#try

...imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it. Do not think it up laboriously, as if you were working out mental arithmetic. Just look at it, touch it, smell it, listen to it, turn yourself into it. When you do this, the words look after themselves, like magic. ↗

— Ted Hughes

#poetry #writing #imagination

I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same, slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones, icily free above the stones, above the stones and then the world. If you should dip your hand in, your wrist would ache immediately, your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn as if the water were a transmutation of fire that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame. If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter, then briny, then surely burn your tongue. It is like what we imagine knowledge to be: dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free, drawn form the cold hard mouth of the world, derived from the rocky breasts forever, flowing and drawn, and since our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown. ↗

— Elizabeth Bishop

#poetry #imagination

After the leaves have fallen, we return To a plain sense of things. It is as if We had come to an end of the imagination, Inanimate in an inert savoir. ↗

— Wallace Stevens

#imagination

I don't hold with shamans, witch doctors, or psychiatrists. Shakespeare, Tolstoy, or even Dickens, understood more about the human condition than ever occurred to any of you. You overrated bunch of charlatans deal with the grammar of human problems, and the writers I've mentioned with the essence. ↗

— Mordecai Richler

#literature #psychiatry #grammar

Being in prison for seven years was like being in an army that never drilled, never deployed, and only fought itself. ↗

— Raegan Butcher

#poetry #prison #social-commentary #sociology #sociology

What an incredible amount of poetry, of novels, of sociological solutions to the ills of the world! One supposes that poetry is written to enrich the spirit; that novels have been conceived at the very least, to entertain us; and even, optimistically, that sociological solutions are a guide to solving something. Viewing the situation calmly, I realized that the first (poetry) was capable of impoverishing the richest spirit, the second of boring the most joyful, the third of confusing the most lucid. ↗

— Augusto Monterroso

#sociology

Crystal ball and candle light, I want your dance tonight. Show me the power of love as we stand together in the middle of the night. ↗

— Santosh Kalwar

#love #poetry #funny

I imagined I was God for a millisecond And became speechless for a long time. ↗

— Dejan Stojanovic

#god #imagination #literature #literature-quotes #poetry

I never, my producer never, we never let myself just sing. We were always trying to get the perfect vocal. ↗

— K. D. Lang

#get #i #just #myself #never

[about her offer of a Swedish massage] Alex: You're not Swedish. Brittany: Yeah, well, neither are you. So if I do it wrong you'll never know the difference. ↗

— Simone Elkeles

#brittany #perfect-chemistry #alex