Top 1200 Poetry Reading Quotes & Sayings - Page 12

In the earliest ages science was poetry, as in the later poetry has become science.

People looking at advertisements or reading their local newspapers would have had no idea that what they were reading was bought and paid for with their tax dollars.

All lives are composed of two basic elements," the squirrel said, "purpose and poetry. By being ourselves, squirrel and raven, we fulfill the first requirement, you in flight and I in my tree. But there is poetry in the meanest of lives, and if we leave it unsought we leave ourselves unrealized. A life without food, without shelter, without love, a life lived in the rain—this is nothing beside a life without poetry.

Reading a script is usually as exciting as reading a boilerplate legal document, so when you read one that makes you feel as if you're seeing the movie, you know it's something different.

People feel compelled to continue reading and hearing the news. Sometimes, you just want somebody to be yelling at it with you as you're reading it. I think of that as my function.

The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public. A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.

If anyone's reading this waiting for some type of full-on, flat apology for anything, they should just stop reading right now.

I studied art at Queens College, taking very few courses in literature. But I've always loved reading poetry and grew up enjoying the so-called beat poets, Allan Ginsburg, Jack Kerouac, and Gregory Corso among them. The poems of Ogden Nash also inspired me, having first seen his work while browsing in a library when I was in the sixth grade.

I started writing poetry in high school because I wanted desperately to write, but somehow, writing stories didn't appeal to me, and I loved the flow and the feel and sense of poetry, especially that of what one might call formal verse.

But it's silly to suggest the writing of poetry is something ethereal, a sort of soul-crashing, devastating emotional experience that wrings you. I have no fancy ideas about poetry. ... It doesn't come to you on the wings of a dove. It's something you have to work hard at.

Abstract reason, formerly the servant of practical human reasons, has everywhere become its master, and denies poetry any excuse for existence. Though philosophers like to define poetry as irrational fancy, for us it is practical, humorous, reasonable way of being ourselves. Of never acquiescing in a fraud; of never accepting the secondary-rate in poetry, painting, music, love, friends. Of safeguarding our poetic institutions against the encroachments of mechanized, insensate, inhumane, abstract rationality.

In poetry, I have, since very young, loved poetry in translation. The Chinese, the French, the Russians, Italians, Indians and early Celts: the formality of the translator's voice, their measured breath and anxiety moves me as it lingers over the original.

My poetry is not lyric. The epigrams are lyric because they come from my youthful period of lyricism, but my other poetry is not lyric.

'Harry Potter' is the first book that ever got me into reading. I had to read it in year 7, for school, and then I kept reading all of them.

I love poetry. If my mind gets a bit tight or bound up with information or depressed with bad news, I find a good book of poetry is like going to the gym for an hour. My mind just expands.

My grandparents - both of my mother's parents - were actors, and they ran the Reading Repertory Theatre Company, through the town of Reading, where I come from.

You may ... make a little recreation of poetry, in the midst of your painful studies. Nevertheless, I cannot but advise you. Withhold thy throat from thirst. Be not so set upon poetry, as to be always poring on the passionate and measured pages. ... let not the Circean cup intoxicate you.

Indeed there can be no more useful help for discovering what poetry belongs to the class of the truly excellent, and can therefore do us most good, than to have always in one's mind lines and expressions of the great masters, and to apply them as a touchstone to other poetry.

There's a richness that reading gives you, an opportunity to probe more than any other medium I know of. Reading is about not being content with the surface.

The inmost spirit of poetry, in other words, is at bottom, in every recorded case, the voice of pain – and the physical body, so to speak, of poetry, is the treatment by which the poet tries to reconcile that pain with the world.

Reading groups, readings, breakdowns of book sales all tell the same story: when women stop reading, the novel will be dead.

Reading, reading actively, strengthens the soul.

That's all there was in our house: poetry and choir rehearsal and duets and so forth; I listened to Dad and Mother discuss things about poetry and delivery and voice and diction - I don't think anyone could know how much it really means.

The laureateship [of U.S. Children's Poet] has brought me a couple of appealing contracts, including my first anthology, the 200-poem The National Geographic Book of Animal Poetry.Apart from the increased travel, I won't let anything interfere with writing poetry.

Poetry, in the entire course of its development, has always been trying to capture meanings and problems which are still obscure and dormant. Poetry tries to awaken them with a kiss, wherever they may be: in the air, in things, in human beings.

The same plasticity that allows us to form a reading circuit to begin with, and short-circuit the development of deep reading if we allow it, also allows us to learn how to duplicate deep reading in a new environment. We cannot go backwards. As children move more toward an immersion in digital media, we have to figure out ways to read deeply there.

Reading can be just feeding, but smart reading takes us further. The classroom is one way to go deeper, but we can't stay in school forever.

I loved reading when I grew up but did feel totally invisible because I couldn't see myself and my life reflected in the books I was reading.

