« All Poetry Quotes · Virginia Woolf's Page
Poetry Quotes by Virginia Woolf
- I am all the time thinking about poetry and fiction and you.
- We read Charlotte Bronte not for exquisite observation of character, not for comedy, not for a philosophic view of life, but for her poetry. Probably…
- You cannot lecture on really pure poetry any more than you can talk about the ingredients of pure water-it is adulterated, methylated, sanded poetry that…
- Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.
- Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.
- I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
- That perhaps is your task--to find the relation between things that seem incompatible yet have a mysterious affinity, to absorb every experience that comes your…
- It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road.
- Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?
- To evade such temptations is the first duty of the poet. For as the ear is the antechamber to the soul, poetry can adulterate and…
- Love, the poet said, is woman's whole existence.
- What has praise and fame to do with poetry? Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice? So that all this…
- Who would not spout the family teapot in order to talk with Keats for an hour about poetry, or with Jane Austen about the art…
- Few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that…
- I went from one to the other holding my sorrow - no, not my sorrow but the incomprehensible nature of this our life - for…
- Tell me", he wanted to say, "everything in the whole world" - for he had the wildest, most absurd, extravagant ideas about poets and poetry…
- My brain hums with scraps of poetry and madness.
More Poetry Quotes
- Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular. — Aristotle
- Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals,… — Aristotle
- I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn't that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come… — Paul Auster
- I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn't until I was… — Paul Auster
- I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets.… — Paul Auster
- If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem. — M H Abrams
- Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things. — Matthew Arnold
- I like poems you can tack all over with a hammer and there are no hollow places. — John Ashbery
- But I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language, his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me… — Chinua Achebe
- I don't think of poetry as a 'rational' activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with words or phrases… — Margaret Atwood
- The genesis of a poem for me is usually a cluster of words. The only good metaphor I can think of is… — Margaret Atwood
- A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language. — Wystan Hugh Auden