Metrical Quotes & Sayings

I try to write very fast. I don't revise very much. I write the poem in one sitting. Just let it rip. It's usually over in twenty to forty minutes. I'll go back and tinker with a word or two, change a line for some metrical reason weeks later, but I try to get the whole thing just done. — Billy Collins

Blessed be all metrical rules that forbid automatic responses, force us to have second thoughts, free us from the fetters of Self. — W. H. Auden

How was I going to make a man fly? How was I going to convince the public that an actor could fly? — Richard Donner

Emily Dickinson never developed. She remained loyal to her persona and to that same little metrical song that stood her in such good stead. She is a striking example of complexity within a simple package. Her rhymes are like bows on the package. — Billy Collins

I think the worst reaction that I could get from someone to my photos is some sort of mediocre, middle-range reaction where they really get nothing from it, and they want to move on to the next thing. [I'd rather they be] horrified, pissed off at me, extremely disgusted at how bad of an artist I am. — Alex Prager

the problem is then to develop a theory of invariance with respect to arbitrary linear transformations, in which, however, in contra-distinction to the case of affine geometry, we have a definite invariant quadratic form, viz. the metrical groundform once and for all as an absolute datum. — Hermann Weyl

1992 became known as the 'Year of the Woman' because so many of us were elected to public office that November, including a record six to the United States Senate. — Dee Dee Myers

If there has been one overriding change in poetic practice, it is that under the influence of free verse the poets have made a primary virtue out of exactitude and economy of meaning: this has replaced metrical skill as the first thing the poet tunes to. — Martin Langford

It is important that we discover an educational method where people learn to learn and go on learning their whole lives — Rudolf Steiner

I don't know what to say," Joel said. "I figure that if you are there, you'll be angry if I claim to believe when I don't. The truth is, I'm not sure I don't believe, either. You might be there. I hope you are, I guess. — Brandon Sanderson

If life is not always poetical, it is at least metrical. Periodicity rules over the mental experience of man, according to the path of the orbit of his thoughts. Distances are not gauged, ellipses not measured, velocities not ascertained, times not known. Nevertheless, the recurrence is sure. What the mind suffered last week, or last year, it does not suffer now; but it will suffer again next week or next year. — Alice Meynell

Metrical geometry is thus a part of descriptive geometry, and descriptive geometry is all geometry. — Arthur Cayley

In America, a metrical poem is likely to conjure up the idea of the sort of poet who wears ties and lunches at the faculty club. In Russia it suggests the moral force of an art practiced against the greatest personal odds, as a discipline, solitary and intense. — Joseph Brodsky

The next time you hear someone in a workshop remarking on how good a particular free-verse line or passage sounds, scan it. The odds are that it will fall into a regular metrical pattern. — Annie Finch

It seems that danger assigns to public voices the responsibility of a rhythm, as if in metrical units there is a coherence we can use to balance whatever senseless and furious event is about to come rushing around our heads. — Don DeLillo

If you ask ... the man in the street ... the human significance of mathematics, the answer of the world will be, that mathematics has given mankind a metrical and computatory art essential to the effective conduct of daily life, that mathematics admits of countless applications in engineering and the natural sciences, and finally that mathematics is a most excellent instrumentality for giving mental discipline ... [A mathematician will add] that mathematics is the exact science, the science of exact thought or of rigorous thinking. — Cassius Jackson Keyser

Whatever works, that's my philosophy. I don't care if it's magic beans or a prayer cloth dipped in the Jordan River. — Robert Ferrigno

I love to rock 'n roll. But my finest suit, of all the things I do, is as a songwriter. — Dan Fogelberg

Or he can work it out as a metrical and formal exercise, but he will be disappointed in its content. The New Year's prospect fairly chills his daunting breast. — John Crowe Ransom

There can be no space nor any part of space without gravitational potentials; for these confer upon space its metrical qualities, without which it cannot be imagined at all. The existence of the gravitational field is inseparably bound up with the existence of space. — Albert Einstein

My object to venture the suggestion that an important application of phonetics to metrical problems lies in the study of phonetic word-structure. — Adelaide Crapsey

There's never been anything like the so-called Vietnam Syndrome: it's mostly a fabrication. — Noam Chomsky

The cleavage between the scientific and the extra-scientific domain of experience is, I believe, not a cleavage between the concrete and the transcendental but between the metrical and the non-metrical. — Arthur Stanley Eddington

Lovers' reading of each other's bodies (of that concentrate of mind and body which lovers use to go to bed together) differs from the reading of written pages in that it is not linear. It starts at any point, skips, repeat itself, goes backward, insists, ramifies in simultaneous and divergent messages, converges again, has moments of irritation, turns the page, finds its place, gets lost. A direction can be recognized in it, a route to an end, since it tends toward a climax, and with this end in view it arranges rhythmic phases, metrical scansions, recurrence of motives. But is the climax really the end? Or is the race toward that end opposed by another drive which works in the opposite direction, swimming against moments, recovering time? — Italo Calvino

