Ivy > Ivy's Quotes

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
― Maya Angelou

“Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.”
― Alice Walker

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?' Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”
― Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of "A Course in Miracles"

“It took me a long time to realise that there are two kinds of writing: the one you write and the one that writes you. The one that writes you is dangerous. You go where you don’t want to go. You look where you don’t want to look.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“I used to think as I looked out on the Hollywood night — there must be thousands of girls sitting alone like me, dreaming of becoming a movie star. But I'm not going to worry about them. I'm dreaming the hardest.”
― Marilyn Monroe

“The thermometer of success is merely the jealousy of the malcontents.”
― Salvador Dali

“Everyone has talent. What's rare is the courage to follow it to the dark places where it leads.”
― Erica Jong

“Poetry is what gets lost in translation.”
― Robert Frost

“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?”
― Emily Dickinson, Selected Letters

“Knowing trees, I understand the meaning of patience. Knowing grass, I can appreciate persistence.”
― Hal Borland

“Poets sing our human music for us.”
― Carol Ann Duffy

“Does something which exists on the edge have no true relevance to the stable center, or does it, by being on the edge, become a part of the edge and thus a part of the boundary, the definition which gives the whole its shape?”
― Lucy Grealy

“Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.”
― Pablo Picasso

“Always be a poet, even in prose.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.”
― Yevgeny Yevtushenko

“As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.”
― Virginia Woolf

“Open the book. (The gilt rubs off the edges of the pages and pollinates the fingertips.)”
― Elizabeth Bishop

“Whereas story is processed in the mind in a straightforward manner, poetry bypasses rational thought and goes straight to the limbic system and lights it up like a brushfire. It's the crack cocaine of the literary world.”
― Jasper Fforde, First Among Sequels

“It was at that age
that poetry came in search of me.”
― Pablo Neruda, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

“A grain of poetry suffices to season a century.
”
― Jose Marti, Versos Sencillos: Simple Verses (Recovering the Us Hispanic Literary Heritage) (Pinata Books for Young Adults)

“There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it”
― Gustave Flaubert

“Put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it."

(Casual Chance, 1964)”
― Colette

“Kiss me, and you will see how important I am.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.”
― Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems

“Almost none of the poetries I admire stick to their labels, native or adopted ones. Rather, they are vagrant in their identifications. Tramp poets, there you go, a new label for those with unstable allegiances.”
― C.D. Wright

“You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.”
― Mae West

“Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance.”
― Anne Sexton

“Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.”
― Pablo Picasso

“You don't really understand an antagonist until you understand why he's a protagonist in his own version of the world.”
― John Rogers