I have nothing else to do; indeed, it is a welcome distraction from eternity. But the book is tedious, it smells of the tomb, it has a rigor mortis about it; a serious fault, and yet a relatively small one, for the great defect of this book is you, reader. You want to live fast, to get to the end, and the book ambles along slowly; you like straight, solid narrative and a smooth style, but this book and my style are like a pair of drunks; they stagger to the right and to the left, they start and they stop, they mutter, they roar, they guffaw, they threaten the sky, they slip and fall…And fall! Unhappy leaves of my cypress tree, you had to fall, like everything else that is lovely and beautiful; if I had eyes, I would shed a tear of remembrance for you. And this is the great advantage in being dead, that if you have no mouth with which to laugh, neither have you eyes with which to cry.”

“Is there a better method of departure by night than this quiet bon voyage with an open book, the sole companion who has come to see you off, to wave you into the dark waters beyond language?”

“I want to read every book that’s writtenhear every song that was sungI want to gaze at every cloudand hold the zing of each fruit on my tongue.”

“Humans have the ability to rewrite history. Within a few decades it is not even questioned. Stories of the past become as real as the world you walk through today. Wars are waged over false history. Sins are denied. All for mankind to move forward and feel comfortable about its past. Your true history is written in the stars. Look up, breathe in, and be humbled by the ones who came before you. The ones who have suffered, who have endured, who have overcome. Their blood is alive in you. Their spirits roam freely in the heavens above.”

“The question ‘Why poetry?’ isn’t asking what makes poetry unique among art forms; poetry may indeed share its origins with other forms of privileged utterance. A somewhat more interesting question would be: “What is the nature of experience, and especially the experience of using language, that calls poetic utterance into existence? What is there about experience that’s unutterable?” You can’t generalize very usefully about poetry; you can’t reduce its nature down to a kernel that underlies all its various incarnations. I guess my internal conversation suggests that if you can’t successfully answer the question of “Why poetry?,” can’t reduce it in the way I think you can’t, then maybe that’s the strongest evidence that poetry’s doing its job; it’s creating an essential need and then satisfying it.”

“You become a house where the wind blows straight through, because no one bothers the crack in the window or lock on the door, and you’re the house where people come and go as they please, because you’re simply too unimpressed to care. You let people in who you really shouldn’t let in, and you let them walk around for a while, use your bed and use your books, and await the day when they simply get bored and leave. You’re still not bothered, though you knew they shouldn’t have been let in in the first place, but still you just sit there, apathetic like a beggar in the desert.”

“The books [poetry collections] may not sell, but neither are they given away or thrown away. They tend, more than other books, to fall apart in their owners’ hands. Not I suppose good news in a culture and economy built on obsolescence. But for a book to be loved this way and turned to this way for consolation and intense renewable excitement seems to me a marvel.”

“When a reader enters the pages of a book of poetry, he or she enters a world where dreams transform the past into knowledge made applicable to the present, and where visions shape the present into extraordinary possibilities for the future.”

“[Fiction and poetry] are medicines, they’re doses, and they heal the rupture that reality makes on the imagination.”

“Please bury me in the library With a dozen long-stemmed proses”

“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.”