English Verse Quotes & Sayings

Verse comedy is interesting to me because of the challenge of writing in rhymed couplets, which is not a form that's usually amenable to English, yet to me it gives great possibility for comedy. — David Ives

A job, in their view, was a job, and, as with most jobs, you just had to find that perfect balance between doing as little as possible so you didn't get tired, and just enough so that you didn't get fired. — John Connolly

At four lines, with the quatrain, we reach the basic stanza form familiar from a whole range of English poetic practice. This is the length of the ballad stanza, the verse of a hymn, and innumerable other kinds of verse. — James Fenton

If I could let you know -
two women together is a work
nothing in civilization ha made simple,
two people together is a work
heroic in its ordinariness,
the slow-picked, halting traverse of a pitch
where the fiercest attention becomes routine
- look at the faces of those who have chosen it. — Adrienne Rich

Among those today who believe that modern poetry must do without rhyme or metre, there is an assumption that the alternative to free verse is a crash course in villanelles, sestinas and other such fixed forms. But most ... are rare in English poetry. Few poets have written a villanelle worth reading, or indeed regret not having done so. — James Fenton

[Rhyme is] but the invention of a barbarous age, to set off wretched matter and lame Meter; ... Not without cause therefore some both Italian and Spanish poets of prime note have rejected rhyme, ... as have also long since our best English tragedies, as ... trivial and of no true musical delight; which [truly] consists only in apt numbers, fit quantity of syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another, not in the jingling sound of like endings, a fault avoided by the learned ancients both in poetry and all good oratory. — John Milton

Great Britain, for instance, is too big and too diverse to be home to a small-island civilization, but in modern times the English - though not, I think, other peoples of the island - have cultivated what might be called a small-island mentality: all their most tiresome history books stress, sometimes in their opening words, that their history is a function of their insularity. They still write and read histories with such titles as Our Island Story and The Offshore Islanders.4The conviction that their island "arose from the azure main" and is like a gem "set in the silver sea" resounds in national songs and scraps of verse which they hear repeatedly. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the English invested heavily in naval security. They created the cult of the "English eccentric" - which is a way of idealizing the outcome of isolation. They have projected an image as "a singular race, one which prides itself on being a little mad. — Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

We stayed mute and disloyal
because we were afraid

I would have touched my fingers
to where your breasts had been
but we never did such things — Adrienne Rich

The iambic pentameter owes its pre-eminence in English poetry to its genius for variation. Good blank verse does not sound like a series of identically measured lines. It sounds like a series of subtle variations on the same theme. — James Fenton

I thinke it not amisse to forewarne you that you thrust as few wordes of many sillables into your verse as may be: and hereunto I might alledge many reasons: first the most auncient English wordes are of one sillable, so that the more monasyllables that you use, the truer Englishman you shall seeme, and the lesse you shall smell of the Inkehorne. — George Gascoigne

Vitamin C is the world's best natural antibiotic, antiviral, antitoxin and antihistamine. This book's recurring emphasis on vitamin C might suggest that I am offering a song with only one verse. Not so. As English literature concentrates on Shakespeare, so orthomolecular (megavitamin) therapy concentrates on vitamin C. Let the greats be given their due. The importance of vitamin C cannot be overemphasised. — Andrew W. Saul

The introductory statement for Paul's famous paragraph on marriage in Ephesians is verse 21: "Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ."1 In English, this is usually rendered as a separate sentence, but that hides from readers an important point that Paul is making. In the Greek text, verse 21 is the last clause in the long previous sentence in which Paul describes several marks of a person who is "filled with the Spirit." The last mark of Spirit fullness is in this last clause: It is a loss of pride and self-will that leads a person to humbly serve others. From this Spirit-empowered submission of verse 21, Paul moves to the duties of wives and husbands. — Timothy J. Keller

The iambic line, with its characteristic forward movement from short to long, or light to heavy, or unstressed to stressed, is the quintessential measure of English verse. — James Fenton

Campaign Against Akhmatova Begins (1922)

