Gregory Orr Quotes

I can't actually explain why my lines got shorter, but they did. Just as I can't explain why my early poems were 'all image' and my current ones are relatively abstract. The sense of the line changed with the theme, somehow my ear (or brain or heart/mind) fell in love with a short line and very very simple words. ~ Gregory Orr

I am committed now to one thing: lyric sequences. I want the intensity of lyric, but the scope and arc of narrative. so, I think I'll just write sequences for the foreseeable (the Beloved sequence doesn't have a 'plot' so I can just keep adding poems to it, it's like a giant bag I can just put beloved lyrics into - I think there are about 300 of them i've published by now). ~ Gregory Orr

Somehow something has gone wrong with poetry in our culture. We have lost touch with its purpose and value, and in doing so, we have lost contact with essential aspects of our own emotional and spiritual lives. ~ Gregory Orr

With "poets dead and gone" as Keats says in "Mermaid Tavern" they are alive and talking to us and us to them. ~ Gregory Orr

Speaking of people I had to exclude: Hank Williams. which is to say, songs are part of lyric poetry in my book, my thinking. In fact they are the urgent element of poetry in our time, they carry the most emotion for the most people in our culture. everyone LOVES poetry, because we all love (one form or another) of rock and roll (be it folk to emo to rap). It's all rock and roll and all lyric poetry. ~ Gregory Orr

Each night, I knelt on a marble slab
and scrubbed at the blood.
I scrubbed for years and still it was there.
But tonight the bones in my feet
begin to burn. I stand up
and start walking, and the slab
appears under my feet with each step,
a white road only as long as your body. ~ Gregory Orr

Language is a theme in the whole book, no? I mean it ends with the title poem about words are all we have. I guess midrash makes sense. How does it change in the course of the sequence? Well, God is into No and into Stasis/Nouns. Adam and Eve, in order to be in this world (and get this world going) must choose verbs. Which is to gain sex but also to choose death and all else that goes with change. To choose becoming over being. ~ Gregory Orr

"Similar but not the same" - that's like the return of the beloved for me. And metamorphosis: the spirit of the beloved moving through things, not lingering long in any one thing or place, no matter how we might wish it. ~ Gregory Orr

And yet I swear
I love this earth
that scars and scalds,
that burns my feet.

And even hell is holy. ~ Gregory Orr

Poetry is the thread that leads us out of the labyrinth of despair and into the light. ~ Gregory Orr

D.H. Lawrence says that myths are "inexhaustible" because they are symbols of heart mysteries. That is, they can't be exhausted - they somehow have embodied some central human mystery (love, loss, being a body in time, who knows which or what?) and thus can be retold infinitely and still be rich. That's part of your saying: it's old, but it's also new. Or: there's nothing "new" in the human heart, but it still matters lots. ~ Gregory Orr

No one can threaten poetry. It's always been there, always will be. Humans need it to live: it has sustaining powers. How could we (anyone) get through adolescence without some form of song? Song is only a version of lyric poetry that is carried more by melody than by internal coherence and unity. but lyric and song - they are the same. ~ Gregory Orr

Maybe it was always simple:
Loss surrounds us.
Who would deny it?
We ourselves are loss, are lost. ~ Gregory Orr

To guide someone
through the halls of hell
is not the same as love. ~ Gregory Orr

I was born with a knife in one hand and a wound in the other. ~ Gregory Orr

Rhyme as an echo not a closing off of sound. Love it. I don't know where the rhymes came from. Or the puns like "no/know" and so on. Just a way my mind start moving toward what seemed urgent to it. I'd like to claim complete rational intent for it all, but it wasn't that way. if you asked me about rhyme thirty years ago, I'd have said: not me, never. And now I done it. ~ Gregory Orr

The way the word sinks
into the deep snow of the page ~ Gregory Orr

Maybe she loved me,
maybe not –
who knows?
Not even the gods
can see into
a human heart –
it's that dark. ~ Gregory Orr

To me, poetry is about survival first of all. Survival of the individual self, survival of the emotional life. ~ Gregory Orr

I want language to help us live in a world of wonder/terror/change. I want it to be about "becoming" rather than "being." I think that being and nouns are part of our hopeless dream that time will stop and we will not die. but it's not that way. So, why not celebrate verbs and the beloved's metamorphosis into other people or creatures or places - the same spirit but moving through things, not static. ~ Gregory Orr

Whenever I read a poem that moves me, I know I'm not alone in the world. I feel a connection to the person who wrote it, knowing that he or she has gone through something similar to what I've experienced, or felt something like what I have felt. And their poem gives me hope and courage, because I know that they survived, that their life force was strong enough to turn experience into words and shape it into meaning and then bring it toward me to share. ~ Gregory Orr

Where would I be if not for your wild heart?
I ask this not from love, but selfishly -
how could I live? How could I make my art? ~ Gregory Orr

To learn by heart is to learn
By hurt - grief inscribing
Its wisdom in the soft tissue.

