Odes Quotes - Page 2

• She dotes on poetry, sir. She adores it; I may say that her whole soul and mind are wound up, and entwined with it. She has produced some delightful pieces, herself, sir. You may have met with her 'Ode to an Expiring Frog,' sir.

  Charles Dickens

  Funny, Humorous, Soul

  Charles Dickens (1838). “The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club”, p.185

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• An aged Burgundy runs with a beardless Port. I cherish the fancy that Port speaks sentences of wisdom, Burgundy sings the inspired Ode.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Running, Wine, Alcohol

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• Of what is lost, irretrievably lost, all I wish to recover is the daily availability of my writing, lines capable of grasping me by the hair and lifting me up when I'm at the end of my strength. (Significant, said the foreigner.) Odes to the human and the divine. Let my writing be like the verses of by Leopardi that Daniel Biga recited on a Nordic bridge to gird himself with courage.

  Roberto Bolano

  Writing, Hair, Bridges

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• One word of praise from a woman is dearer to me than a whole ode from a man . .

  Maxim Gorky

  Men, Praise, Whole

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• The Spider is an ode to my mother. She was my best friend. Like a spider, my mother was a weaver. . . Like spiders, my mother was very clever. Spiders are friendly presences that eat mosquitoes. We know that mosquitoes spread diseases and are therefore unwanted. So, spiders are helpful and protective, just like my mother.

  Louise Bourgeois

  Mother, Clever, Friendly

  "Giant spider takes up residence at Tate", www.theguardian.com. October 3, 2007.

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• I enjoyed [playing lawyer in From The Hip] as an ode to my dad. My dad went to Harvard and Harvard Law School, so he had some friends that practiced in Boston. So, there was a big law firm that he hooked me up with the senior partner, then the senior partner hooked me up with a young lawyer who worked in the firm. And the young lawyer was married to a public defender. So I would hang out with them, and I could see both sides of it, those that are corporate attorneys and those that help the poor and the disenfranchised.

  Judd Nelson

  Senior, Dad, School

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• Horace's best ode would not please a young woman as much as the mediocre verses of the young man she is in love with.

  Michael Moore

  Men, Young, Mediocre

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• This poem will never reach its destination. On Rousseau's Ode To Posterity

  Voltaire

  Poetry, Destination, Posterity

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• Anything Can Happen is also, incidentally, a poem that arose from teaching. I'd talked about the Horace Ode (I, 34) [on which the poem is based] in a lecture I gave at Harvard in the fall of 2000 entitled Bright Boltsand remembered it after the Twin Towers attack.

  Seamus Heaney

  Fall, Teaching, Towers

  Source: harvardmagazine.com

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• I think that poets can say, "What we want is for everybody on earth to wake up free from fear and with access to medicine and clean water and education." But I don't think poets have any special insight on how to get there. And the 20th century is a pretty good record of that because so many of the great poets were Stalinists: Vallejo, Neruda, Eluard, Aragon, etc. They wrote their odes to Lenin and Stalin. They glorified some of the most violent and grotesque dictatorships of the 20th century. And a lot of the ones who were not Stalinists were fascists or fascist sympathizers.

  Robert Hass

  Thinking, Medicine, Water

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• The pleasures of love proceed successively from a distich to a quatrain, from a quatrain to a sonnet, from a sonnet to a ballad, from a ballad to an ode, from an ode to a cantata, and from a cantata to a dithyramb. A husband who begins with the dithyramb is a fool.

  Honore de Balzac

  Love, Husband, Fool

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• Those who draw their sustenance from science are blessed. It is for me to only derive an occasional pleasure. This is nothing worthy of conceit, but I am indeed touched by the joys. This book is an ode to such joys, a digest of my collections from various sources.

  Rabindranath Tagore

  Book, Blessed, Joy

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• Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero'Snatch at today and trust as little as you can in tomorrow' - (Odes) Often translated as 'Seize the day'.

  Horace

  Trust, Carpe Diem, Seize The Day

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• Winter is on my head, but eternal spring is in my heart. The nearer I approach the end, the plainer I hear around me the immortal symphonies of the worlds which invite me. . . . For half a century I have been writing thoughts in prose, verse, history, drama, romance, tradition, satire, ode, and song. I have tried them all, but I feel I have not said a thousandth part of that which is within me. When I go down to the grave, I can say "I have finished my day's work," but I cannot say "I have finished my life's work."

  Victor Hugo

  Song, Drama, Spring

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• In adversity, remember to keep an even mind.

  Horace

  Inspirational, Motivational, Adversity

  "Odes". Book by Horace, Book II, ode iii, line 1, c. 23 BC and 13 BC).

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• Keats's odes are among my favorite poems ever. As are Neruda's. So yes, I think my poems are odes, though I really just see those titles as ways of more or less orienting the poem. I've never thought about this until now, but I guess you could say that one effect of all the titles, their pervasiveness in the book, might be to once again, as so many other things do, put into question the meaning of the word "for," which I suppose is one of the great human questions: what is all this for? Why, and for whom, are we doing whatever we are doing?

  Matthew Zapruder

  Book, Thinking, Way

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Nature gets credit which should in truth be reserved for ourselves: the rose for its scent, the nightingale for its song; and the sun for its radiance. The poets are entirely mistaken. They should address their lyrics to themselves and should turn them into odes of self congratulation on the excellence of the human mind.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Song, Nature, Congratulations

  ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD (1925). “SCIENCE AND THE MODERN WORLD”

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