"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, English, Paris, Poems

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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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"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."

L. M. Montgomery, Canadian Author

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"I thought all the trees were whispering to each other, passing news and plots along in an unintelligible language; and the branches swayed and groped without any wind. They do say the trees do actually move, and can surround strangers and hem them."

J. R. R. Tolkien, English Novelist

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"Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry."

Gustave Flaubert, French Novelist

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"For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming."

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"Here the frailest leaves of me and yet my strongest lasting, Here I shade and hide my thoughts, I myself do not expose them, And yet they expose me more than all my other poems."

Walt Whitman, American Poet

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"Each day before the end of eveshe sought her lover, nor would him leave,until the stars were dimmed, and daycame glimmering eastward silver-grey.Then trembling-veiled she would appear,and dance before him, half in fear;there flitting just before his feetshe gently chid with laughter sweet:'Come! dance now, Beren, dance with me!For fain thy dancing I would see!"

J. R. R. Tolkien, English Novelist

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"It is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem,-a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing. The thought and the form are equal in the order of time, but in the order of genesis the thought is prior to the form."

Ralph Waldo Emerson, American Poet

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"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."

T. S. Eliot, American Poet

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"I once began to ask around what constitutes a good poem. It felt petty, in a sense. A boy would need no help in deciding which girls he thinks are pretty."

Criss Jami, American Philosopher

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"People wish to be poets more than they wish to write poetry, and that's a mistake. One should wish to celebrate more than one wishes to be celebrated."

Lucille Clifton, American Poet

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"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."

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"I want to make the world better."

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"I don't think events in your life affect your music."

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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."

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"I've had every advantage in the world, despite the 18 years of silence which were nobody's fault but mine."

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"If you have more money than you need, you have to give it away. It's a duty. I get to choose whom to sponsor, and I like to give to the areas that I know something about."

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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."

Poetry, English, Paris, Poems

"My music is all about an idealistic human personality. I have 19th-century ideals."

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"Either your understanding of the meaning of music is there from the beginning or it is not."

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