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"I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson's poetry. I came back to my hotel, read 2,000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano."
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"It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road."
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Personal Development
"Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it."
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Personal Development
"I don't think of poetry as a 'rational' activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with words or phrases which appeal more because of their sound than their meaning, and the movement and phrasing of a poem are very important to me."
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Personal Development
"Women do not have as great a need for poetry because their own essence is poetry."
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Personal Development
"One could do worse than be a swinger of birches."
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Personal Development
"Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and falls again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet."
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Personal Development
"There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry."
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Personal Development
"Will the veiled sister pray for Those who walk in darkness, who chose thee and oppose thee, Those who are torn on the horn between season and season, time and time, between Hour and hour, word and word, power and power, those who wait In darkness? Will the veiled sister pray For children at the gate Who will not go away and cannot pray: Pray for those who chose and oppose."
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Personal Development
"The words of the true poems give you more than poems, they give you to form for yourself poems, religions, politics, war, peace, behavior, histories, essays, daily life, & everything else, they balance the ranks, colors, races, creeds, and the sexes, they do not seek beauty, they are sought, forever touching them or close upon them follows beauty, longing, fain, love-sick. They prepare for death, yet they are not the finish, but rather the outset, they bring none of his or her terminus or to be content & full, whom they take they take into space to behold the birth of the stars, to learn one of the meanings, to launch off with absolute faith, to sweep through the ceaseless rings & never be quiet again."
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"Death, like a host, comes smiling to the door;Smiling, he greets us, on that tranquil shoreWhere neither piping bird nor peeping dawnDisturbs the eternal sleep,But in the stillness far withdrawnOur dreamless rest for evermore we keep."
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"I've managed to dodge the curse. Not all my family have. Of course, music helped me - music is all about civilization, about something worthwhile. It's all about ideas."
Family
"There is no change - I'm as deep or as shallow as I ever was. What's new is on-the-job experience. This is what you gain with years."
Change
"Nicolette, Kendalle, and Alexandra are my children. Their mother, Cynthia Beck, and I, love them very much."
Love
"It's true that I tend to daydream. I'm the same person in business as I am in music: I can be distracted and absentminded. It's my style."
Business
"I don't think events in your life affect your music."
Life
"I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson's poetry. I came back to my hotel, read 2,000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano."
Poetry
"When my opera Plump Jack was performed in 1989, my first piano teacher sent me something that I'd composed when I was four. I remember I played it, and it still sounded like me. I'm the same composer I was then."
Politics
"I do not think that music keeps evolving. It evolved through Bach; since then, in my humble opinion, all the innovations added nothing."
Music
"I want to make the world better."
Want
"I feel that I belong to the 19th century. Some composers' music is very topical. It almost says, 'This is about what I read in newspapers yesterday.' Not mine."
Music
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