The Sonnets Quotes

I am a close friend of Robert Loggia. And I just love how, with actors, there's the screen persona. Here is Robert, known for his portrayal of many characters, including gangsters. But in real life, he is elegant and erudite. He sits in the garden reading the sonnets of William Shakespeare. ~ Luanne Rice

...he lifted the fat and frightened hawk onto his fist reciting it passages from Hamlet, Macbeth, Richard II, Othello-- 'but tragedy had to be kept out of the voice'-- and all the sonnets he could remember, whistling hymns to it, playing it Gilbert and Sullivan and Italian opera, and deciding, on reflection, that hawks liked Shakespeare best. ~ Helen Macdonald

The Sonnets to Orpheus, Part Two, XII
Want the change. Be inspired by the flame
where everything shines as it disappears.
The artist, when sketching, loves nothing so much
as the curve of the body as it turns away. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

The Sonnets of Shakespeare have the fascination of an autobiography, without its clarity. It is like reading an important document in a cave by the light of matches which keep blowing out. ~ Gilbert Highet

You cannot locate Shakespeare in his own works, not even in the sonnets. It is in this near invisibility that encourages the zealots who believe that almost anyone wrote Shakespeare, except Shakespeare himself. ~ Harold Bloom

The Love that dare not speak its name" in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo, and those two letters of mine, such as they are. It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as the "Love that dare not speak its name," and on account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him. That it should be so, the world does not understand. The world mocks at it and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it. ~ Oscar Wilde

We always used to celebrate together at the end of a picture. Clark insisted on it. Maybe we'd include the director, maybe not. It was just a kind of ritual that the two of us had. We would share a bottle of champagne while he read poetry to me, usually the sonnets of Shakespeare. He loved poetry, and read beautifully, with great sensitivity, but he wouldn't dare let anyone else know it. He was afraid people would think him weak or effeminite and not the tough guy who liked to fish and hunt. I was the only one he trusted. He never wanted me to tell about this, and here I am giving him away, but I never mentioned it while he was alive. ~ Myrna Loy

As his widow, she knew who she was and what she had inherited. She had loved him in her way and sometimes missed him. She knew what words like "loved" and "missed" meant when she thought of her husband. When she thought of Blunt, on the other hand, she was unsure what anything meant except the sonnets she had written about their love affair. ~ Colm Toibin

No sooner, in fact, had I sent it off than a curious reaction came over me. It seemed to me that I had given away my capacity for belief in the Willie Hughes theory of the Sonnets, that something had gone out of me, as it were, and that I was perfectly indifferent to the whole subject. What was it that had happened? It is difficult to say, perhaps, by finding perfect expression for a passion I had exhausted the passion itself. Emotional forces, like the forces of physical life, have their positive limitations. Perhaps the mere effort to convert any one to a theory involves some form of renunciation of the power of credence. Perhaps I was simply tired of the whole thing, and, my enthusiasm having burnt out, my reason was left to its own unimpassioned judgment. However it came about, and I cannot pretend to explain it, there was no doubt that Willie Hughes suddenly became to me a mere myth, an idle dream, the boyish fancy of a young man who, like most ardent spirits, was more anxious to convince others than to be himself convinced. ~ Oscar Wilde

Because God the Sonnets is made of the energy of the Holy Spirit, He is the door for us to enter the Kingdom of Heaven...The Buddha is also described as a door, a teacher, who shows us the way in this life. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Christopher Marlowe or Francis Bacon The author of Lear remains unshaken Willie Herbert or Mary Fitton What does it matter? The Sonnets were written. ~ Noel Coward

I strive for what you do find in Shakespeare's work - that there is a definite humanity and a definite character behind the writing in the sonnets, and it's very real because it's so deeply personal. I try to aspire to that in what I do. ~ Rufus Wainwright

You know, you scare the hell out of me [...] I don't know, it's like, I look at you and suddenly the sonnets make sense. ~ M.L. Rio

The public is absolutely fascinated by aging. They don't want to get old. And you can see - read Shakespeare. Read the sonnets. They're all about aging. ~ Cynthia Kenyon

Sonnet XII: There is a Meetinghouse across the wold

There is a Meetinghouse across the wold
Near shaded churchyard where pine breezes sigh;
Such sacred mem'ries gently here unfold
Of rustic folk whom 'neath the yew trees lie.
Engraved on stones now crum'ling in the earth,
Of souls asleep for o'er a hundred years,
Foretell unceasing cycles - Death and Birth
That yew tree nods and weeps her unseen tears.
But God shall guide us through the gloom of night
Victorious over grim reaper's blade,
As yet we grasp to see eternal light
Amidst life's fickle joys which here do fade.
Victims of Death by lusty scythe bannish'd
Triumphant wake to find nightmares vanish'd!