Song you sing, poem you are -
Finger moving, precise
As a phonograph needle,
Along the groove of scar. ~ Gregory Orr

I couldn't help noticing
certain parts of the statues
have been polished
to a high sheen
by passing hands
as the centuries passed.
If it's a form of worship
it is not much odder
or more perverse
than the saint's stone toe
kissed to a stub by fervent lips. ~ Gregory Orr

Another way of saying "put it in the Book" would be that each poem we write pops up in the city of poetry, where anyone can visit it. Just as we visit the poems written before us. Go to Dickinson's house, or Li Po's or whomever we think has something to say to us that might help or be beautiful. ~ Gregory Orr

When it's right you can't say Who is kissing whom. ~ Gregory Orr

That's crudely put, but
If we're not supposed to dance,
Why all this music? ~ Gregory Orr

Beauty is like life itself: a dawn mist the sun burns off. It gives no peace, no rest. ~ Gregory Orr

Time is the web, and Fate is the spider. ~ Gregory David Roberts

Long after the greed and disrespect have fallen from mortal lips, the bush and the ocean will still be here. And the birds will still be laughing. Sacred and strong. ~ Gregory Day

I know now that when the loving, honest moment comes it should be seized, and spoken, because it may never come again. And unvoiced, unmoving, unlived in the things we declare form heart to heart, those true and real feelings wither and crumble in the remembering hand that tries too late to reach for them. ~ Gregory David Roberts

But why would anyone on a joyous occasion rake over past unpleasantness and dwell on painful events horrible to experience and repellent to recall? Silence is mightier than words. It clothes the wreckage that befalls us in the deep folds of forgetfulness unless someone stirs up the painful memories for the sole purpose of edifying us by example and, as with illnesses, of helping us avoid the causes that led us to them. ~ Gregory Of Nazianzus

The cops watched me and the Georges and the other foreigners who worked the streets, and they knew exactly what we were doing. They reasoned, truly enough, that we caused no violent harm, and we were good for business in the black market that brought them bribes and other benefits. They took their cut from the drug and currency dealers. They left us alone. They left me alone. ~ Gregory David Roberts

But this world is changing. Perhaps by the time you are old enough to marry the world will hear a woman's voice. Perhaps she will not have to swear to obey in her wedding vows. Perhaps one day a woman will be allowed to both love and think. ~ Philippa Gregory

We stand at a crossroads. Idolatry looms. Traditional values in jeopardy. Truth under siege and virtue abandoned. ~ Gregory Maguire

I grew up really loving horror movies and genre movies. I was a big fan of Universal Monsters movies, read Famous Monsters magazine. I built monster models and creature effects. ~ Gregory Nicotero

I like to do the research of history and the creativity of writing fiction. I am creating this thing which I think is twice as difficult as writing either history or fiction. ~ Philippa Gregory

I'm cancer-free today!
Cancer cannot keep up with my goals, enthusiasm, focus, passion, and determination. I will run you out of my body by not thinking about you, I will focus on what it will be like when you are gone. ~ Gregory Q. Cheek

Human beings have hope. Not matter how desperate things are, they convince themselves that they can change things for the better.
- John Gregory (Clash of the Demons) ~ Joseph Delaney

You are my heart. Even if you are a broken heart ~ Philippa Gregory

I am sorry for you. And I am sorry for me. When you are sent back to me, perhaps a month from now, perhaps a year, I will try to remember this day, and you looking like a child, a little lost among all these clothes. I will try to remember that you were innocent of any plotting; that today at least, you were more a girl than a Boleyn. ~ Philippa Gregory

A young man didn't bring flowers or chocolates to the woman he loved: He brought her stories from the wider world, where men grappled with demons of desire, and monstrous injustice. ~ Gregory David Roberts

Humans were the only creatures in the world that ate their food cooked. You'd never find a Gorilla frying up some bananas for dinner or a lion charcoal-broiling a zebra steak. Cats don't often run to the oven with a mouse or bird they've captured, and a dog wouldn't naturally prepare its rabbit dinner in a stew. ~ Dick Gregory

Surrender to alcohol intoxication provides a partial and subjective shortcut to a more correct state of mind. ~ Gregory Bateson

We might, either of us, be Queen of England and yet we'll always be nothing to our family. ~ Philippa Gregory

She said I was interested in everything and committed to nothing. ~ Gregory David Roberts

