Verses Quotes - Page 18

• Children should Transcribe favourite Passages. A certain sense of possession and delight may be added to this exercise if children are allowed to choose for transcription their favourite verse in one poem and another.

  Charlotte Mason

  Children, Book, Exercise

  "Home Education".

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• My verses stand gawping a bit. I never get used to this. They've lived here long enough.

  Hugo Claus

  Long, Enough, Used

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• Go now, verses, on your light feet, you have not trodden hard on the old earth where the graves laugh when they see their guests, the one corpse stacked on top of the other. Go now and stagger to her whom I do not know.

  Hugo Claus

  Light, Feet, Laughing

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• Nothing whips my blood like verse.

  William Carlos Williams

  Blood, Whips

  Quoted in John Thirlwall (ed) The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams (1957).

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• Polyphonic prose is a kind of free verse, except that it is still freer. Polyphonic makes full use of cadence, rime, alliteration, assonance.

  Amy Lowell

  Use, Cadence, Kind

  "Can Grande's Castle". Book by Amy Lowell, 1921.

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• Great thoughts in crude, unshapely verse set forth lose half their preciousness, and ever must, unless the diamond with its own rich dust be cut and polished, it seems little worth.

  Thomas Bailey Aldrich

  Cutting, Dust, Half

  Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1907). “Poems”

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• And pomp, and feast, and revelry, With mask, and antique pageantry, Such sights as youthful poets dream On summer eves by haunted stream. Then to the well-trod stage anon, If Jonson's learned sock be on, Or sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy's child, Warble his native wood-notes wild, And ever, against eating cares, Lap me in soft Lydian airs, Married to immortal verse Such as the meeting soul may pierce, In notes with many a winding bout Of linked sweetness long drawn out.

  John Milton

  Summer, Dream, Children

  'L'Allegro' (1645) l. 125

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• Let not a single day pass without your learning a verse, half a verse, or a fourth of it, or even one letter of it; nor without attending to charity, study and other pious activity.

  Chanakya

  Half, Charity, Letters

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• You now have learned enough to see That Cats are much like you and me And other people whom we find Possessed of various types of mind. For some are sane and some are mad And some are good and some are bad And some are better, some are worse — But all may be described in verse.

  Garrison Keillor

  Cat, People, Mad

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• What we do may be small, but it has a certain character of permanence; and to have produced anything of the slightest permanent interest, whether it be a copy of verses or a geometrical theorem, is to have done something utterly beyond the powers of the vast majority of men.

  G. H. Hardy

  Character, Science, Men

  G. H. Hardy (2012). “A Mathematician's Apology”, p.76, Cambridge University Press

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• We wrote verses that condemned us, with no hope of pardon, to the most bitter solitude.

  Salvatore Quasimodo

  Solitude, Bitterness, Pardon

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• After I'd produced about two dozen pen and ink drawings, one evening I decided that they needed poems to accompany them. I still have no idea where that notion came from, but it took me about two hours to produce verses for these creatures.

  Jack Prelutsky

  Ideas, Two, Drawing

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• Poetry seems to sink into us the way prose doesn't. I can still quote verses I learned when I was very young, but I have trouble remembering one line of a novel I just finished reading.

  Jack Prelutsky

  Reading, Writing, Lines

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• It is a commonplace that Racine is untranslatable. This is not because his verse is difficult, but because it is not.

  Kenneth Rexroth

  Difficult, Commonplace

  Kenneth Rexroth, Bradford Morrow (1989). “More Classics Revisited”, p.54, New Directions Publishing

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• Verse, singing, and speech have a common origin.

  Jean-Philippe Rameau

  Singing, Speech, Common

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• There is a verse [in the Koran] that says God swears by time. Anything you gain in life, you pay for with your time. Time is the most important thing that has been given to man.

  Shirin Ebadi

  Men, Design, Important

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• Time broadens the scope of verses and I know of some which, like music, are everything for all men.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Men, Scope, Knows

  Jorge Luis Borges (1964). “Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings”, p.154, New Directions Publishing

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• I dream of silent verses where the rhyme glides noiseless as an oar.

  Richard Aldington

  Dream, Silent, Rhyme

  Richard Aldington (1928). “Collected poems”

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• I can scarce bring myself to believe, that I am admitted to a familiar correspondence, and all the license of friendship, with a man who writes blank verse like Milton.

  Charles Lamb

  Believe, Writing, Men

  Charles Lamb, Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd (1856). “The Life and Letters”, p.53

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• When a man's verses cannot be understood, nor a man's good wit seconded with the forward child understanding, it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room. Truly, I would the gods had made thee poetical.

  William Shakespeare

  Children, Men, Understanding

  William Shakespeare, Joseph Dennie, Isaac Reed, Samuel Johnson, George Steevens (1805). “As you like it. All's well that ends well”, p.89

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• The glorious Dryden, refiner and purifier of English verse, did less for rhyme than he did for metre.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Rhyme, Glorious

  H. P. Lovecraft (2013). “The Conservative”, p.53, Arktos

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• There is not less wit nor invention in applying rightly a thought one finds in a book, than in being the first author of that thought. Cardinal du Perron has been heard to say that the happy application of a verse of Virgil has deserved a talent.

  Pierre Bayle

  Book, Firsts, Talent

  Pierre Bayle (1735). “The Dictionary Historical and Critical of Mr. Peter Bayle”, p.779

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• Give me a flagon of red wine, a book of verses, a loaf of bread, and a little idleness. If with such store I might sit by thy dear side in some lonely place, I should deem myself happier than a king in his kingdom.

  Omar Khayyam

  Lonely, Kings, Book

  Omar Khayyam (1898). “Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám”

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• When you are very old, and sit in the candle - light at evening spinning by the fire, you will say, as you murmur my verses, a wonder in your eyes, 'Ronsard sang of me in the days when I was fair.

  Pierre de Ronsard

  Eye, Fire, Light

  'Sonnets pour Hèléne' (1578) bk. 2, no. 42

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• The words that bore the deathless verse of Homer from bard to a group of fascinated hearers, and with whose fading sounds the poems passed beyond recall, are fixed on the printed page in a hundred tongues. They carry to a million eyes what once could reach but a hundred ears.

  Nicholas Murray Butler

  Eye, Ears, Pages

  Nicholas Murray Butler (1911). “Philosophy”

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