Quotes & Sayings About Odes

This universe an old enchantment guards; Its objects are carved cups of World-Delight Whose charmed wine is some deep soul's rapture-drink: The All-Wonderful has packed heaven with his dreams, He has made blank ancient Space his marvel-house; He spilled his spirit into Matter's signs: His fires of grandeur burn in the great sun, He glides through heaven shimmering in the moon; He is beauty carolling in the fields of sound; He chants the stanzas of the odes of Wind; He is silence watching in the stars at night; He wakes at dawn and calls from every bough, Lies stunned in the stone and dreams in flower and tree. — Sri Aurobindo

Keats's odes are among my favorite poems ever. As are Neruda's. So yes, I think my poems are odes, though I really just see those titles as ways of more or less orienting the poem. I've never thought about this until now, but I guess you could say that one effect of all the titles, their pervasiveness in the book, might be to once again, as so many other things do, put into question the meaning of the word "for," which I suppose is one of the great human questions: what is all this for? Why, and for whom, are we doing whatever we are doing? — Matthew Zapruder

This poem will never reach its destination. On Rousseau's Ode To Posterity — Voltaire

I was a young, & had deep loves, & my heart would overflow with enthusiasm! And I mingled with the crowd, I mixed with my fellow men, speaking my thought out loud! And they gaped back at me, without understanding. And I withdrew from them, & they said to me: Arrogant one! And from time to time in my solitude, my loves, my repressed enthusiasms broke out into odes, conversation; & my companions laughed and used to point at me as a madman. So I suffered, doubted, cursed, & no one believed me sincere. It's as if this heart, once so full of strength & love were annihilated. — Comte De Lautreamont

If you would seek to find yourself
look not in the mirror
for there is but a shadow there'
A stranger ...
SILENIUS, ODES TO TRUTH — Sidney Sheldon

Keisha, my love," I said in my fey-est, gayest drawl, "your bum doesn't just look big, it is big. No, I take that back. It's enormous. Planets feel inferior beside it . Lesser bums are drawn into orbit around it. Last time it went dark, everyone said, Oh, is it an eclipse? And I told them, 'No, it's Keisha's bum blotting out the sun.' I could compose odes to the size of your bum."

Jude answering Keisha's question "Does my bum look big in this?"

Merrow, JL (2013-04-09). Slam! (Kindle Locations 35-38). — J.L. Merrow

What Exile from himself can flee?[a] To zones though more and more remote, Still, still pursues, where'er I be, The blight of Life - the Demon Thought.[b] [a] [Compare Horace, Odes, II. xvi. 19, 20. [b] Compare Prior's Solomon, bk. iii. lines 85, 86: 'In the remotest wood and lonely grot Certain to meet that worst of evils - thought.' — George Gordon Byron

A poem with grandly conceived and executed stanzas, such as one of Keats's odes, should be like an enfilade of rooms in a palace: one proceeds, with eager anticipation, from room to room. — James Fenton

These shirts are perfectly serviceable."
I rolled my eyes. "Serviceable? Anyan, I get it that you're utilitarian. If we were in the old country you'd write odes to factories. You'd sing the praises of the communal farm while you gnawed on a perfectly 'serviceable' radish. But this is the new millennium. In America. Buy a button-up. — Nicole Peeler

Sometimes, even those whom we consider as our close friends may betray us so easily, in a moment when we do not even expect it. Such is the truth of life, despite so many eloquent odes humanity dedicated to friendship. — Sahara Sanders

Nature gets credit which should in truth be reserved for ourselves: the rose for its scent, the nightingale for its song; and the sun for its radiance. The poets are entirely mistaken. They should address their lyrics to themselves and should turn them into odes of self congratulation on the excellence of the human mind. — Alfred North Whitehead

Of what is lost, irretrievably lost, all I wish to recover is the daily availability of my writing, lines capable of grasping me by the hair and lifting me up when I'm at the end of my strength. (Significant, said the foreigner.) Odes to the human and the divine. Let my writing be like the verses of by Leopardi that Daniel Biga recited on a Nordic bridge to gird himself with courage. — Roberto Bolano

An aged Burgundy runs with a beardless Port. I cherish the fancy that Port speaks sentences of wisdom, Burgundy sings the inspired Ode. — Ambrose Bierce

Odes were the compositions in which he took most delight, and it was long before he liked his Epistles and Satires. He told me what he read solidly at Oxford was Greek; not the Grecian historians, but Homer and Euripides, and now and then a little Epigram; that the study of which he was the most fond was Metaphysicks, but he had not read much, even in that way. — Samuel Johnson

Stop staring at my dick," he growled.
Oh, yes it was definitely an illusion. "Barrons loved me staring at his dick,"I informed it. "he would have been happy if I'd stared at his dick all day long, composing odes to its perfection. — Karen Marie Moning

Ah!' said Michel, tempted, 'you have modern poems?'
'Of course. For instance, Martillac's 'Electric Harmonies,' which won a prize last year from the Academic of Sciences, and Monsieur de Pulfasse's 'Meditations on Oxygen;' and we have the 'Poetic Parallelogram,' and even the 'Decarbonated Odes ... '
Michel couldn't bear hearing another word and found himself outside again, stupefied and overcome. Not even this tiny amount of art had escaped the pernicious influence of the age! Science, Chemistry, Mechanics had invaded the realm of poetry! 'And such things are read,' he murmured as he hurried through the streets, ' perhaps even bought! And signed by the authors and placed on the shelves marked 'Literature.' But not one copy of Balzac, not one work by Victor Hugo! Where can I find such things-where, if not the Library ... — Jules Verne

Horace's best ode would not please a young woman as much as the mediocre verses of the young man she is in love with. — Michael Moore

