All Quotes By Tag: Words

“All you must do is say ‘Once there was…’ and let your hoping find the words.”

“I hear the fear and hope fighting in my voice.”

“How amazing these words are that slowly come to me. How wonderfully on and on they go.Will the words end, I askwhenever I remember to.Nope, my sister says, all of five years oldnow,and promising meinfinity.”

“Find the pitch and pace and syllables and words you love to hear. Delight your own senses, and self-romance.”

“Our words may not cause plants to sprout, but they can make hope spring forth in a human heart.”

“It was language I loved, not meaning. I liked poetry better when I wasn’t sure what it meant. Eliot has said that the meaning of the poem is provided to keep the mind busy while the poem gets on with its work — like the bone thrown to the dog by the robber so he can get on with his work. . . . Is beauty a reminder of something we once knew, with poetry one of its vehicles? Does it give us a brief vision of that ‘rarely glimpsed bright face behind/ the apparency of things’? Here, I suppose, we ought to try the impossible task of defining poetry. No one definition will do. But I must admit to a liking for the words of Thomas Fuller, who said: ‘Poetry is a dangerous honey. I advise thee only to taste it with the Tip of thy finger and not to live upon it. If thou do’st, it will disorder thy Head and give thee dangerous Vertigos.”

“Whatever you get out of poetry – take it. take it. take it. Words are better off felt than understood.”

“I cannot decide whether it is an illness or a sin, the need to write things down and fix the flowing world in one rigid form. Bear believed writing dulled the spirit, stilled some holy breath. Smothered it. Words, when they’ve been captured and imprisoned on paper, become a barrier against the world, one best left unerected. Everything that happens is fluid, changeable. After they’ve passed, events are only as your memory makes them, and they shift shapes over time. Writing a thing down fixes it in place as surely as a rattlesnake skin stripped from the meat and stretched and tacked to a barn wall. Every bit as stationary, and every bit as false to the original thing. Flat and still and harmless. Bear recognized that all writing memorializes a momentary line of thought as if it were final. But I was always word-smitten.”

“Words are what sticks to the real. We use them to push the real, to drag the real into the poem. They are what we hold on with, nothing else. They are as valuable in themselves as rope with nothing to be tied to.”

“We no longer know what we feel when we can say what we feel.”

“I know what I know until I try to say it. Then I don’t know it.”

“No, she wasn’t losing language. She was choking on it.”

“Yes, I read. I have that absurd habit. I like beautiful poems, moving poetry, and all the beyond of that poetry. I am extraordinarily sensitive to those poor, marvelous words left in our dark night by a few men I never knew.”

“Step out from behind the words. When you’re a writer you can imagine that the words speak for you and are you, but they’re not. You are this living breathing bad hair day kind of person.”

“To write does not mean to convert the real into words but to make the power of the word real.”