Sherry Chandler > Sherry's Quotes

“...What you fear will not go away; it will take you into yourself and bless you and keep you. That's the world, and we all live there.”
― William Stafford

“She had come to that state where the horror of the universe and its smallness are both visible at the same time—the twilight of the double vision in which so many elderly people are involved. If this world is not to our taste, well, at all events, there is Heaven, Hell, Annihilation—one or other of those large things, that huge scenic background of stars, fires, blue or black air. All heroic endeavour, and all that is known as art, assumes that there is such a background, just as all practical endeavour, when the world is to our taste, assumes that the world is all. But in the twilight of the double vision, a spiritual muddledom is set up for which no high-sounding words can be found; we can neither act nor refrain from action, we can neither ignore nor respect Infinity.”
― E. M. Forster, A Passage to India

“In Europe life retreats out of the cold, and exquisite fireside myths have resulted—Balder, Persephone—but [in India] the retreat is from the source of life, the treacherous sun, and no poetry adorns it because disillusionment cannot be beautiful. Men yearn for poetry though they may not confess it; they desire that joy shall be graceful and sorrow august and infinity have a form, and India fails to accommodate them.”
― E. M. Forster, A Passage to India

“They had started speaking of “women and children”—that phrase that exempts the male from sanity when it has been repeated a few times. Each felt that all he loved best in the world was at stake, demanded revenge, and was filled with a not unpleasing glow, in which the chilly and half-known features of Miss Quested vanished, and were replaced by all that is sweetest and warmest in private life. “But it’s the women and children,” they repeated, and the Collector knew he ought to stop them intoxicating themselves, but he hadn’t the heart.”
― E.M. Forster

“Let no man pull you so low as to hate him.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., A Knock at Midnight: Inspiration from the Great Sermons of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.

“I have decided to stick to love...Hate is too great a burden to bear.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches

“Rhythm must have meaning.”
― Ezra Pound

“Every poet has his dream reader: mine keeps a look out for curious prosodic fauna like bacchics and choriambs.”
― W. H. Auden

“I am his Highness' dog at Kew;
Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?”
― Alexander Pope

“Words ought to be a little wild for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking.”
― John Maynard Keynes

“You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger.”
― Muriel Rukeyser

“Always our wars have been our confessions of weakness”
― Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry

“The exceeding brightness of this early sun
Makes me conceive how dark I have become.”
― Wallace Stevens, The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play

“I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job”
― Seamus Heaney

“Intelligent discontent is the mainspring of civilization.”
― Eugene V. Debs

“We are against war and the sources of war.
We are for poetry and the sources of poetry.”
― Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry

“I think there is choice possible at any moment to us, as long as we live. But there is no sacrifice. There is a choice, and the rest falls away. Second choice does not exist. Beware of those who talk about sacrifice”
― Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry

“I don't like a kind of workshop that is about editing--I don't want to sit there and be an editor. I don't want to tell someone how to "fix" a poem.”
― Natasha Trethewey

“Art is not about itself but the attention we bring to it.”
― Marcel Duchamp

“Works of art imitate and provoke other works of art, the process is the source of art itself.”
― Edward Hirsch

“The appropriation of the creativity-procreativity metaphor by women is a conscious challenge to traditional poetics and beyond that to traditional metaphysics, for the gynocentric vision is not that Logos condescends to incarnate itself, but that Flesh becomes Word.”
― Alicia Ostriker, Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America

“From oriole to crow, note the decline
In music. Crow is realist. But, then,
Oriole, also, may be realist.”
― Wallace Stevens, The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play

“A pear should come to the table popped with juice,
Ripened in warmth and served in warmth. On terms
Like these, autumn beguiles the fatalist.”
― Wallace Stevens, The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play

“Poetry is a finikin thing of air
That lives uncertainly and not for long
Yet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs.”
― Wallace Stevens, The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play

“We say God and the imagination are one . . .
How high that highest candle lights the dark.”
― Wallace Stevens, The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play

“As we live our truths, we will communicate across all barriers, speaking for the sources of peace. Peace that is not lack of war, but fierce and positive.”
― Muriel Rukeyser

“With women poets we look at or into, but not up at, sacred things; we unlearn submission.”
― Alicia Ostriker, Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America

“To Wallace Stevens' post-Nietzschean formula 'God and the imagination are one,' these women poets would add a crucial third element: God and the imagination and my body are one.”
― Alicia Ostriker, Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America

“Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once
As quick as foxes on the hill;”
― Wallace Stevens, The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play