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"In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well."
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"One can't write for all readers. A poet cannot write for people who don't like poetry."

"A tough life needs a tough language-and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers-a language powerful enough to say how it is."

"I suppose that's how it looks in prose. But it's very different if you look at it through poetry and I think it's nicer' Anne recovered herself and her eyes shone and her cheeks flushed 'to look at it through poetry."

"The arts generally have had to recognize Modernism - how should poetry escape?"

"Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it."

"The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English."

"A poet is not an inventor. A poet is a player that plays with words on the field of human imagination to excite a reader's mind with the colors of emotion."
Explore more quotes by Paul Valery

"The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us."

"The history of thought may be summed up in these words: it is absurd by what it seeks and great by what it finds."

"The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best."

"Politics is the art of preventing people from busying themselves with what is their own business."

"A man is a poet if difficulties inherent in his art provide him with ideas; he is not a poet if they deprive him of ideas."

"War: a massacre of people who don't know each other for the profit of people who know each other but don't massacre each other."

"Long years must pass before the truths we have made for ourselves become our very flesh."
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