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Amy Lowell
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“All books are either dreams or swords, / You can cut, or you can drug, with words.”
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“Rapture's self is three parts sorrow.”
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“Happiness, to some, elation; / Is, to others, mere stagnation.”
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“Even pain / Pricks to livelier living ...”
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“For the man who should loose me is dead, / Fighting with the Duke in Flanders, / In a pattern called a war. / Christ! What are patterns for?”
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“Youth condemns; maturity condones.”
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“Art, true art, is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.”
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“Poetry is the most concentrated form of literature; it is the most emotionalized and powerful way in which thought can be presented ...”
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“Love is a game — yes? / I think it is a drowning.”
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“I know that a creed is the shell of a lie.”
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“Do we want laurels for ourselves most, / Or most that no one else shall have any?”
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“May is much sunshine through small leaves.”
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“And now a month has passed and not a word have I had from you, / Not so much as a scrawl to say you could not write!”
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“But a place is nothing, not even space, / Unless at its heart a figure stands.”
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“What is the thing I would say to you / Ere the time when we can say nothing at all, / Neither you to me nor I to you, / And between us is sprung a smoky wall?”
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“What are poems but words / Set edgewise up like children's blocks / To build a structure no one can inhabit.”
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“Light is forever, / For the fire of the sky has no end.”
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“I never deny poems when they come; whatever I am doing, whatever I am writing, I lay it aside and attend to the arriving poem.”
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“The stigma of oddness is the price a myopic world always exacts of a genius.”
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“How hard, how desperately hard, is the way of the experimenter in art!”
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“I do not suppose that anyone not a poet can realize the agony of creating a poem. Every nerve, even every muscle, seems strained to the breaking point. The poem will not be denied; to refuse to write it would be a greater torture. It tears its way out of the brain, splintering and breaking its passage, and leaves that organ in the state of a jelly-fish when the task is done.”
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“For books are more than books, they are the life, / The very heart and core of ages past. / The reason why men lived, and worked, and died, / The essence and quintessence of their lives.”
Amy Lowell, U.S. poet, critic, biographer
(1874 - 1925)
Full name: Amy Lawrence Lowell.