Art Quote by Gregory Orr

““Where would I be if not for your wild heart? I ask this not from love, but selfishly— how could I live? How could I make my art?””

Gregory Orr

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More by Gregory Orr

I am committed now to one thing: lyric sequences. I want the intensity of lyric, but the scope and arc of narrative. so, I think I'll just write sequences for the foreseeable (the Beloved sequence doesn't have a 'plot' so I can just keep adding poems to it, it's like a giant bag I can just put beloved lyrics into…

Gregory Orr

No one can threaten poetry. It's always been there, always will be. Humans need it to live: it has sustaining powers. How could we…

Gregory Orr

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I can't actually explain why my lines got shorter, but they did. Just as I can't explain why my early poems were 'all image' and my current ones are relatively abstract. The sense of the line changed with the theme, somehow my ear (or brain or heart/mind) fell in love with a short line and very very simple words.

Gregory Orr

Every breath is a resurrection.

Gregory Orr

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I want language to help us live in a world of wonder/terror/change. I want it to be about "becoming" rather than "being." I think that being and nouns are part of our hopeless dream that time will stop and we will not die. but it's not that way. So, why not celebrate verbs and the beloved's metamorphosis into other people…

Gregory Orr

Another way of saying "put it in the Book" would be that each poem we write pops up in the city of poetry, where…

Gregory Orr

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I believe in poetry as a way of surviving the emotional chaos, spiritual confusions, and traumatic events that come with being alive.

Gregory Orr

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Poetry is the thread that leads us out of the labyrinth of despair and into the light.

Gregory Orr

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D.H. Lawrence says that myths are "inexhaustible" because they are symbols of heart mysteries. That is, they can't be exhausted - they somehow have embodied some central human mystery (love, loss, being a body in time, who knows which or what?) and thus can be retold infinitely and still be rich. That's part of your saying: it's old, but it's…

Gregory Orr

“Somehow something has gone wrong with poetry in our culture. We have lost touch with its purpose and value, and in doing so, we…

Gregory Orr

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That's crudely put, but If we're not supposed to dance, Why all this music?

Gregory Orr

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“Self-Portrait at Twenty" I stood inside myself like a dead tree or a tower. I pulled the rope of braided hair and high above me a bell of leaves tolled. Because my hand stabbed its brother, I said: Make it stone. Because my tongue spoke harshly, I said: Make it dust. And yet it was not death, but her body…

Gregory Orr

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True works of art contain their own theory and give us the measurement according to which we should judge them.

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Before Noah, men having only water to drink, could not find the truth. Accordingly...they became abominably wicked, and they were justly exterminated by the water they loved to drink. This good man, Noah, having seen that all his contemporaries had perished by this unpleasant drink, took a dislike to it; and God, to relieve his dryness, created the vine and…

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“Hear the sum of the whole matter in the compass of one brief word — every art possessed by man comes from Prometheus.”

Aeschylus

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I think most artists feel like they're outside society - no matter how many accolades they receive, or how much money is in your…

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The capacity to be puzzled is the premise of all creation, be it in art or in science.

Erich Fromm

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That's the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.

Ray Bradbury

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“So, really," continued Jacob as if this were perfectly normal to expound on art in these circumstances, "when you think about it, the artists who make people stop and think, who push the form, who make you uncomfortable, who are laughable, well, they're the ones who get remembered." Idly, Jacob dug a hole in the snow with his shovel and…

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