Verses Quotes - Page 9

• Narrative nonfiction was not my forte. I always wanted to let my imagination run free, and the facts sometimes got in the way. At one point I wanted to illustrate Jack Prelutsky's enchanting poems. Unable to do that, I started devising and improvising my own poems, very raw at first. I immersed myself in verse, writing reams of stuff until it gelled.

  Douglas Florian

  Running, Writing, Imagination

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

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• We expect kids to go straight from Shel Silverstein to William Shakespeare. There needs to be a bridge of relatable, fun, rhythmic verse that gets kids to cross over, so to speak, so they can appreciate Mary Oliver and Naomi Shihab Nye and Langston Hughes.

  Kwame Alexander

  Fun, Kids, Appreciate

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• We think "reading the Bible in context" means thinking about the handful of verses before and after the verses we're looking at on the page. That isn't the case. While that's important, context is so much wider than a handful of verses.

  Michael S. Heiser

  Reading, Mean, Thinking

  Source: www.patheos.com

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• Sometimes I write it down, sometimes I freestyle. I get lines coming to me randomly throughout the day and I'll jot it down and build on that. If I get a line that's about love, it starts up a whole love verse... And if a beat speaks to me, it's like I already know what to write.

  CJ Fly

  Writing, Sometimes, Speak

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I always hesitate to call myself a children's poet, and I always hesitate to call what I write for children poetry. Though a few of the verses that I've written, yes, I think they are truly poems.

  Mary Ann Hoberman

  Children, Writing, Thinking

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

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• Kaz came to Switzerland where I was teaching to share with me [Heart Sutra] wondrous insight. There he and I worked on this new translation - with my part being to help render it into a verse form that would be good to chant. Since I have worked with many dying people over the years and often share the Heart Sutra with them, I found this new version that we created together to be so much more accessible to those who were facing death.

  Joan Halifax

  Teaching, Heart, Years

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• I always knew about as a kid, knew that that particular injury at [my grandfather's] finger had been caused in that disaster that killed his brother-in-law, my grandmother's brother. And he never talked about his own brother's death to me. My mother told me about that and told me about the impact on her family. And that's part of what you hear in the first verse of "Miner's Prayer."

  Dwight Yoakam

  Mother, Brother, Prayer

  Source: www.npr.org

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• Limericks don't come from Limerick. But it comes from that between the verses when they used to have those competitions that they would put in the refrain, "follow me up, follow me up, follow me up to Limerick Town."

  Malachy McCourt

  Competition, Towns, Follow Me

  Source: bigthink.com

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• I don't care whether you are me or Michael Jordan, it makes no difference we are all going to feel that way but it is what we do about what we feel that isn't comfortable that separates the people who do really well verses the people who just meek out existence.

  John Assaraf

  Differences, People, Care

  Source: insearchofheroes.com

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• I opposed the Fatwa against Salman Rushdie. I read the book and took a critical distance. I did not think The Satanic Verses is a blasphemous book. I did not consider the book as being a great read, but as an intellectual I read, I assess, and I respond. I make a difference between true freedom of expression to which we owe a response and provocation, which we ignore.

  Tariq Ramadan

  Distance, Book, Thinking

  "'You want my reaction? You get my silence.'". Interview with Lars Mensel, Clemens Lukitsch, www.theeuropean-magazine.com. November 19, 2012.

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• I'm proud to say I'm the only Slaughterhouse member who has not rewritten a verse yet, and that's the ongoing joke in the group, 'cause everybody has rewrote their sh*t except for me.

  Joe Budden

  Ongoing, Proud, Causes

  Source: djbooth.net

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• You know, if you use instrument, why, you have to stay on perfect time - timing. And if you do a cappella - I'm so bad, just wonder, you know, maybe I'll sing one verse this way and one verse another. And if you're doing it a capella, you don't have to keep any time. You can just go out as far as you want to with it.

  Ralph Stanley

  Perfect, Use, Want

  "Remembering Bluegrass And Banjo Legend Ralph Stanley". "Fresh Air", www.npr.org. June 24, 2016.

