A Quote by James Wright

Poetry can keep life itself alive. You can endure almost anything as long as you can sing about it.

James Wright

Quote Topics

About Alive Almost Almost Anything Anything Endure Itself Keep Life Long Poetry Sing

Quote Author

James Wright
American - Poet
December 13, 1927 - March 25, 1980

We can endure almost anything if we are centered, if we have some focus in our life. You can endure if you have an anchor.

Renita J. Weems

There have always been great defenses of poetry, and I've tried to write mine, and I think all of my work and criticism is a defense of poetry to try and keep something alive in poetry.

Edward Hirsch

The child thinks of growing old as an almost obscene calamity, which for some mysterious reason will never happen to itself. All who have passed the age of thirty are joyless grotesques, endlessly fussing about things of no importance and staying alive without, so far as the child can see, having anything to live for. Only child life is real life.

George Orwell

I'll sing as long as people want to hear me, and I'll be able to sing as long as I'm alive.

John Raitt

Love so needs to love that it will endure almost anything, even abuse, just to flicker for a moment. But the sky's mouth is kind, its song will never hurt you, for I sing those words.

Rumi

Almost anything is enough to keep alive someone who wishes nothing for himself but time to write music.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Homosexuals are delicate and bad poetry is delicate and [Allen] Ginsberg turned the tables by making homosexual poetry strong poetry, almost manly poetry; but in the long run, the homo will remain the homo and not the poet.

Charles Bukowski

I feel deep gratitude for the life poetry has allowed me to live. I know the life I could have lived without it. Both on the physical plain, and the soul plain. Poetry helps us endure.

Dorianne Laux

I may sing the same songs for over 40 years now but I always sing them in different ways in order to keep the excitement and passion alive.

Eric Burdon

I look at the great poets of the Soviet Union, like Anna Akhmatova, who endured far worse then anything we've seen or hopefully that we will ever see. If they could keep writing and keep a voice alive, keep people hopeful through their poetry, then I would be ashamed to stop and to give in. It would be really self-indulgent, unacceptable, and inexcusable to walk away from it.

Sara Paretsky

The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself - as a vocation and an elevation almost.

Seamus Heaney

I've never been able to write poetry without having vast tracts of dead time. Poetry requires a certain kind of disciplined indolence that the world, including many prose writers, doesn't recognize as discipline. It is, though. It's the discipline to endure hours that you refuse to fill with anything but the possibility of poetry, though you may in fact not be able to write a word of it just then, and though it may be playing practical havoc with your life. It's the discipline of preparedness.

Christian Wiman

Prayer is as necessary as the air, as the blood in our bodies, as anything to keep us alive-to keep us alive to the grace of God.

Mother Teresa

My dream was bigger than anything else. My fight and me wanting to fulfill what I wanted to be in life. That was enough to keep me strong enough to endure anything.

Allen Iverson

One day while studying a Yeats poem I decided to write poetry the rest of my life. I recognized that a single short poem has room for history, music, psychology, religious thought, mood, occult speculation, character, and events of one's own life. I still feel surprised that such various substances can find shelter and nourishment in a poem. A poem in fact may be a sort of nourishing liquid, such as one uses to keep an amoeba alive. If prepared right, a poem can keep an image or a thought or insights on history or the psyche alive for years, as well as our desires and airy impulses.