Karl Shapiro Quotes

24 quotes in 375 categories

• The modern essay has regained a good deal of its literary status in our time, much to the credit of Joseph Epstein.
• Leo Connellan has retained his soul and voice in Provincetown and Other Poems.
• Laughter and grief join hands. Always the heart Clumps in the breast with heavy stride; The face grows lined and wrinkled like a chart, The…
• But with exquisite breathing you smile, with satisfaction of love, And I touch you again as you tick in the silence and settle in sleep.
• Poetry is innocent, not wise. It does not learn from experience, because each poetic experience is unique.
• Already old, the question Who shall die? Becomes unspoken Who is innocent?
• The good poet sticks to his real loves, to see within the realm of possibility. He never tries to hold hands with God or the…
• The body, what is it, Father, but a sign To love the force that grows us, to give back What in Thy palm is senselessness…
• My soul is now her day, my day her night, So I lie down, and so I rise.
• To make the child in your own image is a capital crime, for your image is not worth repeating. The child knows this and you…
• How something important happens is the business of historians and newspapers, the effect it has is the business of philosophers and writers and especially poets.
• A man's house is his stage. Others walk on to play their bit parts. Now and again a soliloquy, a birth, an adultery.
• Lawyers love paper. They eat, sleep and dream paper. They turn paper into gold, and their files are colorful and their language neoclassical and calli-graphically…
• The proverbist knows nothing of the two sides of a question. He knows only the roundness of answers.
• Poets of course are even more unpredictable than other writers, overwhelmed as they are by the moment they inhabit and finding it difficult to connect…
• Self-knowledge is a dangerous thing, tending to make man shallow or insane.
• Every war is its own excuse. That's why they're all surrounded with ideals. That's why they're all crusades.
• Haul up the flag, you mourners, Not half-mast but all the way; The funeral is done and disbanded; The devil's had the final say.
• The good poet sticks to his real loves, those within the realm of possibility. He never tries to hold hands with God or the human…
• Lastly, his tomb shall list and founder in the troughs of grass. And none shall speak his name.

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