Sonnet Quotes - Page 5

• Dancing, is, for the most part, attended with many amorous smiles, wanton compliments, unchaste kisses, scurrilous songs and sonnets, effeminate music, lust provoking attire, ridiculous love pranks, all which savor only of sensuality, of raging fleshly lusts. Therefore, it is wholly to be abandoned of all good Christians.

  William Prynne

  Christian, Song, Kissing

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• In your language you have a form of poetry called the sonnet…There are fourteen lines, I believe, all in iambic pentameter. That’s a very strict rhythm or meter…And each line has to end with a rigid pattern. And if the poet does not do it exactly this way, it is not a sonnet…But within this strict form the poet has complete freedom to say whatever he wants…You’re given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. What you say is completely up to you.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Believe, Writing, Lines

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• I prefer formal techniques, and use sonnets and rhyme, any manner of scheme to give a shape and order-of feeling as well as argument-to a poem. But all my life, I've also been a person who's made his bed in the morning and picks up the bath mat. That's what I mean by temperament. Whether genetic or acquired, I have a disposition to arrangements. One is born with this, as if with blue eyes or a weak heart. Do you think Allen Ginsberg ever put the cap back on his toothpaste?

  J. D. McClatchy

  Morning, Eye, Heart

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• I'm working now on a collection of Shakespearean sonnets, about 100 of them, that I may publish if anyone's interested. My take on life is a little different from the bard's.

  Jack Prelutsky

  Different, May, Littles

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• The idea that a student can write a sonnet or a novel without having a sound understanding about its history, and where it fits into literature as a whole, seems to me to be manifestly daft.

  Nicholas Royle

  Writing, Ideas, Poetry

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• There is no objection to the proposal: in order to learn to be a poet, I shall try to write a sonnet. But the thing you must try to write, when you do so, is a real sonnet, and not a practice sonnet.

  James Fenton

  Real, Writing, Order

  "Just keep practising for real" by James Fenton, www.theguardian.com. June 8, 2002.

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• I don't think I can really believe in doomsday; I could hardly believe in rewards and punishments, in heaven or hell. As I wrote down in one of my sonnets - I seem to be always plagiarizing, imitating myself or somebody else for that matter - I think I am quite unworthy of heaven or of hell, and even of immortality.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Believe, Thinking, Punishment

  Jorge Luis Borges, Richard Burgin (1998). “Jorge Luis Borges: Conversations”, p.79, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• A sentimental aphorism is even more a surprise than a hard- boiled sonnet.

  Mason Cooley

  Sentimental, Surprise, Aphorism

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• I came from a white middle class neighborhood. Was I expected to go back there and teach the woman next door about Renaissance sonnets? The embarrassing truth of the matter was that I was being chosen because Yale University had some peculiar idea about what my skin color or ethnicity signified.

  Richard Rodriguez

  Doors, Ethnicity, Color

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

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• The next time you see a person with a composed face and a soft voice, remember that inside her mind she might be solving an equation, composing a sonnet, designing a hat. She might, that is, be deploying the power of quiet.

  Susan Cain

  Voice, Design, Mind

  Susan Cain (2012). “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking”, p.266, Broadway Books

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• A story is a story is a story. The only difference is in the techniques you bring to bear. There are always limitations on what you can and can't do. But I enjoy that. Just like when you write a sonnet or haiku, there are rules you have to abide by. And to me, playing within the rules is the fun part. It keeps the brain fresh.

  J. Michael Straczynski

  Fun, Writing, Differences

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• Every time I get happy
  the Nana-hex comes through.
  Birds turn into plumber's tools,
  a sonnet turns into a dirty joke,
  a wind turns into a tracheotomy,
  a boat turns into a corpse.

  Anne Sexton

  Happiness, Depression, Dirty

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• Elinor Lipman is to tweets what Shakespeare is to sonnets.

  Firoozeh Dumas

  Tweet

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• The true self seeks release, not constraint. It doesnt want to be corseted in a sonnet or made to learn a system of musical notations. It wants liberation, which is why very often it fastens on the novel, for the novel seems spacious, undefined, free.

  Rachel Cusk

  Self, Musical, Want

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• So, some of the most difficult formal poems that I've written, say one sentence sonnets, I've been able to do those fairly quickly whereas some of the clearest, simplest lyrics that I've written have taken me the longest to get to the clarity of feeling that you're looking for.

  Edward Hirsch

  Taken, Feelings, Able

  "Embracing the Mess of Poetry". Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.

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• I strive for what you do find in Shakespeare's work - that there is a definite humanity and a definite character behind the writing in the sonnets, and it's very real because it's so deeply personal. I try to aspire to that in what I do.

  Rufus Wainwright

  Real, Writing, Character

  "If Music Be the Food of Love, Play on, Rufus Wainwright". Interview with Jacob Blickenstaff, www.motherjones.com. June 25, 2016.

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• I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Art, Angel, Thinking

  Vladimir Nabokov (2016). “Lolita”, p.171, Hamilton Books

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• Often you've read another poem that you think is so beautiful that you'd like to make something like that. And so you try to make a sonnet that works in a certain kind of way, or you try to make something that's songlike, or you create a refrain, or you love the way a poem works in two line stanzas and you try to do that.

  Edward Hirsch

  Beautiful, Thinking, Two

  "Embracing the Mess of Poetry". Big Think interview, bigthink.com.

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• The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.

  Oscar Wilde

  Book, Writing, Artist

  Oscar Wilde (2015). “Oscar Wilde The Dover Reader”, p.48, Courier Dover Publications

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• I hope you will love your baby. I hope it will be a boy. That husband of yours, I hope, will always treat you well, because otherwise my specter shall come out of him, like black smoke, like a demented giant, and pull him apart nerve by nerve. ... I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Baby, Art, Husband

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• Each genre exerts a considerable spell, as a kind of "form" to be filled, as a Shakespearean sonnet is filled.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Kind, Form, Genre

  "Writing Lessons From the Madly Prolific Joyce Carol Oates". Interview with Alexander Sammon, www.motherjones.com. September 10, 2016.

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• I was born in the era of the novel. I've written many, as well as collections of poetry, and essays for mouthing off. I've written to inches, word-counts, page-counts, even the sonnet and the screenplay (which I call a plot poem). I write narrative. That's it. I just want to tell it.

  Julianna Baggott

  Writing, Plot, Want

  Interview with Roxane Gay, therumpus.net. May 11, 2012.

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• In me thou see'st the twilight of such day As after sunset fadeth in the west, Which by and by black night doth take away Death's second self, that seals up all in rest. -Sonnet 73

  William Shakespeare

  Twilight, Sunset, Night

  Sonnet 73

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• You can't beat a good sonnet, and you can write a sonnet without being married to the damned thing.

  Bonnie Jo Campbell

  Writing, Married, Beats

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Characters to me are like sonnets, they have limits that you obey which allow a force to enter in, an invention that makes the novel possible. Change the limits and the force leaves. The novel becomes impossible.

  Alexander Chee

  Character, Possible Change, Limits

  "Go Forth (Vol. 41)". Interview with Kristen Evans, logger.believermag.com. February 26, 2016.

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