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• It's not as if the New Testament writers came along and said, "The culmination of Old Testament books is more books, New Testament books." In some ways they thought instead of the culmination of Old Testament books being Christ himself, the word incarnate as the opening verses of Hebrews 1 put it. In the past God spoke to the fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his son and the son is revelation.

  D. A. Carson

  Father, Book, Son

  Source: www.booksataglance.com

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• Grunge, man, that was incredible. It was dangerous. It was not verse/chorus. Songs could be short, long, a lark, majestic. You were constantly being surprised.

  Martin Popoff

  Song, Men, Long

  Source: archive.alternativenation.net

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• All of Victorian verse is pentameter.

  Derek Walcott

  Victorian

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

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• The U.N. [the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention] has looked into this whole situation. They spent eighteen months in formal, adversarial litigation. [So it's] me and the U.N. verses Sweden and the U.K. Who's right? The U.N. made a conclusion that I am being arbitrarily detained illegally, deprived of my freedom and that what has occurred has not occurred within the laws that the United Kingdom and Sweden, and that [those countries] must obey. It is an illegal abuse.

  Julian Assange

  Country, Law, Abuse

  Source: www.zerohedge.com

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• One of the interesting things about the history of poetry in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries is that people who read liked getting their information in rhyme just as much as in prose. The genre that we would think of as nonfiction often was written in verse in forms like the Georgic when people thought that one of the tasks of poetry was conveying arguments and information in a pleasant way.

  Robert Hass

  Thinking, People, Interesting

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I started to write the song. And I was in Gladewater, Texas, one night with Carl Perkins and I said, I've got a good idea for a song. And I sang him the first verse that I had written, and I said it's called "Because You're Mine." And he said, "I Walk The Line" is a better title, so I changed it to "I Walk The Line."

  Johnny Cash

  Song, Writing, Night

  Source: wrvo.org

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• Some people think that Southern hip-hop doesn't have any depth. They think it's just noise, all about people having a good time in the club. And some of it doesn't have a lot of depth, it's true, but some does. I wanted to work against that stereotype. These are verses by Southern artists who are really wrestling with what it means to be here, young black men who are trying to figure out how to live in the South. So I wanted the epigraphs in my novels to reflect that.

  Jesmyn Ward

  Mean, Wrestling, Artist

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• At Dresden on the Elbe, that handsome city,
  Where straw hats, verses, and cigars are made,
  They've built (it well may make us feel afraid,)
  A music club and music warehouse pretty.

  Heinrich Heine

  Cities, Clubs, May

  Heinrich Heine (1866). “The Poems of Heine: Complete”, p.21

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• What verse is for the poet, dialectical thinking is for the philosopher. He grasps for it in order to get hold of his own enchantment, in order to perpetuate it.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Philosophical, Thoughtful, Thinking

  Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (2012). “Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks”, p.44, Regnery Publishing

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• Some poems are for holidays only. They are polished and sweet, but it is the sweetness of sugar, and not such as toil gives to sour bread. The breath with which the poet utters his verse must be that by which he lives.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Sweet, Integrity, Holiday

  Henry David Thoreau (2016). “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”, p.243, Xist Publishing

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• A true poem is distinguished not so much by a felicitous expression, or any thought it suggests, as by the atmosphere which surrounds it. Most have beauty of outline merely, and are striking as the form and bearing of a stranger; but true verses come toward us indistinctly, as the very breath of all friendliness, and envelop us in their spirit and fragrance.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Beauty, Expression, Poetry

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Henry David Thoreau (Illustrated)”, p.279, Delphi Classics

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• Much verse fails of being poetry because it was not written exactly at the right crisis, though it may have been inconceivably near to it. It is only by a miracle that poetry is written at all. It is not recoverable thought, but a hue caught from a vaster receding thought.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Inspirational, Miracle, Poetry

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Henry David Thoreau (Illustrated)”, p.246, Delphi Classics

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• The night in prison was novel and interesting enough.... I found that even here there was a history and a gossip which never circulated beyond the walls of the jail. Probably this is the only house in the town where verses are composed, which are afterward printed in a circular form, but not published. I was shown quite a long list of verses which were composed by some young men who had been detected in an attempt to escape, who avenged themselves by singing them.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Wall, Night, Men

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