Odes Quotes

• The writer's only responsibility is to his art...If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is worth any number of old ladies.

  William Faulkner

  Mother, Art, Responsibility

  Quoted in Paris Review, Spring 1956

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• The ode lives upon the ideal, the epic upon the grandiose, the drama upon the real.

  Victor Hugo

  Wisdom, Real, Drama

  Victor Hugo (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Victor Hugo (Illustrated)”, p.12468, Delphi Classics

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• My books are elegiac in the sense that they're odes to a nation that even I sometimes think may not exist anymore except in my memory and my imagination.

  Richard Russo

  Memories, Book, Thinking

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• The drama is complete poetry. The ode and the epic contain it only in germ; it contains both of them in a state of high development, and epitomizes both.

  Victor Hugo

  Drama, Epic, Development

  Victor Hugo (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Victor Hugo (Illustrated)”, p.12469, Delphi Classics

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• Had I but written as many odes in praise of Muhammad and Ali as I have composed for King Mahmud, they would have showered a hundred blessings on me.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Kings, Blessing, Praise

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• A classic lecture, rich in sentiment, With scraps of thundrous Epic lilted out By violet-hooded Doctors, elegies And quoted odes, and jewels five-words-long, That on the stretched forefinger of all Time Sparkle for ever.

  Alfred Lord Tennyson

  Time, Epic, Doctors

  'The Princess' (1847) pt. 2, l. 352

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• Creativity is an ode to life. It is not a form of entertainment. It is a form of joy.

  Wynn Bullock

  Creativity, Design, Joy

  Wynn Bullock, Raphael Shevelev (1993). “The enchanted landscape: photographs 1940-1975”, Aperture

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• Carpe diem! Rejoice while you are alive; enjoy the day; live life to the fullest; make the most of what you have. It is later than you think.

  Horace

  Inspirational, Life, Positive

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• The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is worth any number of old ladies.

  William Faulkner

  Mother, Dream, Art

  In Paris Review Spring 1956, p. 30

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• Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

  John Keats

  Music, Spiritual, Sweet

  "Ode on a Grecian Urn" l. 11 (1820)

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• We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams.

  Arthur O'Shaughnessy

  Inspirational, Music, Dream

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• Pulvis et umbra sumsu." ~ Horace, Odes ("We are dust and Shadows")

  Cassandra Clare

  Dust, Shadow

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• Wheresoe'er I turn my view,
  All is strange, yet nothing new:
  Endless labor all along,
  Endless labor to be wrong:
  Phrase that Time has flung away;
  Uncouth words in disarray,
  Trick'd in antique ruff and bonnet,
  Ode, and elegy, and sonnet.

  Samuel Johnson

  Views, Poetry, Phrases

  Tobias George Smollett, Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith (1810). “The Poetical Works of Doctors Smollett, Johnson, and Goldsmith”, p.113

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• Beauty is truth, truth beauty,-that is all
  Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

  John Keats

  Beauty, Truth, Philosophy

  "Ode on a Grecian Urn" l. 46 (1820)

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• Yet, she said to herself, form the dawn of time odes have been sung to love; wreaths heaped and roses; and if you asked nine people out of ten they would say they wanted nothing but this--love; while the women, judging from her own experience, would all the time be feeling, This is not what we want; there is nothing more tedious, puerile, and inhumane than this; yet it is also beautiful and necessary.

  Virginia Woolf

  Beautiful, Judging, Rose

  Virginia Woolf (2013). “Ao farol: To the lighthouse: Edição bilíngue português - inglês”, p.250, Editora Landmark LTDA

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• Unnur Birna is a Reykjavik-based violinist and singer. She has performed as a session musician with countless Icelandic and international artists while recording and appearing as a solo artist as well. Unnur has joined me as an unpaid guest on a few Icelandic shows in recent years, so it is a great pleasure to return the favour and appear on one of her songs at last. This new track, Sunshine, came about in Italy, written as an ode to sunlight and happiness after fleeing the dark winter in Iceland

  Ian Anderson

  Song, Sunshine, Dark

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• Shoes would interfere with her conversation, for she constantly addresses the ground under her feet. Asking forgiveness. Owning, disowning, recanting, recharting a hateful course of events to make sense of her complicity. We all are, I suppose. Trying to invent our version of the story. All human odes are essentially one, "My life; what I stole from history, and how I live with it.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Shoes, Feet, Trying

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• Poetry, even that of the loftiest, and seemingly, that of the wildest odes, [has] a logic of its own as severe as that of science; and more difficult, because more subtle, more complex, and dependent on more and more fugitive causes. In the truly great poets... there is a reason assignable, not only for every word, but for the position of every word.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Poetry, Causes, Logic

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, James Engell, Walter Jackson Bate (1984). “Biographia Literaria, Or, Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions”, p.9, Princeton University Press

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• Primitive times are lyrical, ancient times epical, modern times dramatic. The ode sings of eternity, the epic imparts solemnity tohistory, the drama depicts life. The characteristic of the first poetry is ingeniousness, of the second, simplicity, of the third, truth.

  Victor Hugo

  Drama, Epic, History

  Victor Hugo (1909). “The Works of Victor Hugo ...”

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• A good poem is a tautology. It expands one word by adding a number which clarify it, thus making a new word which has never before been spoken. The seedword is always so ordinary that hardly anyone perceives it. Classical odes grow from and or because, romantic lyrics from but and if. Immature verses expand a personal pronoun ad nauseam, the greatest works bring glory to a common verb. Good poems, therefore, are always close to banality, over which, however, they tower like precipices.

  Alasdair Gray

  Numbers, Immature, Ordinary

  "Unlikely Stories, Mostly". Book by Alasdair Gray, 1983.

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• Tinted Distances is a tender meditation that reveals a careful eye and steady devotion to elegy and ode.

  Dorianne Laux

  Distance, Eye, Meditation

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• To be a woman and a writer is double mischief, for the world will slight her who slights "the servile house," and who would rather make odes than beds.

  Dilys Laing

  Justice, House, Bed

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• [On writing her first poem at age eight:] An ode to my dead mother and father, who were both alive and pretty pissed off.

  Judith Viorst

  Mother, Children, Father

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• No, I chose the name Jane Seymour because I was doing my first film, 'Ode to Lovely War,' and one of the top agents in England spotted me dancing in the chorus. I was a singer and dancer in that movie with Maggie Smith, um, and he told me he couldn't sell me as Joyce Penelope Wilhelmina Frankenberg.

  Jane Seymour

  War, Names, Dancing

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• A poem with grandly conceived and executed stanzas, such as one of Keats's odes, should be like an enfilade of rooms in a palace: one proceeds, with eager anticipation, from room to room.

  James Fenton

  Rooms, Palaces, Anticipation

  "Changing rooms" by James Fenton, www.theguardian.com. September 6, 2002.

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