#poetry

Where to start? Everything cracks and shakes, The air trembles with similes, No one world's better than another; the earth moans with metaphors. ↗

— Osip Mandelstam

#poetry #simile #simile

Here the phenomenologist has nothing in common with the literary critic who, as has frequently been noted, judges a work that he could not create and, if we are to believe certain facile condemnations, would not want to create. A literary critic is a reader who is necessarily severe. By turning inside out like a glove an overworked complex that has become debased to the point of being part of the vocabulary of statesmen, we might say that the literary critic and the professor of rhetoric, who know-all and judge-all, readily go in for a simplex of superiority. As for me, being an addict of felicitous reading, I only read and re-read what I like, with a bit of reader's pride mixed in with much enthusiasm. ↗

— Gaston Bachelard

#literary-criticism

This is the city, and I am one of the citizens/Whatever interests the rest interests me ↗

— Walt Whitman

#poetry #new-york-city

A lover goes toward his beloved as enthusiastically as a schoolboy leaving his books, but when he leaves his girlfriend, he feels as miserable as the schoolboy on his way to school. (Act 2, scene 2) ↗

— William Shakespeare

#poetry #love

We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. ↗

— T.S. Eliot

#poetry #self-discovery #wisdom #experience

All the black leather she needs is the E-Z boy recliner where her love is parked with one of his hands wrapped around a remote, the other, a bottle of beer. She's right. It's kinky. The way he doesn't look away from the TV, as her head bobs in his lap like a fisherman's float on a nature program, hectic with the pace his breath sets. His crotch swells under her mouth's prowess. He's such a sweetheart he waits until the commercials to come. ↗

— Daphne Gottlieb

#relationships #love

Love me in actions, not in words. ↗

— Dee Dee M. Scott

#poetry #love

Don't you just love poetry that gives you a crinkly feeling up and down your back? ↗

— L.M. Montgomery

#poetry #love

I've had it with these cheap sons of bitches who claim they love poetry but never buy a book. ↗

— Kenneth Rexroth

#love

Whereas story is processed in the mind in a straightforward manner, poetry bypasses rational thought and goes straight to the limbic system and lights it up like a brushfire. It's the crack cocaine of the literary world. ↗

— Jasper Fforde

#poetry #humor