The key to faking deaths is a fine appreciation of arterial spray patterns. I have found that blood bags work very well at simulating spray with a strategically poked hole; apply pressure to the bottom of the bag, practice a bit, and before long you will be able to write stories of carnage and odes to gore.
A small fan brush-the sort that one dude used to paint happy little trees-can paint a picture of blunt force spatters if you flick the surface properly. You could even talk to yourself, as that painter did, while you flick blood around: And maybe over here we have a nice stab wound. And, I don't know, maybe there's a few more back over here. Multiple stab wounds. It doesn't matter, whatever you feel like. — Kevin Hearne

So let there be prose.
There must be a divine prose for the Prophet to triumph — Mahmoud Darwish

To be a woman and a writer is double mischief, for the world will slight her who slights "the servile house," and who would rather make odes than beds. — Dilys Laing

Keatsian odes or reflective elegies which had formed the backbone of his early work ('At Grass', 'Church Going', 'An Arundel Tomb', 'The Whitsun Weddings', 'Here', 'Dockery and Son'). Now he resumed the sequence, and over the next six years would complete four more, all focused directly or indirectly on the theme of death: 'The Building', 'The Old Fools', 'Show Saturday' and finally 'Aubade'. — James Booth

My books are elegiac in the sense that they're odes to a nation that even I sometimes think may not exist anymore except in my memory and my imagination. — Richard Russo

Shoes would interfere with her conversation, for she constantly addresses the ground under her feet. Asking forgiveness. Owning, disowning, recanting, recharting a hateful course of events to make sense of her complicity. We all are, I suppose. Trying to invent our version of the story. All human odes are essentially one, My life; what I stole from history, and how I live with it. — Barbara Kingsolver

All human odes are essentially one. "My life: what I stole from history, and how I live with it." Personally — Barbara Kingsolver

Non omnis moriar, said Horace's Odes - I shall not wholly die. Yes, and he was right. As long as people remembered, then death was not complete. Only if there were nobody at all left to remember would death be complete. — Alexander McCall Smith

Poetry, even that of the loftiest, and seemingly, that of the wildest odes, [has] a logic of its own as severe as that of science; and more difficult, because more subtle, more complex, and dependent on more and more fugitive causes. In the truly great poets ... there is a reason assignable, not only for every word, but for the position of every word. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Carpe diem."

(Odes: I.11) — Horace

Voltaire was also there, fleeing a royal arrest warrant, and working as a kind of one-man eighteenth-century USO show during the siege, offering bons mots and brandy between bouts of battle and composing odes to the military men. The — Tom Reiss

A good poem is a tautology. It expands one word by adding a number which clarify it, thus making a new word which has never before been spoken. The seedword is always so ordinary that hardly anyone perceives it. Classical odes grow from and or because, romantic lyrics from but and if. Immature verses expand a personal pronoun ad nauseam, the greatest works bring glory to a common verb. Good poems, therefore, are always close to banality, over which, however, they tower like precipices. — Alasdair Gray

I'll turn into a god of pain and disease and build an altar to you from the bones of your murderer. Their suffering will be my first odes, and they will not end until I feel satisfied that even dead, resting wherever you are resting, you can hear the pain of the idiot that thought your death would go unavenged. — Ayize Jama-Everett

Had I but written as many odes in praise of Muhammad and Ali as I have composed for King Mahmud, they would have showered a hundred blessings on me. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

We live in a disconcerting world. Trying to comprehend what we see around us, we ask ourselves: what is the universe made of? and what is our place in it? where odes the universe come from? and where do we come from? — Rafael Abalos

A classic lecture, rich in sentiment, With scraps of thundrous Epic lilted out By violet-hooded Doctors, elegies And quoted odes, and jewels five-words-long, That on the stretched forefinger of all Time Sparkle for ever. — Alfred Lord Tennyson

The pleasures of love proceed successively from a distich to a quatrain, from a quatrain to a sonnet, from a sonnet to a ballad, from a ballad to an ode, from an ode to a cantata, and from a cantata to a dithyramb. A husband who begins with the dithyramb is a fool. — Honore De Balzac

He'll never compose whole odes to my beauty and grace. He'll never show up with a boom box to reenact Say Anything outside my window. He'll never drive over at three a.m. because I'm sick and can't sleep and just want to feel his arms around me. — Abby McDonald

Some pious souls are troubled because they cannot at all times, or often, use, in its joyous import, the language of this Psalm. Such should remember that David, though he lived long, never wrote but one twenty-third Psalm. Some of his odes do indeed express as lively a faith as this, and faith can walk in darkness. But where else do we find a whole Psalm expressive of personal confidence, joy, and triumph, from beginning to end? God's people have their seasons of darkness and their times of rejoicing. — William Swan Plumer

Moderation He that holds fast the golden mean, And lives contentedly between The little and the great, Feels not the wants that pinch the poor, Nor plagues that haunt the rich man's door Embittering all his state Horace, from Odes, Book II, translated by William Cowper — Daisy Goodwin

And how about the "Daily Odes to the Benefactor"? Who can read them without bowing his head reverently before the selfless labor of this Number of Numbers? Or the terrible blood-red beauty of the "Flowers of Judicial Verdicts"? Or the immortal tragedy, "Lat for Work"? Or the bedside book of "Stanzas on Sexual Hygiene"? — Yevgeny Zamyatin

Yet, she said to herself, from the dawn of time odes have been sung to love; wreaths heaped and roses; and if you asked nine people out of ten they would say they wanted nothing but this
love; while the women, judging from her own experience, would all the time be feeling, This is not what we want; there is nothing more tedious, puerile, and inhumane than this; yet it is also beautiful and necessary. — Virginia Woolf