All Quotes By Tag: Writing

“Sometimes in composition class, when I have been confronted by someone who simply cannot get the first word written on paper, I give the following advice: Say your essay into a tape recorder and then write it down.”

“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.”

“If you ask a twenty-one-year-old poet whose poetry he likes, he might say, unblushing, “Nobody’s,” In his youth, he has not yet understood that poets like poetry, and novelists like novels; he himself likes only the role, the thought of himself in a hat.”

“…and yet the idea is hard to accept, it’s so hard to succeed in making something happen, even what’s been decided on and planned out, not even the will of a god seems forceful enough to manage it, if our own will is made in its semblance. It may be, rather, that nothing is ever unmixed and the thirst for totality is never quenched, perhaps because it is a false yearning. Nothing is whole or of a single piece, everything is fractured and evenomed, veins of peace run through the body of war and hatred insinuates itself into love and compassion, there is truce amid the quagmire of bullets and a bullet amid the revelries, nothing can bear to be unique or prevail or be dominant and everything needs fissures and cracks, needs it negation at the same time as its existence. And nothing is known with certainty and everything is told figuratively.”

“She had a habit of walking around in white cotton panties and writing poetry on the back of crumpled envelopes.”

“The Throes of Poetry – Hymns formed from groans of acquaintance, its rhythm weaving between tranquility, compassions, and peril – like bare feet stomping on broken glass – bleeds, recoils, then steps again.”

“I never have time to write anymore. And when I do I only write about how I never have time. It’s work and it’s money and I’ve written more lists than songs lately. I stay up all night to do all these things I need to do, be all these things I want to be, playing with shadows in the darkness that shouldn’t be able to exist. Empty bottles and cigarettes while watching the sunrise, why do I complain? I have it all, everything I ever asked for.”

“Why do we write? A chorus erupts. Because we cannot simply live.”

“When you’re a student of poetry, you’re lucky if you don’t realize how untalented you are until you get a little better. Otherwise, you would just stop.”

“The one who pulls the puppet strings knows fairytales can heal.”

“If I knew what to doI’d do more than write a song for you”

“When I die I hope it may be said:’Her suffering was black, but her books were read’.”

“Poetry is only the highest eloquence of passion, the most vivid form of expression that can be given to our conception of anything, whether pleasurable or painful, mean or dignified, delightful or distressing. It is the perfect coincidence of the image and the words with the feeling we have, and of which we cannot get rid in any other way, that gives an instant “satisfaction to the thought.” This is equally the origin of wit and fancy, of comedy and tragedy, of the sublime and pathetic.”

“Music resembles poetry, in eachAre nameless graces which no methods teach,And which a master hand alone can reach.”

“Memang sulit menulis puisi. Dan untuk apa mempersulit diri sendiri.”