She ran from lamppost to lamppost, the wind slammed.
Trotsky reviewed her in Pravda: One reads with dismay...
and an unofficial Communist Party resolution banned her poetry (1925).
She didn't notice, didn't know what a Communist Party was in those days.
Fog choked the city.
Russia's great poets were all about 35 years ol
Scraggly trees wandered by the canal in dim sun. — Anne Carson

how can I reconcile this passion
with our modesty

your calvinist heritage
my girlhood frozen into forms

how can I go on this mission
without you

you, who might have told me
everything you feel is true? — Adrienne Rich

After that I didn't listen to music as much because '70s music just wasn't ... I remember all the songs, but it wasn't because I was into them, you know what I mean? — Tom Araya

He was a noisy robust little man with a gleam of real talent concealed in the messy obscurity of his verse. But because he did his best to shock people with his monstrous mass of otiose words (he was the inventor of the "submental grunt" as he called it), his main output seems now so nugatory, so false, so old-fashioned (super-modern things have a queer knack of dating much faster than others) that his true value is only remembered by a few scholars who admire the magnificent translations of English poems made by him at the very outset of his literary career, - — Vladimir Nabokov

At Camp Don Bosco, there were Bibles all over the place, mostly 1970s hippie versions like Good News for Modern Man. They had groovy titles like The Word or The Way, and translated the Bible into "contemporary English," which meant Saul yelling at Jonathan, "You son of a bitch!" (I Samuel 20:30). Awesome! The King James version gave this verse as "Thou son of the perverse rebellious woman," which was bogus in comparison. Maybe these translations went a bit far. I recall one of the Bibles translating the inscription over the cross, "INRI" (Iesus Nazaremus Rex Iudaeorum), as "SSDD" (Same Shit Different Day), and another describing the Last Supper - the night before Jesus' death, a death he freely accepted - where Jesus breaks the bread, gives it to his disciples, and says, "It's better to burn out than fade away," but these memories could be deceptive. — Rob Sheffield

We can't own ideas; they can only own us. — Marty Rubin

I never reflect or convey that which I have not experienced myself. — Abbas Kiarostami

THE greatest of English dramatists except Shakespeare, the first literary dictator and poet-laureate, a writer of verse, prose, satire, and criticism who most potently of all the men of his time affected the subsequent course of English letters: such was Ben Jonson, and as such his strong personality assumes an interest to us almost unparalleled, at least in his age. Ben Jonson came of the stock that was centuries after to give to the world Thomas Carlyle; for Jonson's grandfather was of Annandale, over the Solway, whence he — Ben Jonson

BLANK-VERSE, n. Unrhymed iambic pentameters - the most difficult kind of English verse to write acceptably; a kind, therefore, much affected by those who cannot acceptably write any kind. — Ambrose Bierce

The fifth force was the magic of Time, the greatest of all the magics. — Michael Scott

The glorious Dryden, refiner and purifier of English verse, did less for rhyme than he did for metre. — H.P. Lovecraft

Ray please I never lied to her. When need arose I may have used words that lied. — Anne Carson

We did meet forty years ago. At that time we were both influenced by Whitman and I said, jokingly in part, 'I don't think anything can be done in Spanish, do you?' Neruda agreed, but we decided it was too late for us to write our verse in English. We'd have to make the best of a second-rate literature. — Jorge Luis Borges

What is a Lamb of God? People use this phrase.
I don't know.
I watch my sister, fingers straying absently about her mustache,
no help there. — Anne Carson

You know, he said, with an effort, 'if one person loves, the other does.'
... 'I hope so, because if it were not, love might be a very terrible thing,' she said.
'Yes, but it is - at least with most people,' he answered. — D.H. Lawrence

The typical lawmaker of today is a man wholly devoid of principle - a mere counter in a grotesque and knavish game. If the right pressure could be applied to him, he would be cheerfully in favor of polygamy, astrology or cannibalism. — H.L. Mencken

Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must of its nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:
I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
Here it is in modern English:
Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account. — George Orwell

Nighthawks

I wanted to run away with you tonight
but you are a difficult woman
the rules of you -

Past and future circle round us
now we know more now less
in the institute of shadows.

On a street black as widows
with nothing to confess
our distances found us

the rules of you -
so difficult a woman
I wanted to run away with you tonight. — Anne Carson

Young men keep telling me they don't 'have it all' either. And they may have a point. But if you define 'having it all' as the opportunity to have a successful career and a family, I'd say this. When a man tells his coworkers he's going to have a child, no one asks him how he'll manage or if he'll be coming back to work. — Anne-Marie Slaughter

and they still control the world, and you are not in my arms. — Adrienne Rich