His only extravagance was soccer, though he called it football, of course, rooted for Tottenham. His mother, you see, was Jewish; she loved how Tottenham fought back against anti-Semitic slurs and called themselves the Yid Army. The Yiddos. For Leo, he said, it had also been the name, so meaty, so metrical. Tottenham Hotspur, its own tiny song. — Lauren Groff

The rhythmic pattern of the poem, which forces continuity of attention - incites a pleasurable compulsion to 'follow' - is either a tried metrical suasion-contrivance or a specially invented pattern of physical insistences, equally, if not more, binding in its effect on the reader. From a straight linguistic point of view, there is room for wonder if there is not latent vice in this environment in which pleasurable physically-compelled responses, produced by incidents of poetic utterance, are identified with the Good. — Laura Riding

Why should anyone be frightened by a hat? — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

Pageboy haircut, and I hadn't even bothered to, like, brush it. Furthermore, — John Green

It may be safely affirmed that there neither is, nor can be, any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition ... They both speak by and to the same organs; the bodies in which both of them are clothed may be said to be of the same substance, their affections are kindred, and almost identical, not necessarily differing even in degree; Poetry sheds no tears "such as Angels weep," but natural and human tears; she can boast of no celestial ichor that distinguishes her vital juices from those of prose; the same human blood circulates through the veins of them both. — William Wordsworth

More terrorists and extremists have been captured or killed in Pakistan than in any place in the world. — Thomas E. Donilon

Modernism in other arts brought extreme difficulty. In poetry, the characteristic difficulty imported under the name of modernism was obscurity. But obscurity could just as easily be a quality of metrical as of free verse. — James Fenton

In the conventional Christian narrative, Christianity is a radical rewriting of the covenant between God and Israel in which Christianity supplants Judaism as God's "light to the nations."4 Progressive churches tend to wriggle uncomfortably with the unavoidable implication that Christianity is an improvement on Judaism designed to replace the original, a sort of Judaism 2.0. Many of us know instinctively that something is wrong with this conclusion. How do we proclaim a bold gospel that doesn't disparage our spiritual parent, the tradition of Judaism? Brigitte — Elizabeth M. Edman

All through childhood, I wrote verses and mysteries. There is, for me, one connection: structure. My poetry is metrical, rhyming. — Sophie Hannah

To understand Vers libre, one must abandon all desire to find in it the even rhythm of metrical feet. One must allow the lines to flow as they will when read aloud by an intelligent reader. — Amy Lowell

Thinking is translating 'prosaic-ideas' without accessories" since ideas (in brain) do not follow any metrical composition. — Md. Ziaul Haque

Life would be stunted and narrow if we could feel no significance in the world around us beyond that which can be weighed and measured with the tools of the physicist or described by the metrical symbols of the mathematician. — Arthur Eddington

Here, then, is the real problem of our negligence. We fail in our duty to study God's Word not so much because it is difficult to understand, not so much because it is dull and boring, but because it is work. Our problem is not a lack of intelligence or a lack of passion. Our problem is that we are lazy. — R.C. Sproul

Compared to them I'm pretty used to losing. There are plenty of things in this world that are way beyond me, plenty of opponents I can never beat. Not to brag, but these girls probably don't know as much as I do about pain. And, quite naturally, there might not be a need for them to know it. These random thoughts come to me as I watch their proud ponytails swinging back and forth, their aggressive strides. Keeping to my own leisurely pace, I continue my run down along the Charles. — Haruki Murakami

So one of my core themes in The Myth of Male Power - that history's controlling force was not patriarchy, but survival - is still ignored. Instead, the leading universities' women's studies and "gender studies" courses still emanate from the Marxist and Civil Rights model of oppressor vs. oppressed. We'll see in this book exactly why the dichotomy of oppressor/oppressed is both inaccurate and, more important, undermines love and women's empowerment. In virtually every leading university this leads to a demonizing of men and masculinity that distorts the very essence of traditional masculinity - being socialized to be a hero by being willing to sacrifice oneself in war or in work. The possibility that being socialized to be disposable is not genuine power is, to this day, either considered radical, heretical, or, most frequently, not considered. — Warren Farrell

I began to write what I called 'rhythms' ie unrhymed pieces with no formal metrical scheme where the rhythm was created by a kind if inner chant..Later I was told I was writing 'free verse' or Vers libre. — Richard Aldington

Two possibilities present themselves for the analytical treatment of metrical geometry. — Hermann Weyl