Robert Pinsky Quotes

26 quotes in 358 categories

• Deciding to remember, and what to remember, is how we decide who we are.
• To talk about the reality of life here and the work that you do here at the university.
• A sentence is like a tune. A memorable sentence gives its emotion a melodic shape. You want to hear it again, say it—in a way,…
• When I had no roof I made audacity my roof.
• Poetry is the most bodily of the arts.
• An artist needs not so much an audience, as to feel a need to answer, a promise to respond....a good feeling about his art.
• Poetry’s medium is the individual chest and throat and mouth of whoever undertakes to say the poem.
• In jazz, as in poetry, there is always that play between what’s regular and what’s wild. That has always appealed to me.
• In the particular presence of memorable language we can find a reminder of our ability to know and retain knowledge itself: the brightness wherein all…
• The medium of poetry is a human body: the column of air inside the chest, shaped into signifying sounds in the larynx and the mouth.…
• Whatever makes a child want to glue macaroni on a paper plate and paint the assemblage and see it on the refrigerator - that has…
• The heart grows brutal feeding on fantasies.
• Poetic language is singularly appropriate for recounting the life of the king who is traditionally accepted as the author of the poetic psalms, some of…
• There is something cathartic about having absolute loss articulated.
• Poetry's medium is not merely light as air, it is air: vital and deep as ordinary breath.
• I think my first experience of art, or the joy in making art, was playing the horn at some high-school dance or bar mitzvah or…
• Sometimes the ideas that mean the most to you will feel true long before you can quite formulate them or justify them.
• Poetry is a vocal art for me - but not necessarily a performative one. It might be reading to oneself or recalling some lines by…
• Autobiography is a genre notorious for falsehood.
• Method involves a slavish addiction to laws, and we can only aspire to anarchy.

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