Yeats Quotes

I remember Francis Bacon would say that he felt he was giving art what he thought it previously lacked. With me, it's what Yeats called the fascination with what's difficult. I'm only trying to do what I can't do.

Lucian Freud

Art, Giving, Trying

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One day in Dipstick, Nebraska, or Landfill, Oklahoma, is worth more to me than an eternity in Dante's plastic Paradiso, or Yeats's gold-plated Byzantium.

Edward Abbey

Byzantium, Oklahoma, One Day

Edward Abbey (2015). “A Voice Crying in the Wilderness”, p.28, RosettaBooks

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There are those who regard this history of past strife and exile as better forgotten. But, to use the phrase of Yeats, let us not casually reduce "that great past to a trouble of fools." For we need not feel the bitterness of the past to discover its meaning for the present and the future.

John F. Kennedy

Time, Past, Needs

Address Before the Irish Parliament, delivered 28 June 1963, Dublin, Ireland

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Yeats was the greatest poet of our times . . . certainly the greatest in this language, and so far as I am able to judge, in any language.

T. S. Eliot

Time, Judging, Able

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Earth, receive an honored guest; William Yeats is laid to rest. Let the Irish vessel lie Emptied of its poetry.

W. H. Auden

Art, Lying, Poetry

"In Memory of W. B. Yeats" l. 42 (1940)

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And I love Jane Austen's use of language too--the way she takes her time to develop a phrase and gives it room to grow, so that these clever, complex statements form slowly and then bloom in my mind. Beethoven does the same thing with his cadence and phrasing and structure. It's a fact: Jane Austen is musical. And so's Yeats. And Wordsworth. All the great writers are musical.

Andrew Clements

Clever, Giving, Musical

Andrew Clements (2008). “Things Hoped For”, p.77, Penguin

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It's just like Yeats said. In dreams begin responsibilities. Flip this around and you could say that where there's no power to imagine, no responsibility can arise.

Haruki Murakami

Dream, Responsibility, Flip

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The sad fact is that I love Dickens and Donne and Keats and Eliot and Forster and Conrad and Fitzgerald and Kafka and Wilde and Orwell and Waugh and Marvell and Greene and Sterne and Shakespeare and Webster and Swift and Yeats and Joyce and Hardy, really, really love them. It’s just that they don’t love me back.

David Nicholls

Facts, Wilde, Donne

David Nicholls (2004). “A Question of Attraction: A Novel”, p.233, Villard

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The censorious said she slept in a hammock and understood Yeats's poems, but her family denied both stories.

Hector Hugh Munro

Hammocks, Stories, Said

Saki, Hector Hugh Munro (2016). “Delphi Complete Works of Saki (Illustrated)”, p.420, Delphi Classics

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To be the father of growing daughters is to understand something of what Yeats evokes with his imperishable phrase 'terrible beauty.' Nothing can make one so happily exhilarated or so frightened: it's a solid lesson in the limitations of self to realize that your heart is running around inside someone else's body. It also makes me quite astonishingly calm at the thought of death: I know whom I would die to protect and I also understand that nobody but a lugubrious serf can possibly wish for a father who never goes away.

Christopher Hitchens

Daughter, Running, Atheist

"Hitch-22: A Memoir". Book by Christopher Hitchens, www.huffingtonpost.com. May 20, 2010.

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Is it not certain that the Creator yawns in earthquake and thunder and other popular displays, but toils in rounding the delicate spiral of a shell? -Yeats, The Trembling of the Veil

William Butler Yeats

Earthquakes, Toil, Shells

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Alister McGrath has now written two books with my name in the title. The poet W. B. Yeats, when asked to say something about bad poets who made a living by parasitizing him, wrote the splendid line, 'was there ever dog that praised his fleas?

Richard Dawkins

Dog, Book, Two

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I wanted to see who this Yeats person was, and I said to my mother, 'I want a book by this person.' And she bought it for me, and a lot of it was over my head, but I had it.

