Harper Curtis > Harper's Quotes

“I've been riding on the crest of a slump lately.”
― Tom Waits

“A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.”
― Randall Jarell

“It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Language is a virus from outer space”
― William S. Burroughs

“I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of the Imagination.”
― John Keats

“The two duties are to lament or praise.”
― Theodore Roethke, Selected Poems

“But no, I was out for stars:
I would not come in.
I meant not even if asked,
And I hadn't been.”
― Robert Frost, A Witness Tree

“Remember me,"
whispers the dust.”
― Peter Huchel

“Perhaps they were right putting love into books. Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.”
― William Faulkner

“There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro

“A learner rather"

Stephen's answer to Deasy who says "You were not born to be a teacher, I think. Perhaps I am wrong." (Episode 2, line 403 in the Gabler edition)”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music.... And people flock around the poet and say: 'Sing again soon' - that is, 'May new sufferings torment your soul but your lips be fashioned as before, for the cry would only frighten us, but the music, that is blissful.”
― Soren Kierkegaard, Either - Or

“Love is the expression of the one who loves, not of the one who is loved. Those who think they can love only the people they prefer do not love at all. Love discovers truths about individuals that others cannot see”
― Soren Kierkegaard

“A Poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness, and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays

“A man may meet a woman and be shocked by her ugliness. Soon, if she is natural and unaffected, her expression makes him overlook the faults of her features. He begins to find her charming, it enters his head that she might be loved, and a week later he is living in hope. The following week he has been snubbed into despair, and the week afterwards he has gone mad. (Chapter 17)”
― Stendhal, Love