Paul Engle Quotes

36 quotes in 699 categories

• But maybe it's up the hills or under the leaves or in a ditch somewhere. Maybe it's never found. But what you find, whatever you…
• Poetry is ordinary language raised to the "N th" power.
• Corncobs are the greatest fire-making tinder.
• Human life is too difficult for people.
• I had been warned about Jews by my gentile friends - they did terrible things with knives to boys.
• I wanted to write poetry almost a little more than I wanted to eat.
• Without vision you don't see, and without practicality the bills don't get paid.
• All families had their special Christmas food. Ours was called Dutch Bread, made from a dough halfway between bread and cake, stuffed with citron and…
• I knew about holiness, never having missed a Sunday-school class since I started at four years. But if Jews were also religious, how could our…
• The corncob was the central object of my life. My father was a horse handler, first trotting and pacing horses, then coach horses, then work…
• The years rolled their brutal course down the hill of time. Still poor, my clothes still smelling of the horse barn, still writing those doubtful…
• Verse is not written, it is bled; Out of the poet's abstract head. Words drip the poem on the page; Out of his grief, delight…
• The sharpest memory of our old-fashioned Christmas eve is my mother's hand making sure I was settled in bed.
• All poetry is an ordered voice, one which tries to tell you about a vision in the un-visionary language of farm, city, and love.
• Other families bought automobiles; we had a horse-headed hitching post in front of our house and drove horses.
• To eat in the same room where food is cooked - that is the way to thank the Lord for His abundance.
• When your first marriage goes into tragedy, you become very battle-scarred... I even thought of suicide. Luckily, I had known some happy marriages.
• A barn with cattle and horses is the place to begin Christmas; after all, that's where the original event happened, and that same smell was…
• Contrary to slanderous Eastern opinion, much of Iowa is not flat, but rolling hills country with a lot of timber, a handsome and imaginative landscape,…
• Every Christmas should begin with the sound of bells, and when I was a child mine always did. But they were sleigh bells, not church…

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