Overhearing Quotes

• Poetry is often the art of overhearing yourself say things you didn't know you knew. It is a learned skill to force yourself to articulate your life, your present world or your possibilities for the future.

  David Whyte

  Art, Skills, World

  "The Questions that Have No Right to Go Away" by David Whyte, www.huffingtonpost.com. June 18, 2012.

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• If you want your children to improve, let them overhear the nice things you say about them to others.

  Haim Ginott

  Children, Nice, Self Esteem

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• Writing a first draft is like groping one's way into a dark room, or overhearing a faint conversation, or telling a joke whose punchline you've forgotten. As someone said, one writes mainly to rewrite, for rewriting and revising are how one's mind comes to inhabit the material fully.

  Ted Solotaroff

  Writing, Dark, Mind

  Ted Solotaroff (2008). “The Literary Community: Selected Essays : 1967-2007”

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• I wanted to pack a lot into the lyric, but not go beyond its bounds. Some have written that I wanted to expand what the lyric could do. I just want the hugeness of experience-which includes philosophical discursiveness-to move at a rate of speed that kept it (because all within one unity of experience) emotional. Also, often, questions became the way the poems propelled themselves forward It brings the reader in as a listener to a confession[.] A poem is a private story, after all, no matter how apparently public. The reader is always overhearing a confession.

  Jorie Graham

  Moving, Philosophical, Emotional

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• A poem is a private story, after all, no matter how apparently public. The reader is always overhearing a confession.

  Jorie Graham

  Stories, Matter, Confession

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• Poetry is the art of overhearing ourselves say things from which it is impossible to retreat.

  David Whyte

  Art, Retreat, Impossible

  David Whyte (2007). “The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America”, p.289, Crown Business

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