Norwegian Poet Quotes

ONE WORD
One word
- one stone
in a cold river.
One more stone
I'll need many stones
if I'm going to get over. ~ Olav H. Hauge

Neither black/red/yellow nor woman but poet or writer. For many of us, the question of priorities remains a crucial issue. Being merely "a writer" without a doubt ensures one a status of far greater weight than being "a woman of color who writes" ever does. Imputing race or sex to the creative act has long been a means by which the literary establishment cheapens and discredits the achievements of non-mainstream women writers. She who "happens to be" a (non-white) Third World member, a woman, and a writer is bound to go through the ordeal of exposing her work to the abuse and praises and criticisms that either ignore, dispense with, or overemphasize her racial and sexual attributes. Yet the time has passed when she can confidently identify herself with a profession or artistic vocation without questioning and relating it to her color-woman condition. ~ Trinh T. Minh-ha

I define influence simply as literary love, tempered by defense. The defenses vary from poet to poet. But the overwhelming presence of love is vital to understanding how great literature works. ~ Harold Bloom

One of the most intuitive nature writers of our recently past century, Peter Matthiessen, lends a poets voice to the desperate effort to save the tiger. ~ Ron Franscell

Light itself was your first love: you paint only as a means of telling about light... Ink and catgut and paint were necessary down there, but they are also dangerous stimulants. Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from love of the thing he tells, to love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only what they say about Him. ~ C.S. Lewis

Young poets bewail the passing of love; old poets, the passing of time. There is surprisingly little difference. ~ Mason Cooley

Right is more beautiful than private affection, and is compatible with universal wisdom. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Waiting for dusk and someone dear to come and whip him down the street, gently home ~ Donald Justice

Keep awake, alive, new. Perform the paradox of being hard and yet soft. Survive without calcification of the tender membranes. Be a poet. Be alive. ~ Tennessee Williams

Belief in one's identity as a poet or writer prior to the acid test of publication is as naive and harmless as the youthful belief in one's immortality ... and the inevitable disillusionment is just as painful. ~ Dan Simmons

If I am not mistaken, it was a British poet who said that 'no one is properly dressed unless he wears a smile.' ~ Sukarno

I've read every letter that you've sent me these past two years. In return, I've sent you many form letters, with the hope of one day being able to give you the proper response you deserve. But the more letters you wrote to me, and the more of yourself you gave, the more daunting my task became.
I'm sitting beneath a pear tree as I dictate this to you, overlooking the orchards of a friend's estate. I've spent the past few days here, recovering from some medical treatment that has left me physically and emotionally depleted. As I moped about this morning, feeling sorry for myself, it occurred to me, like a simple solution to an impossible problem: today is the day I've been waiting for.
You asked me in your first letter if you could be my protege. I don't know about that, but I would be happy to have you join me in Cambridge for a few days. I could introduce you to my colleagues, treat you to the best curry outside India, and show you just how boring the life of an astrophysicist can be.
You can have a bright future in the sciences, Oskar.
I would be happy to do anything possible to facilitate such a path. It's wonderful to think what would happen if you put your imagination toward scientific ends.
But Oskar, intelligent people write to me all the time. In your fifth letter you asked, "What if I never stop inventing?" That question has stuck with me.
I wish I were a poet. I've never confessed that to anyone, and I'm confessing it to you, bec ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

There is absolutely nothing to be gained from sleeping with one strange woman after another. It just tires you out and makes you disgusted with yourself. ~ Haruki Murakami

Nobody likes being alone that much. I don't go out of my way to make friends, that's all. It just leads to disappointment. ~ Haruki Murakami

My father played the melodion
Outside at our gate;
There were stars in the morning east;
And they danced to his music.
Across the wild bogs his melodion called
To Lennons and Callans.
As I pulled on my trousers in a hurry
I knew some strange thing had happened.
Outside in the cow-house my mother
Made the music of milking;
The light of her stable-lamp was a star
And the frost of Bethlehem made it twinkle.
A water-hen screeched in the bog,
Mass-going feet
Crunched the wafer-ice on the pot-holes,
Somebody wistfully twisted the bellows wheel.
My child poet picked out the letters
On the grey stone,
In silver the wonder of a Christmas townland,
The winking glitter of a frosty dawn.
Cassiopeia was over
Cassidy's hanging hill,
I looked and three whin bushes rode across
The horizon - the Three Wise Kings.
An old man passing said:
"Can't he make it talk" -
The melodion, I hid in the doorway
And tightened the belt of my box-pleated coat.
I nicked six nicks on the door-post
With my penknife's big blade -
There was a little one for cutting tobacco.
And I was six Christmases of age.
My father played the melodion,
My mother milked the cows,
And I had a prayer like a white rose pinned
On the Virgin Mary's blouse ~ Patrick Kavanagh

