A Quote by Walter Mosley

Poetry teaches us music, metaphor, condensation and specificity.

Walter Mosley

Quote Topics

Music Poetry Condensation Metaphor Specificity Teaches Us

Quote Author

Walter Mosley
American - Novelist
Born: January 12, 1952

Comic strips introduced me to metaphors. They are pure metaphor, so you learn how to tell a story with symbols, which is a very valuable thing to learn. And I learned that from motion pictures, too, and from poetry. Poetry is mainly metaphor. If it doesn't have a metaphor, it doesn't work.

Ray Bradbury

Poetry is the most informative of all of the arts because everything comes down to poetry. No matter what it is we are describing, ultimately we use either a metaphor; or we say "that's poetry in motion." You drink a glass of wine and say, "that's poetry in a bottle." Everything is poetry, so I think we come down to emotional information. And that's what poetry conveys.

Nikki Giovanni

I don't think music teaches about mundane, everyday life. It teaches us what it is to be a human being.

Steven Stucky

What Western society teaches us is that if you get enough money, power, and beautiful people to have sex with, that's going to bring you happiness. That's what every commercial, every magazine, music, movie teaches us. That's a fallacy.

Adam Yauch

Poetry teaches us how to live in a world in which none of us belongs.

Dennis Nurkse

The game of chess is a metaphor for life... it teaches you strategy and it teaches you the value of knowing where you are, where you want to get to and what obstacles are in the way that you need to navigate in order to get there.

Lupita Nyong'o

Poetry is music though, unfortunately, not all music is poetry. Because music has other carriers to take its message - beats, lyrics, singers, bass players - anyone in music can rise to make a major statement but in poetry there are only words to do the work. And they do sometimes have to sweat.

Nikki Giovanni

The golden light of metaphor, which is the intelligence of poetry, was implicit in alchemical study. To change, magically, one substance into another, more valuable one is the ancient function of metaphor, as it was of alchemy.

Patricia Hampl

Poetry teaches us things that cannot be learned in prose, such as certain kinds of irony or the importance of the unsaid. The most important element of any poem is the part that is left unsaid. So the poetry frames the experience that lies beyond naming.

Sam Hamill

All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Poetry is the alchemy which teaches us to convert ordinary materials into gold.

Anais Nin

As poetry is the harmony of words, so music is that of notes; and as poetry is a rise above prose and oratory, so is music the exaltation of poetry.

Henry Purcell

Racing teaches us to challenge ourselves. It teaches us to push beyond where we thought we could go. It helps us to find out what we are made of. This is what we do. This is what it's all about.

PattiSue Plumer

As water by cooling and condensation becomes ice, so thought by condensation assumes physical form. Everything in the universe is thought in material form.