#poetry

L'aube exalteé ainsi qu'un peuple de colombes, et j'ai vu quelquefois ce que l'homme a cru voir! (And dawn, exalted like a host of doves - and then I've seen what men believe they've seen!) ↗

— Arthur Rimbaud

#men

I am talking about the responsibility of the poet, who is irresponsible by definition, an anarchist enamored of a solar order and never of the new order or whatever slogan makes five or six hundred million men march in step in a parody of order. ↗

— Julio Cortázar

#poets #men

A poet is a blind optimist. The world is against him for many reasons. But the poet persists. He believes that he is on the right track, no matter what any of his fellow men say. In his eternal search for truth, the poet is alone. He tries to be timeless in a society built on time. ↗

— Jack Kerouac

#beat #early-stories-and-other-writings #jack-kerouac #optimist #prose-poetry

As Auden is believed to have said, no poem saved a single Jew from the gas chambers. Never mind. Write the poems anyway. Play the music in spite of that. ↗

— Philip Pullman

#art

If my like for you was a football crowd, you’d be deaf ’cause of the roar. And if my like for you was a boxer, there’d be a dead guy lying on the floor. And if my like for you was sugar, you’d lose your teeth before you were twenty. And if my like for you was money, let’s just say you’d be spending plenty. ↗

— Cath Crowley

#poetry #sweet-talk #love

There’s no money in poetry, but there’s no poetry in money, either ↗

— Robert Graves

#poets #money

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore, There is society, where none intrudes, By the deep sea, and music in its roar: I love not man the less, but Nature more ↗

— George Gordon Byron

#poetry #solitude #love

It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted. ↗

— George Eliot

#poetry #music

If you must write prose or poems, the words you use should be your own. Don't plagiarize or take 'on loan'. There's always someone, somewhere, with a big nose, who knows, who'll trip you up and laugh when you fall. ↗

— Steven Morrissey

#poetry #music

I could do with a bit more excess. From now on I'm going to be immoderate--and volatile--I shall enjoy loud music and lurid poetry. I shall be rampant. ↗

— Joanne Harris

#music #poetry #rampant #volatile #music