Patti Smith

Mother, Book, Want

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With him in defense, we could play Arthur Askey in goal.
(after signing Ron Yeats)

Bill Shankly

Play, Goal, Defense

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... woman is frequently praised as the more "creative" sex. She does not need to make poems, it is argued; she has no drive to make poems, because she is privileged to make babies. A pregnancy is as fulfilling as, say, Yeats' Sailing to Byzantium.... To call a child a poem may be a pretty metaphor, but it is a slur on the labor of art.

Cynthia Ozick

Baby, Art, Sex

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Most of my influences from outside the commerical strange fiction genre came in with university, discovering James Joyce and Wallace Stevens, Blake and Yeats, Pinter and Borges. And meanwhile within those genres I was discovering Gibson and Shepard, Jeter and Powers, Lovecraft and Peake.

Hal Duncan

Jeter, Fiction, Strange

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Yeats, you need ten years in the library, but I have need of ten years in the wilderness.

Lionel Johnson

Years, Library, Needs

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I am talking about poetry. It's like that line from [John] Yeats: I go back to "where all the ladders start/ In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart."

Robert Hass

Heart, Talking, Ladders

"Robert Hass" by Sarah Pollock, www.motherjones.com. March/April 1997.

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[William Butler] Yeats has the phrase Hodos Chameliontos, chameleon-like, in that you don't know where the beginning or the middle or the end is, so it's an unrelieved hallucination, because you don't know where you're coming in and you don't know where you're going out. It ends, you're going into the hallucination, or maybe coming out of it, I don't know.

Allen Ginsberg

Going Out, Phrases, Hallucinations

Source: sensitiveskinmagazine.com

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Anyone who has read Yeats's wonderful Autobiography will remember his Sligo shabby, shadowed, half country and half sea, full of confused romance, superstition, poverty, eccentricity, unrecognized anachronism, passion and ignorance and the little boy's misery. Yeats was treated well but was bitterly unhappy; he prayed that he would die, and used often to say to himself: "When you are grown up, never talk as grown-up people do of the happiness of childhood.

Randall Jarrell

Country, Confused, Passion

"Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964". Book by Randall Jarrell, "The Development of Yeats's Sense of Reality" (p. 89), 1980.

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W. B. Yeats has created, if not a new world, a new star. He is not a reporter of life as it is, to the extent that Shakespeare or Browning is. One is not quite certain that his kingdom is of the green earth. He is like a man who has seen the earth not directly but in a crystal.

Robert Wilson Lynd

Stars, Men, World

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My two great heroes are W. B. Yeats and Federico Garcia Lorca.

Leonard Cohen

Hero, Two, Lorca

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I think the whole emphasis in England, in universities, on practical criticism (but not that so much as on historical criticism, knowing what period a line comes from) this is almost paralysing. In America, in University, we read - what? - T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Yeats, that is where we began. Shakespeare flaunted in the background. I'm not sure I agree with this, but I think that' for the young poet, the writing poet, it is not quite so frightening to go to university in America as it is in England, for these reasons.

Sylvia Plath

Writing, Thinking, Knowing

Source: www.english.illinois.edu

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In the 1970s, for example, I found myself learning to relish the poetry of Andrew Marvell and Sir Thomas Wyatt, and getting a handle on poetry of plainer speech than I had dwelt with heretofore. Which led me into a new appreciation of middle [William Butler ] Yeats, of the short three-beat line and forward-driving syntax, and that paid in, in turn, to a poem like Casualty in Field Work. The traffic, however, was usually the other way. My teaching was animated by what I was reading and being excited by as a poet.

Adam Kirsch

Appreciation, Teaching, Reading

Source: harvardmagazine.com

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When Yeats said the center cannot hold, he was talking for himself, but it was true for the rest of us as well.

Jean-Luc Godard

Talking, Said, Wells

Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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