You had to form for yourself a lucid language for the world, to overcome the battering of experience, to replace everyday life's pain and harshness and wretched dreariness with - no not with certainty but with an ignorance you could live with. Deep ignorance, but still a kind that knew its limits. The limits were crucial. ~ Gregory Benford

But a lady forced is never a lady won ~ Gregory Benford

Freeman murmured at his elbow, "Let him go. I'm working on an even bigger nuclear rocket, called Orion. We might take a cruise out to Saturn on it by the 1980s or ~ Gregory Benford

Children talk themselves out of their convictions as they grow up and become distracted by their huge selfish selves. All the literature is consistent on this point. Children begin to think they've imagined us. ~ Gregory Maguire

Number is different from quantity. ~ Gregory Bateson

Sometimes the worst thing you can do to a woman is to love her. ~ Gregory David Roberts

Gregory smiled a little, holding up an empty syringe. "I'm afraid you don't have all that much choice in the matter. I added a little something to your IV line. We'll see you in a few hours."
"What - ?" My eyes widened. "You bastard."
"My parents were married."
"You could have ... could have asked me ... " My voice was already slowing down. I didn't know whether it was psychosomatic or just very well timed, but either way, I was pissed. ~ Mira Grant

Drive safe, dress safe, live safe. Retreat to the safest place of all. ~ Daryl Gregory

Retarding the aging process would be therapy and enhancement because it would mean defeating diseases and because it would extend our life span. ~ Gregory Stock

None of us lie or guard our secrets when we sing, and India is a nation of singers whose first love is the kind of song we turn to when crying just isn't enough. ~ Gregory David Roberts

There was a scientist who did not believe in gods or fairies or supernatural creatures of any sort. But she had once known an angel, and had talked to her every day. ~ Daryl Gregory

It was on Thanksgiving Day a number of years ago… I got to thinking that there might be some beings on another planet somewhere who are as intelligent compared with us as we are compared with turkeys.
Then I had visions of these beings from another planet going to the butcher shop with their meat list. I wonder what they'd call their butcher shops? They'd probably call them "folks shops." I could hear them placing an order: "Give me a half dozen Oriental knees, two Caucasian feet and twelve fresh Black lips." And the folks-shopkeeper comes back smiling and says, "These Black lips are so fresh they're still talkin'. ~ Dick Gregory

The truth is that there are no good men, or bad men,' he said. 'It is the deeds that have goodness or badness in them. There are good deeds, and bad deeds. Men are just men - it is what they do, or refuse to do, that links them to good and evil. The truth is that an instant of real love, in the heart of anyone - the noblest man alive or the most wicked - has the whole purpose and process and meaning of life within the lotus-folds of its passion. The truth is that we are all, every one of us, every atom, every galaxy, and every particle of matter in the universe, moving toward God. ~ Gregory David Roberts

We are beginning to play with ideas of ecology, and although we immediately trivialize these into commerce or politics, there is at least an impulse still in the human breast to unify and thereby sanctify the total natural world, of which we are ... There have been, and still are, in the world many different and even contrasting epistemologies which have been alike in stressing an ultimate unity, and, although this is less sure, which have also stressed the notion that ultimate unity is aesthetic. The uniformity of these views gives hope that perhaps the great authority of quantitative science may be insufficient to deny an ultimate unifying beauty.
I hold to the presupposition that our loss of the sense of aesthetic unity was, quite simply, an epistemological mistake. ~ Gregory Bateson

It is what the poets of Ireland used to be saying, that every brave man, good at fighting, and every man that could do great deeds and not be making much talk about them, was of the Sons of the Gael; and that every skilled man that had music and that did enchantments secretly, was of the Tuatha de Danaan. ~ Lady Gregory

By then Geoffrey's threadbare soul had been left far behind standing by the side of the highway. Did he feel anything anymore? Warm? Cold? Watching after them, mouth open as if to call out; did he wish at the last moment to have done life differently? ~ B.P. Gregory

The thing that most critics miss about Faulkner is that his famous storytelling voice is, in fact, a standard Southern storytelling voice that is typical of the Gulf Coast - Mississippi, Alabama and so on. ~ Gregory Benford

The cave of Ozma has been discovered, and she is to come back and rule our Oz, and the idiotic Scarecrow can go stuff himself. Hah!Good one: a Scarecrow stuffing himself. ~ Gregory Maguire

You lost your copper as well as your faith in wishes, and prayers. ~ Gregory Maguire

A certain young scholar of Shiz Right before a philosophy quiz Guzzled splits of champagne So that he could declaim I drink, and therefore I is. ~ Gregory Maguire

Kurtapyjama. His face was deeply lined, and his white ~ Gregory David Roberts