Louise Bogan Quotes & Sayings

Stupidity always accompanies evil. Or evil, stupidity. — Louise Bogan

But childhood prolonged, cannot remain a fairyland. It becomes a hell. — Louise Bogan

Pasture, stone wall, and steeple,
What most perturbs the mind:
The heart-rending homely people,
Or the horrible beautiful kind? — Louise Bogan

Poetry is often generations in advance of the thought of its time. — Louise Bogan

How much of our inner substance is it good for us to give to public griefs? The whole modern tendency to agonize over the suffering of the entire globe is surely something new. — Louise Bogan

Your work is carved out of agony as a statue is carved out of marble. — Louise Bogan

The intellectual is a middle-class product; if he is not born into the class he must soon insert himself into it, in order to exist. He is the fine nervous flower of the bourgeoisie. — Louise Bogan

You need some place to work in. That's the door half open. — Louise Bogan

The fact, and the intuition or logic about the fact, are severe coordinates in fiction. In the short story they must cross with hair-line precision. — Louise Bogan

Hate does not present many choices; if hate is your solution, you are fairly certain to hate all phemonena with equal joy and intensity, without troubling to drag into prominence any one feature from the loathsome whole. — Louise Bogan

But is there any reason to believe that a woman's spiritual fibre is less sturdy than a man's? Is it not possible for a woman to come to terms with herself if not with the world; to withdraw more and more, as time goes on, her own personality from her productions; to stop childish fears of death and eschew charming rebellions against facts? — Louise Bogan

But it's silly to suggest the writing of poetry is something ethereal, a sort of soul-crashing, devastating emotional experience that wrings you. I have no fancy ideas about poetry ... It doesn't come to you on the wings of a dove. It's something you have to work hard at. — Louise Bogan

The women rest their tired half-healed hearts; they are almost
well. — Louise Bogan

All art, in spite of the struggles of some critics to prove otherwise, is based on emotion and projects emotion. — Louise Bogan

True revolutions in art restore more than they destroy. — Louise Bogan

Up from the bronze, I saw Water without a flaw Rush to its rest in air Reach to its rest, and fall. — Louise Bogan

In the country whereto I go
I shall not see the face of my friend
Nor her hair the color of sunburnt grasses;
Together we shall not find
The land on whose hills bends the new moon
In air traversed of birds.
What have I thought of love?
I have said, "It is beauty and sorrow."
I have thought that it would bring me lost delights, and splendor
As a wind out of old time ...
But there is only the evening here,
And the sound of willows
Now and again dipping their long oval leaves in the water.
from "Betrothed — Louise Bogan

I cannot believe that the inscrutable universe turns on an axis of suffering; surely the strange beauty of the world must somewhere rest on pure joy! — Louise Bogan

Song, like a wing, tears through my breast, my side,
And madness chooses out my voice again,
Again. — Louise Bogan

O God, in the dream the terrible horse began
To paw at the air, and make for me with his blows. — Louise Bogan

Goodbye, goodbye!
There was so much to love, I could not love it all;
I could not love it enough. — Louise Bogan

I'll lie here and learn
How, over their ground,
Trees make a long shadow
And a light sound. — Louise Bogan

The art of one period cannot be approached through the attitudes (emotional or intellectual) of another. — Louise Bogan

Come, drunks and drug-takers; come perverts unnerved!
Receive the laurel, given, though late, on merit; to whom
and wherever deserved.
Parochial punks, trimmers, nice people, joiners true-blue,
Get the hell out of the way of the laurel. It is deathless
And it isn't for you. — Louise Bogan

Intellectuals range through the finest gradations of kind and quality: from those who are merely educated neurotics, usually with strong hidden reactionary tendencies, through mediocrities of all kinds, to men of real brains and sensibility, more or less stiffened into various respectabilities or substitutes for respectability. The number of Ignorant Specialists is large. The number of hysterics and compulsives is also large. — Louise Bogan

The poem is always the last resort. In it the poet makes a world in little, and finds peace, even though, under complete focused emotion, the evocation be far more bitter than reality, or far more lovely. — Louise Bogan

Politics are nothing but sand and gravel: it is art and life that feed us until we die. Everything else is ambition, hysteria or hatred. — Louise Bogan

The measured blood beats out the year's delay. — Louise Bogan

Women have no wilderness in them They are provident instead Content in the tight hot cell of their hearts To eat dusty bread. — Louise Bogan

It is almost impossible for the poetess, once laurelled, to take off the crown for good or to reject values and taste of those who tender it. — Louise Bogan

What we suffer, what we endure, what we muff, what we kill, what we miss, what we are guilty of, is done by us, as individuals, in private. — Louise Bogan

The Initial Mystery that attends any journey is: how did the traveler reach his starting point in the first place? — Louise Bogan

You have put your two hands upon me, and your mouth,
You have said my name as a prayer.
Here where trees are planted by water
I have watched your eyes, cleansed from regret,
And your lips, closed over all that love cannot say. — Louise Bogan

At midnight tears
Run into your ears. — Louise Bogan

I hope that one or two immortal lyrics will come out of all this tumbling around. — Louise Bogan

O fortunate bride, who never again will become elated after
childbirth!
O lucky older wife, who has been cured of feeling unwanted! — Louise Bogan

It is through the acceptance of a variety of aethetic and intellectual points of view that a culture is given breadth and density. — Louise Bogan

O remember
In your narrowing dark hours
That more things move
Than blood in the heart. — Louise Bogan

No more pronouncements on lousy verse. No more hidden competition. No more struggling not to be a square. — Louise Bogan

Perhaps this very instant is your time. — Louise Bogan

Because language is the carrier of ideas, it is easy to believe that it should be very little else than such a carrier. — Louise Bogan

A thousand kindnesses do not make up for a thousand blows. — Louise Bogan

It is not possible, for a poet, writing in any language, to protect himself from the tragic elements in human life ... [ellipsis in source] Illness, old age, and death
subjects as ancient as humanity
these are the subjects that the poet must speak of very nearly from the first moment that he begins to speak. — Louise Bogan

Innocence of heart and violence of feeling are necessary in any kind of superior achievement: The arts cannot exist without them. — Louise Bogan

I don't like quintessential certitude. — Louise Bogan

Once form has been smashed, it has been smashed for good, and once a forbidden subject has been released, it has been released for good. — Louise Bogan

In a time lacking in truth and certainty and filled with anguish and despair, no woman should be shamefaced in attempting to give back to the world, through her work, a portion of its lost heart. — Louise Bogan

The terrible beast, that no one may understand,
Came to my side, and put down his head in love. — Louise Bogan

Unaccustomed sense of peace did not depend on ... 'the whim of any fallible creature, or ... economic security, or the weather. I don't know where it comes from. Jung states that such serenity is always a miracle ... I am so glad that the therapists of my maturity and the saints of my childhood agree on one thing. — Louise Bogan

I have lost faith in universal panaceas - work is the one thing in which I really believe. — Louise Bogan