13 February, 2013 ~ Timothy Salter

Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch's wife, He would have written sonnets all his life?. ~ Lord Byron

Why people fall in love has been debated since before Shakespeare's sonnets. ~ Joe Bruno

Some say that Cusk has no sense of humour, but expecting giggles from this writer would be akin to expecting sonnets from Benny Hill. ~ Julie Burchill

Holy Sonnets: Thou hast made me, and shall thy work decay?"

Thou hast made me, and shall thy work decay?
Repair me now, for now mine end doth haste,
I run to death, and death meets me as fast,
And all my pleasures are like yesterday;
I dare not move my dim eyes any way,
Despair behind, and death before doth cast
Such terror, and my feebled flesh doth waste
By sin in it, which it towards hell doth weigh.
Only thou art above, and when towards thee
By thy leave I can look, I rise again;
But our old subtle foe so tempteth me,
That not one hour I can myself sustain;
Thy grace may wing me to prevent his art,
And thou like adamant draw mine iron heart. ~ John Donne

I can't pray or weigh my words right; doomsday
is here my friend, but you're immune. We suffer
for you. I'm weaving crowns of sonnets, dreads;
a souvenir so you'll never forget your friends. ~ Jalina Mhyana

Shakespeare wrote his sonnets within a strict discipline, fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, rhyming in three quatrains and a couplet. Were his sonnets dull? Mozart wrote his sonatas within an equally rigid discipline - exposition, development, and recapitulation. Were they dull?. ~ David Ogilvy

Sonnets are guys writing in English, imitating an Italian song form. It was a form definitely sung as often as it was recited. ~ Steve Earle

Your days are your sonnets. ~ Oscar Wilde

No decent man ought to read Shakespeare's sonnets because it was like listening at keyholes. ~ Virginia Woolf

There is a special department of Hell for students of probability. In this department there are many typewriters and many monkeys. Every time that a monkey walks on a typewriter, it types by chance one of Shakespeare's sonnets. ~ Bertrand Russell

Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets. ~ Oscar Wilde

Most girls want love sonnets, and you want a song about a cowboy wanted dead of alive- Jax Stone ~ Abbi Glines

You didn't mind me being sweet a few hours ago," he reminds me. I roll my eyes as I pull my hand back. "That's because you were giving me my third orgasm. I would've let you recite sonnets as long as you kept doing that thing with your tongue. ~ Corinne Michaels

Muse's creations are predominately lyrical often resulting in poetic sonnets and fairytale like art. ~ Earl M. Coleman

They think thee mad? I'll show thou mad, my lord. ~ Phar West Nagle

My double drags his coffin, humble slave,
I, at least, am real, though changed to flesh.
Far-off, I build me a church no hand can shape

("Winter Sonnets: III") ~ Vyacheslav Ivanov

After you kind of find your footing, sonnets are what comes easiest. ~ Marilyn Nelson

I write quite a lot of sonnets, and I think of them almost as prayers: short and memorable, something you can recite. ~ Carol Ann Duffy

I don't think I can really believe in doomsday; I could hardly believe in rewards and punishments, in heaven or hell. As I wrote down in one of my sonnets - I seem to be always plagiarizing, imitating myself or somebody else for that matter - I think I am quite unworthy of heaven or of hell, and even of immortality. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

Then, were not summer's distillation left
A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,
Beauty's effect with beauty were bereft,
Nor it nor no remembrance what it was.
But flowers distilled, though they with winter meet,
Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet. ~ William Shakespeare

Again? Honestly, do you guys think she's hiding in Shakespeare's Sonnets?
- Tina Lewis ~ R.J. Morse, R.J. Brookes

while inside, a ferocious love wound around
and around me-till it pierced me with its thorns, its sword,
slashing a seared road through my heart

100 Love Sonnets by Pablo Neruda, translated by Stephen Tapscott ~ Pablo Neruda

There might be symphonies of perfume, Mozarts of musk. Novelists might construct nasal narratives, versifiers sonnets of scent. Sculpture would entail subtleties of shape that only fingers trained through hundreds of millions of years of tactile evolution could discriminate. ~ Richard Fortey