“Summer afternoon—summer afternoon. To me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.”
Henry James · Edith Wharton's memoir, A Backward Glance
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Poetry Quotes
PoetryWriting
63 quotes on poetry and the craft of writing — from the classics to the everyday.
“Morning without you is a dwindled dawn.”
Emily Dickinson · Poem Fr949, c. 1864
“The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. Don't go back to sleep.”
Rumi · "The Essential Rumi", translated by Coleman Barks
“Morning without you is a dwindled dawn.”
Emily Dickinson · Poem Fr949, c. 1864
“Bees do have a smell, you know, and if they don't they should, for their feet are dusted with spices from a million flowers.”
Ray Bradbury · Dandelion Wine, 1957
“Then followed that beautiful season called summer, filled was the air with a dreamy and magical light.”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow · Evangeline, 1847
“Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate.”
William Shakespeare · Sonnet 18, c. 1609
“And what is so rare as a day in June? Then, if ever, come perfect days.”
James Russell Lowell · The Vision of Sir Launfal, 1848
“You may write me down in history with your bitter, twisted lies, you may trod me in the very dirt, but still, like dust, I'll rise.”
Maya Angelou · "Still I Rise," And Still I Rise, 1978
“Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.”
Langston Hughes · "Dreams," 1922
“Yet each man kills the thing he loves.”
Oscar Wilde · The Ballad of Reading Gaol, 1898
“There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, there is a rapture on the lonely shore.”
Lord Byron · Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto IV, 1818
“There is no such thing as good writing. There is only good rewriting.”
Louis Brandeis · attributed
“The end of art is peace.”
Seamus Heaney · "The Harvest Bow," Field Work, 1979
“On a lazy Saturday morning when you're lying in bed, drifting in and out of sleep, there is a space where fantasy and reality become one.”
Lynn Johnston
“Drawing is rather like playing music: it's like an interpretation. I never directly copy things. I interpret them.”
David Hockney · Various interviews and writings
“Art has to move you and design does not, unless it's not just design, it's art.”
David Hockney · Interview, 2006
