Drinkwater Quotes & Sayings

This play John Drinkwater's Abraham Lincoln holds the season's record, thus far, with a run of four evening performances and one matinee. By an odd coincidence, it ran just five performances too many. — Dorothy Parker

When you defile the pleasant streams,
And the wild bird's abiding place,
You massacre a million dreams,
And cast your spittle in God's face — John Drinkwater

The poet's perfect expression is the token of a perfect experience; what he says in the best possible way he has felt in the best possible way, that is, completely. — John Drinkwater

Poetry being the sign of that which all men desire, even though the desire be unconscious, intensity of life or completeness of experience, the universality of its appeal is a matter of course. — John Drinkwater

It is commonly asserted and accepted that Paradise Lost is among the two or three greatest English poems; it may justly be taken as the type of supreme poetic achievement in our literature. — John Drinkwater

To know anything of a poet but his poetry is, so far as the poetry is concerned, to know something that may be entertaining, even delightful, but is certainly inessential. — John Drinkwater

God, he thought, her eyes are so bright, flashing, deep, full of promise, all those things eyes are in books but never are in life, and she was his. — John Crowley

Grant us the wil1 to fashion as we feel, Grant us the strength to labor as we know, Grant us the purpose, ribbed and edged with steel, To strike the blow. — John Drinkwater

Tall and fair, with blue-green eyes, sandy hair streaked by the sun, and a lean and comely body, Gerris Drinkwater had a swagger to him, a confidence bordering on arrogance. — George R R Martin

can perceive. Television is coming to — Carol Drinkwater

Drinkwater had a swagger to him, a confidence bordering on arrogance. He never seemed ill at ease, and even when he did not speak the language, he had ways of making himself understood. — George R R Martin

The musician - if he be a good one - finds his own perception prompted by the poet's perception, and he translates the expression of that perception from the terms of poetry into the terms of music. — John Drinkwater

Every fruit that bedecked Cecile's gaily-dressed stall had been grown on her own holding. — Carol Drinkwater

This be my pilgrimage and goal Daily to march and find The secret phrases of the soul, The evangels of the mind. — John Drinkwater

If it is an imperfect word, no external circumstance can heighten its value as poetry. — John Drinkwater

came bounding towards her, startling — Carol Drinkwater

She had always lived her best life in dreams. She knew no greater pleasure than that moment of passage into the other place, when her limbs grew warm and heavy and the sparkling darkness behind her lids became ordered and doors opened; when conscious thought grew owl's wings and talons and became other than conscious. — John Crowley

skidded the elegant white speedboat skilfully through the — Carol Drinkwater

There can be no proof that Blake's lyric is composed of the best words in the best order; only a conviction, accepted by our knowledge and judgment, that it is so. — John Drinkwater

We recognise in the finished art, which is the result of these conditions, the best words in the best order - poetry; and to put this essential poetry into different classes is impossible. — John Drinkwater

These rare mini mind-blanks always seemed to occur when he needed perking up, creative jolts as if his brain had temporarily overclocked its processor to light-speed frequency, but with the side effect of shutting his consciousness down to protect it from overheating. That theory certainly fit the observable phenomena.
Then again, the competing theories included: he was nuts; he had a brain tumour; aliens had temporarily abducted him. — Karl Drinkwater

It should here be added that poetry habitually takes the form of verse. — John Drinkwater

So it is in poetry. All we ask is that the mood recorded shall impress us as having been of the kind that exhausts the imaginative capacity; if it fails to do this the failure will announce itself either in prose or in insignificant verse. — John Drinkwater

Somewhere within the meeting of our eyes, our souls were bonding, even if our day to day lives were far apart. — Carol Drinkwater

ground-growing shrub rather like a small azalea,' Madame is explaining when I return — Carol Drinkwater

Poe's saying that a long poem is a sequence of short ones is perfectly just. — John Drinkwater

A lyric, it is true, is the expression of personal emotion, but then so is all poetry, and to suppose that there are several kinds of poetry, differing from each other in essence, is to be deceived by wholly artificial divisions which have no real being. — John Drinkwater

presentation, she looked drawn, as old as the limestone hills behind her property. Her facial skin was marbled, hair greying at the roots. She had grown frail, as though she might disintegrate at the first touch; she was a desiccated, vulnerable shadow of her former self and it was hard to — Carol Drinkwater

The written word is everything. — John Drinkwater

When the poet makes his perfect selection of a word, he is endowing the word with life. — John Drinkwater

I am moving the rudder, shifting the course of my life. I have not thought of it this way before, but that is what I am doing. Taking my fate into my own hands, turning dreams into reality. And there is nothing more sacred or precious than that. To choose a direction: but how often do we miss the signposts? — Carol Drinkwater

Lord Rameses of Egypt sighed
Because a summer evening passed;
And little Ariadne cried
That summer fancy fell at last
To dust; and young Verona died
When beauty's hour was overcast.

Theirs was the bitterness we know
Because the clouds of hawthorn keep
So short a state, and kisses go
To tombs unfathomably deep,
While Rameses and Romeo
And little Ariadne sleep. — John Drinkwater

How many worlds make up a life! — Carol Drinkwater

Great men are rare, poets are rarer, but the great man who is a poet, transfiguring his greatness, is the rarest of all events. — John Drinkwater

Poetry is the communication through words of certain experiences that can be communicated in no other way. — John Drinkwater

But in the finished art of the song the use of words has no connection with the use of words in poetry. — John Drinkwater

In the corridors under tehre is nothing but sleep. And stiller than ever on orchard boughs they keep Tryst with the moon, and deep is the silence, deep On moon-washed apples of wonder. — John Drinkwater

For while the subjects of poetry are few and recurrent, the moods of man are infinitely various and unstable. It is the same in all arts. — John Drinkwater

He wondered where his mind had wandered this time, what life it had lived as a trail of neurons sped through networks of possibilities particle-fast, too rapid to catch without a hadron collider, causing super quarks of weirdness and leaving him with only a vague after-image like a melting dream. He had to accept that he couldn't catch all his thoughts, all the things going on in his body, the processes which slipped by in the background just leaving a shadow, an itch, the grain of sand that probably wouldn't become a pearl, a blazing after-trace that lives a second then is gone forever. All those possibilities occurring in a second of frantic life: it never ceased to amaze him. The world was an incredible and beautifully constructed thing.
However, there wasn't really time for a wank. — Karl Drinkwater

Any long work in which poetry is persistent, be it epic or drama or narrative, is really a succession of separate poetic experiences governed into a related whole by an energy distinct from that which evoked them. — John Drinkwater

And not a girl goes walking Along the Cotswold lanes But knows men's eyes in April Are quicker than their brains. — John Drinkwater

Nothing lasts forever. But there is new life; new colours, fresh words, new tunes to compose. There is now; time present, time future. We build with new bricks and hope our voices are heard, our music is sung and our love cherished for as long as it is offered. — Carol Drinkwater

Memories don't all have to be good. — Karl Drinkwater

They called him John Storm: John after his grandfather, but Storm after his father and his mother. — John Crowley

To take an analogy: if we say that a democratic government is the best kind of government, we mean that it most completely fulfills the highest function of a government - the realisation of the will of the people. — John Drinkwater