"Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea."

Poetry, Criticism, Fiction, Open

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"Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea."

Exlpore more Poetry quotes

"I love writing poetry because it's pretty. I love writing pretty."

Richelle E. Goodrich, American Poet

Poetry, Beauty, Inspirational, Truth, Happiness

"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."

Debasish Mridha, American Author

Poetry, Imagination, Words, Emotion

"Old wives keep in memory word of things that once were needful for the wise to know."

J. R. R. Tolkien, English Novelist

Poetry, Beauty, Peace, Happiness, Love

"Amore is loveconfessed to you in haiku.Do you love me too?"

Richelle E. Goodrich, American Poet

Poetry, Love, Inspirational, Happiness, Truth

"The lamp hummed:'Regard the moon,La lune ne garde aucune rancune,She winks a feeble eye,She smiles into corners.She smoothes the hair of the grass.The moon has lost her memory.A washed-out smallpox cracks her face,Her hand twists a paper rose,That smells of dust and old Cologne,She is aloneWith all the old nocturnal smellsThat cross and cross across her brain."The reminiscence comesOf sunless dry geraniumsAnd dust in crevices,Smells of chestnuts in the streets,And female smells in shuttered rooms,And cigarettes in corridorsAnd cocktail smells in bars."

T. S. Eliot, American Poet

Poetry, Moon, Memory, Night, Nostalgia

"Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them."

Friedrich Nietzsche, German Philosopher

Poetry, Experience, Truth, Emotion

"Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves."

T. S. Eliot, American Poet

Poetry, Time, Feelings, Being

"It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road."

Virginia Woolf, British Author

Poetry, Movement, Memory, Time

"In a real poem a sound does not swallow a letter, but a letter swallows a sound."

Dejan Stojanovic, Serbian Philosopher

Poetry, Sound, Art, Expression, Creativity

"True poetry is the fragrance of the heart in the house of peace."

Sir Kristian Goldmund Aumann, British Musician

Poetry, Heart, Peace, Calm

Explore more quotes by John Updike

"The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop."

Marriage

"That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds."

Marriage

"When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas."

Mind

"Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn."

Art

"I was made to feel I could do things. If you get this feeling early and can hold it until you're 15, you tend to never lose it."

Confidence

"The difficulty with humourists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't whichever seems likelier to win an effect."

Satire

"Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness."

Humility

"Mozart's music gives us permission to live."

Music

"Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us."

Childhood

"On the single strand of wire strung to bring our house electricity, grackles and starlings neatly punctuated an invisible sentence."

Observation