Top 23 Elegy Quotes & Sayings

Wheresoe'er I turn my view, All is strange, yet nothing new: Endless labor all along, Endless labor to be wrong: Phrase that Time has flung away; Uncouth words in disarray, Trick'd in antique ruff and bonnet, Ode, and elegy, and sonnet.

There's something really unnatural about losing a child, and there's something unnatural about having to write an elegy for your child, but I felt that I wanted people to know what he was like.

ELEGY, n. A composition in verse, in which, without employing any of the methods of humor, the writer aims to produce in the reader's mind the dampest kind of dejection.

In an age of malice and bad faith on many sides, I reread White or Thurber or Mitchell and am reminded again that good writing is done, as I said in my elegy for Salinger, with an active eye and ear and an ardent heart, and in no other way.

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis' by JD Vance made me entirely rethink U.S. republicanism, Donald Trump and the American white working class.

Writing is alchemy. Dross becomes gold. Experience is transformed. Pain is changed. Suffering may become song. The ordinary or horrible is pushed by the will of the writer into grace or redemption, a prophetic wail, a screed for justice, an elegy of sadness or sorrow. ... There is always a tension between experience and the thing that finally carries it forward, bears its weight, holds it in. Without that tension, one might as well write a shopping list.

The elegy does the work of mourning; it allows us to experience mortality. It turns loss into remembrance, and it delivers an inheritance.

We should write an elegy for every day that has slipped through our lives unnoticed and unappreciated. Better still, we should write a song of thanksgiving for all the days that remain-now that we know how to cherish them.

A word is elegy to what it signifies.

I'd lived in West Virginia on and off for four to five years growing up. I'm familiar with Bible Belt, with Appalachia, 'Hillbilly Elegy.'

Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog And in that town a dog was found, As many dogs there be, Both mongrel, puppy, whelp, and hound, And curs of low degree.

Travel is a caprice in childhood, a passion in youth, a necessity in manhood, and an elegy in old age.

I want my images to achieve two things in this regard - to be an elegy to a world that is tragically vanishing, to make people see what beauty is disappearing. Also, to try and show that animals are sentient creatures equally as worthy of life as humans.

Be With Me In The Phases Of My Work Because My Brain Feels Like It Has Been Whipped And I Yearn To Make A Small Perfect Thing Which Will Live In Your Morning Like Curious Static Through A President's Elegy Or A Nude Hunchback Acquiring A Tan On The Crowded Oily Beach.

When I was from Cupid's passions free, my Muse was mute and wrote no elegy.

Regret is a short, evocative and achingly beautiful word: an elegy to lost possibilities even in its brief annunciation.

Tinted Distances is a tender meditation that reveals a careful eye and steady devotion to elegy and ode.

The nobility of Teresa Leo's poems is that they are not disposed to hide from the dark-rather, they display a mind that tends toward obsession and brooding, that works against fatality like fingers at a knot. The firm, attentive mind on display and the lucid unfolding of the poems are the life instinct seeking and finding its way through again and again. Love and beauty are the argument, but they don't win easily. Bloom in Reverse works through elegy toward survival with moving persistence, both driven and compelling.

Part of elegy is confrontation - not just with the idea of death, but with the person who has died.

My images are unashamedly idyllic and romantic, a kind of enchanted Africa. They're my elegy to a world that is steadily, tragically vanishing.

It seems to me that, with but slight reserve and modification, we may apply to our departed friend his own pathetic and beautiful elegy upon another.

To me, elegy suggests that there is hope, and in some respects you've moved past the loss and are able to deal with it and to write about it.

Sooner or later, all the peoples of the world will have to discover a way to live together in peace, and thereby transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood.