A Quote by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Some of us have been thinking and talking too long without doing anything. Poems are perfect; picketing, sometimes, is better. — © Edna St. Vincent Millay
Some of us have been thinking and talking too long without doing anything. Poems are perfect; picketing, sometimes, is better.
Some actors like encouragement. Some actors prefer to have pressure. And sometimes, for some actors, its better to give your comment by silence, because they are so skillful, so gifted, that they understand without talking too much.
I wish I'd been better able to resist the sense of obligation to write some of the poems I did. It's in the nature of commissioned work to be written too much from the side of your mind that knows what it's doing, which dries up the poetry.
While some of us act without thinking, too many of us think without acting.
Doing is a quantum leap from imagining. Thinking about swimming isn't much like actually getting in the water. Actually getting in the water can take your breath away. The defense force inside of us wants us to be cautious, to stay away from anything as intense as a new kind of action. Its job is to protect us, and it categorically avoids anything resembling danger. But it's often wrong. Anything worth doing is worth doing too soon.
For better or worse, I tend to do a lot of thinking in my poems. But lately I've been trying to pay more attention to when and where I do that thinking, to be attentive to the settings in which meditation takes place. Sometimes the disconnect between the mind and the world is itself revealing, but in 'The Whole World Is Gone,' I think the setting deeply complements, indeed elicits and allows, a certain set of realizations to occur.
I'm very open and honest, and I feel like it's important for women to hear that we're not perfect; none of us are perfect. And sometimes we aspire to have these ideas in our heads of what perfection is, and I probably would've been better off if I'd left myself alone.
The real truth is that the war didn't have much to do with it except that it provided a perfect limbo in which two people who were too young and too related could start kissing without anything or anyone making us stop.
I have sometimes asked myself whether my country is the better for my having lived at all? I do not know that it is. I have been the instrument of doing the following things; but they would have been done by others; some of them, perhaps, a little better.
I've been an acquaintance of the president Ryan Glover for some years and for a couple years we've been talking about possibilities, puzzle pieces fitting together. I was doing an event that they were sponsoring, and after a group of us went to dinner and we started talking a little bit more and one thing led to another.We all thought it might be a good idea to try to develop a show and as we started talking about the show that we might bring to air, it turned into doing a newsmagazine.
When I start on a book, I have been thinking about it and making occasional notes for some time... So I have lots of theme, locale, subjects and technical ideas... I don't worry about long periods of not doing anything. I know my subconscious is busy.
When I make a film, I don't watch a lot of other films. I read a lot; I try to read poems, things that can liberate my human condition, that make me go away... I spend a lot of the time doing nothing, just concentrating on the subject. Sometimes I'll sit in my chair for two or three hours without doing anything.
God wants to be our partner throughout life. Too often we are tempted to either carry the entire load ourselves or give everything to God and do nothing. God doesn't like either strategy. Sometimes He moves before us and sometimes after us - but He doesn't move without us. Without God... we cannot. Without us... God will not.
Although I could be wrong. If Roland Emmerich's thinking about doing that at some point, I'd be glad to don the long hair again. But sometimes you can just go a little bit further out with something you're only going to be doing for a short run
I have been thinking about the notion of perfect love as being without fear, and what that means for us in a world that's becoming increasingly xenophobic, tortured by fundamentalism and nationalism.
Poems give us permission to be unsure, in ways we must be if we are ever to learn anything not already known. If you look with open eyes at your actual life, it's always going to be the kind of long division problem that doesn't work out perfectly evenly. Poems let you accept the multiplicity and complexity of the actual, they let us navigate the unnavigable, insoluble parts of our individual fates and shared existence.
The world isn't perfect, and some days it wears you down. You can either accept that, and face it, and be a help to others instead of a hindrance. Or you can decide the rules are too tough and they shouldn't apply to you, and you can ignore them and make things harder for everybody else. Sometimes life is about being sad and doing things anyway. Sometimes it's about being hurt and doing things anyway. The point isn't perfection. The point is doing it anyway.
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