And so I just grieve, groaning,
'Let me not go
To the Place of the Shorn:
My heart is now precious ...
For I, I am a poet
And my flower is golden. ~ David Bowles

My advice to aspiring poets is to find a community of other poets who are willing to read one another's work. And to read widely, in a variety of time periods and cultures, to identify which traits of poems are appealing and which aversive. And what can be stolen. ~ Lucia Perillo

Of little use, the man you may suppose,
Who says in verse what others say in prose;
Yet let me show a poet's of some weight,
And (though no soldier) useful to the state,
What will a child learn sooner than a song?
What better teach a foreigner the tongue?
What's long or short, each accent where to place
And speak in public with some sort of grace? ~ Alexander Pope

Growing up, I'd already decided I wanted to be a beatnik. A Bohemian poet, I thought. Or a musician. Maybe an artist. I'd dress in black turtlenecks and smoke Gitanes. I'd listen to cool jazz in clubs, getting up to read devastating truths from my notebook, leaning against the microphone, cigarette dangling from my hand. ~ Charles De Lint

A satirical poet is the check of the laymen on bad priests. ~ John Dryden

What made me a comedian was that I wasn't really a songwriter, I was more of a poet. ~ Tommy Chong

In every age poets and social reformers have tried to stimulate the people of their own time to a nobler life by enchanting stories of the virtues of the heroes of old. ~ Alfred Marshall

The greatest poet who ever wrote about rowing is Virgil, the greatest historian is Thucydides, but the greatest imagination ever to turn its attention to the sport is that of painter, Thomas Eakins. ~ Barry S. Strauss

Who would one rather be? The one who desires, or the object of desire? One's answer to this question might determine if he is meant to be a poet or something else entirely. ~ Lan Samantha Chang

I express myself in sculpture since I am not a poet. ~ Aristide Maillol

It was among farmers and potato diggers and old men in workhouses and beggars at my own door that I found what was beyond these and yet farther beyond that drawingroom poet of my childhood in the expression of love, and grief, and the pain of parting, that are the disclosure of the individual soul. ~ Lady Gregory

The poets whom I knew then were all men and all seemed dauntingly sure of themselves - although I am sure that really they were as uncertain as I was. ~ Helen Dunmore

Out beyond the ideas of Life and Death, there lives a poet trying to find the world between the breaths. With each Inhale he writes the songs of life and with each exhale he lets it out like a death. ~ AnkitMishra

Why our poet chose to give his 1958 hurricane a little-used Spanish name sometimes given to parrots) instead of Linda or Lois, is not clear. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Once upon a time, you dragged a part of me into the world of the dead, and now Naoko has dragged another pat of me into that world. ~ Haruki Murakami

A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas. ~ G.H. Hardy

All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful. ~ Wilfred Owen

A great poet can give wings to abstract thoughts that touch a reader's mind with the ecstasy of joy. ~ Debasish Mridha

Therefore it seemed a dreadful injustice that these wise races should perish at the hands of creatures who were still little more than animals. It was as if vultures feasted on and squabbled over the paralyzed body of the youthful poet who could only stare at them with puzzled eyes as they slowly robbed him of an exquisite existence they would never appreciate, never know they were taking. ~ Michael Moorcock

The beauty of a woman is first a soulful beauty. And yes, as we live it out, own it, inhabit our beauty, we do become more lovely. More alluring. As the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, "Self flashes off frame and face." Our true self becomes reflected in our appearance. But it flows from the inside ~ John Eldredge

One error, in fact, of eccentricity in poetry is to seek for new human emotions to express; and in this search for novelty in the wrong place it discovers the perverse. The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all. ~ T. S. Eliot

Justice is in the hands of the gods, an old poet wrote, mortal hands hold only mercy and the sword. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

American poets celebrate their bodies, very specifically, as Whitman did. ~ Diane Wakoski