Sonnet Quotes - Page 6

• Sonnets are guys writing in English, imitating an Italian song form. It was a form definitely sung as often as it was recited.

  Steve Earle

  Song, Writing, Italian

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• The short story is not as restrictive as the sonnet, but, of all the literary forms, it is possibly the most single-minded. ...at the end there has to be the literary equivalent of the magician's puff of smoke, an outcome that is both startling and anticipated.

  Louis Menand

  Puff, Stories, Outcomes

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• A sermon is a form that yields a certain kind of meaning in the same way that, say, a sonnet is a form that deals with a certain kind of meaning that has to do with putting things in relation to each other, allowing for the fact of complexity reversal, such things. Sermons are, at their best, excursions into difficulty that are addressed to people who come there in order to hear that.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Yield, Order, People

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• To write poetry is to be very alone, but you always have the company of your influences. But you also have the company of the form itself, which has a kind of consciousness. I mean, the sonnet will simply tell you, that's too many syllables or that's too many lines or that's the wrong place. So, instead of being alone, you're in dialogue with the form.

  Billy Collins

  Writing, Mean, Lines

  "Poet Billy Collins discusses humor, authenticity and ‘Aimless Love’". Interview with Jeffrey Brown, www.pbs.org. October 29, 2013.

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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, Odes

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• Milton was the first person who really experimented with putting politics into sonnets.

  Robert Hass

  Firsts, Milton, Persons

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Sweetheart, darling, dearest, it was funny to think that these endearments, which used to sound exceedingly sentimental in movies and books, now held great importance, simple but true verbal affirmations of how they felt for each other. They were words only the heart could hear and understand, words that could impart entire pentameter sonnets in their few, short syllables.

  E. A. Bucchianeri

  True Love, Book, Heart

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• If you want to be considered a poet, you will have to show mastery of the petrarchan sonnet form or the sestina. Your musical efforts must begin with well-formed fugues. There is no substitute for craft... Art begins with craft, and there is no art until craft has been mastered.

  Anthony Burgess

  Art, Effort, Musical

  Anthony Burgess (1986). “But Do Blondes Prefer Gentlemen?: Homage to Qwert Yuiop, and Other Writings”, New York : McGraw-Hill

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• Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch's wife, He would have written sonnets all his life?.

  Lord Byron

  Thinking, Wife, Laura

  Don Juan canto 3, st. 8 (1821)

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• Better a live doggerel than a dead sonnet.

  Ethel Mumford

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• You mean you're comparing our lives to a sonnet? A strict form, but freedom within it? Yes. Mrs. Whatsit said. You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. What you say is completely up to you.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Writing, Mean, Up To You

  Madeleine L'Engle (2013). “The Wrinkle in Time Quintet”, p.87, Macmillan

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• In a thousand words I can have the Lord's Prayer, the 23rd Psalm, the Hippocratic Oath, a sonnet by Shakespeare, the Preamble to the Constitution, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and almost all of the Boy Scout Oath. Now exactly what picture were you planning to trade for all that?

  Roy H. Williams

  Prayer, Writing, Boys

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• It is curious that I always want to group things, a series of sonnets, a series of photographs; whatever rationalizations appear, they originate in urges that are rarely satisfied with single images.

  Minor White

  Want, Groups, Photographer

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• Scorn not the sonnet. Critic, you have frowned, Mindless of its just honours; with this key Shakespeare unlocked his heart.

  William Wordsworth

  Heart, Keys, Justice

  "Scorn not the Sonnet" l. 1 (1827)

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• In a world of bands called Limp Bizkit and Hoobastank, Electric Sheep rolls off the tongue like a Shakespearean love sonnet. Leave me alone.

  Tom Morello

  Sheep, Leave Me Alone, Band

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• I have discovered the most exciting, the most arduous literary form of all, the most difficult to master, the most pregnant in curious possibilities. I mean the advertisement. It is far easier to write ten passably effective Sonnets, good enough to take in the not too inquiring critic, than one effective advertisement that will take in a few thousand of the uncritical buying public.

  Aldous Huxley

  Business, Writing, Mean

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• A true sonnet goes eight lines and then takes a turn for better or worse and goes six or eight lines more.

  Robert Frost

  Funny, Humor, Eight

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• When a sonnet is mediocre it is bad, for it should be sublime.

  Giacomo Casanova

  Sublime, Should, Mediocre

  Giacomo Casanova (1997). “History of My Life”, p.143, JHU Press

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• Christopher Marlowe or Francis Bacon The author of Lear remains unshaken Willie Herbert or Mary Fitton What does it matter? The Sonnets were written.

  Noel Coward

  Doe, Matter, Mary

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• What are the precise characteristics of an epigram it is not easy to define. It differs from a joke, in the fact that the wit of the latter dies in the words, and cannot therefore be conveyed in another language; while an epigram is a wit of ideas, and hence, is translatable. Like aphorisms, songs and sonnets, it is occupied with some single point, small and manageable; but whilst a song conveys a sentiment, a sonnet a poetical, and an aphorism a moral reflection, an epigram expresses a contrast.

  William Matthews

  Song, Reflection, Ideas

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• Sport strips away personality, letting the white bone of character shine through. Sport gives players an opportunity to know and test themselves. The great difference between sport and art is that sport, like a sonnet, forces beauty within its own system. Art, on the other hand, cyclically destroys boundaries and breaks free.

  Rita Mae Brown

  Sports, Art, Character

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• If I asked you about love, you'd probably quote me a sonnet. But you've never looked at a woman and been totally vulnerable. Known someone that could level you with her eyes, feeling like God put an angel on earth just for you. Who could rescue you from the depths of hell.

  Robin Williams

  Love You, Eye, Angel

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• Quiet book-learning in monasteries and ethereal music, sonnets and courtly lovethat stuff is all fantasyand veneer? You couldn't afford to let the beauty of the thing seduce you too far or you forgot the truth and the truth was always hard as iron bloody bars.

  Janice Galloway

  Book, Iron, Bars

  1994 Foreign Parts, ch.7.

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• My sonnet asserts that the sonnet still lives. My epic, should such fortune befall me, asserts that the heroic narrative is not lost - that it is born again.

  James Fenton

  Epic, Narrative, Heroic

  "An Introduction to English Poetry". Book by James Fenton, 2002.

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• When you work in form, be it a sonnet or villanelle or whatever, the form is there and you have to fill it. And you have to find how to make that form say what you want to say. But what you find, always--I think any poet who's worked in form will agree with me--is that the form leads you to what you want to say.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Thinking, Want, Poet

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