Reading is very creative - it's not just a passive thing. I write a story; it goes out into the world; somebody reads it and, by reading it, completes it.

Book clubs, both online and in person, have become a large percentage of the reading public, and many of them won't consider reading books in hardcover.

I quickly learned that reading is cumulative and proceeds by geometrical progression: each new reading builds upon whatever the reader has read before.

Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.

It may be that poetry makes life's nebulous events tangible to me and restores their detail; or conversely, that poetry brings forth the intangible quality of incidents which are all too concrete and circumstantial. Or each on specific occasions, or both all the time.

Reading takes me to a different place than my everyday life. I usually get fully involved in what I'm reading about, so it's a great escape.

I read my books at night, like that, under the quilt with the overheated reading lamp. Reading all those good lines while suffocating. It was magic.

Reading code is like reading all things written: You have to scribble, make a mess, remind yourself that the work comes to you through trial and error and revision.

Be not so set upon poetry, as to be always poring on the passionate and measured pages. Let not what should be sauce, rather than food for you, engross all your application. Beware of a boundless and sickly appetite for the reading of poems which the nation now swarms withal; and let not the Circaen cup intoxicate you. But especially preserve the chastity of your soul from the dangers you may incur, by a conversation with muses no better than harlots.

Poetry is poetry, and one's objective as a poet is to achieve poetry precisely as one's objective in music is to achieve music.

I'm not really quiet or shy. Ask any of my friends! But I always ground my poetry in life itself. Poetry is an art of language, though, so I am always aware of every word's meaning, or multiple meanings.

Poetry is superior to painting in the presentation of words, and painting is superior to poetry in the presentation of facts. For this reason I judge painting to be superior to poetry.

My reading is extremely eclectic. Lately I've been teaching myself computer graphics, so I'm reading a lot about that. I read books of trivia, of facts.

I love reading for a character I have no business reading for.

Honestly, I think I have this narcolepsy thing with reading. I fall asleep when I'm reading. So, if I stay awake to read an entire script, I'm like, 'Wow, I need to do this.'

Loneliness is necessary for pure poetry. When someone intrudes into the poet's life (and any sudden personal contact, whether in the bed or in the heart, is an intrusion) the poet loses his or her balance for a moment, slips into being what he or she is, uses his or her poetry as one would use money or sympathy. The person who writes the poetry emerges, tentatively, like a hermit crab from a conch shell. The poet, for that instant, ceases to be a dead person.

Workers need poetry more than bread. They need that their life should be a poem. They need some light from eternity. Religion alone can be the source of such poetry.

People say modernism killed poetry for them: it doesn't rhyme, it doesn't touch a popular musical oral tradition. Years ago, you memorized and read poetry; it was one of the things you were forced to learn. Now it has tiny role in school.

If I'm reading a book and it seems truly interesting, I tend to start reading back to front in order not to be too deeply under the sway of progress.

Yes, I read. I have that absurd habit. I like beautiful poems, moving poetry, and all the beyond of that poetry. I am extraordinarily sensitive to those poor, marvelous words left in our dark night by a few men I never knew.

Poetry examines an emotional truth. It's an experience filtered through the personality of the poet. We look to poetry for visions, not scientific truths. The poet's job is to combine new elements. Explore their melting, seeping into one another.

I have my Poetry 180 project, which I've made my main project. We encourage high schools, because that's really where, for most people, poetry dies off and gets buried under other adolescent pursuits.

What the war did was give me the opportunity of three years of continuous reading, and it was in the course of reading that I became convinced that I should become an economist.

I feel most myself when I'm reading, but by that I don't mean that I'm most comfortable when I'm reading. I feel most fully a person who's torn between attention and inattention, between loving and hating, between hyper-responsiveness and total dullness. Reading is not a comfortable experience for me.

Sometimes you're reading something, and you don't know it will be important in your life. You're reading this script, and you start to get involved. It's not an intellectual experience.

My earliest memory of books is not of reading but of being read to. I spent hours listening, watching the face of the person reading aloud to me.

There are definitely some tricks and techniques to a good reading. Rewarding the audience that shows up to your reading is very important and you can't be boring or ungrateful.

I don't like poetry that doesn't give me a sense of ritual, but I don't like poetry that doesn't sound like people talking to each other. I try to do both at once.

I think going from doing TV and straight plays to Shakespeare is weird enough because you have this heightened language, and you are telling a story through metric poetry. But I think music is that place beyond poetry.

I'm kind of a nerd when it comes to literature and theory. I wish I could have more of that in life, but I don't because I'm always reading scripts or things to prepare for movies when I'm reading.

The honor of being able to play Maura is transformative. I'm 70 years old. I should be in a reading room, reading Dickens or something.

I find a lot of poetry very disappointing, but I do have poets that I go back to. One book of poetry that I'd like to mention is 'The Exchange' by Sophie Cabot Black. Her poems are difficult without being too difficult.