Victory Poems Quotes & Sayings

They are not burdened by any need to hide. They do not have to slink around in the shadows. They do not have to construct new lies to hide old ones. They need waste no effort covering tracks or maintaining disguises. And ultimately they find that the energy required for the self-discipline of honesty is far less than the energy required for secretiveness. The more honest one is, the easier it is to continue being honest, just as the more lies one has told, the more necessary it is to lie again. — M. Scott Peck

It is easier to endure than to change. But once one has changed, what was endured is hard to recall. — Susan Sontag

I clung tightly to Kwan's mane as he propelled his great serpent body through the cloud banks. The cockatrice's big green head dipped under the clouds, and I spotted an emerald island below, with dramatic peaks jutting up from the jungle. I asked the great cockatrice for the name of the isle, but he only laughed at me, saying that names changed faster than a century's wind. That didn't seem very fast to me, but I took his word for it. — Heather Heffner

Citizenship is an attitude, a state of mind, an emotional conviction that the whole is greater than the part ... and that the part should be humbly proud to sacrifice itself that the whole may live. — Robert A. Heinlein

He who is discouraged after a failure is not a real artist. — Auguste Rodin

Out of my entire annual output of songs, perhaps two, or at the most three, came as a result of inspiration. We can never rely on inspiration. When we most want it, it does not come. — George Gershwin

Humankind invented clocks to define eternity just as humankind invented religion to define God. — Suki Michelle

Nations should be governed by a council of learned men who must answer to the people for their actions. — Isabel Allende

Poems, even when narrative, do not resemble stories. All stories are about battles, of one kind or another, which end in victory or defeat. Everything moves towards the end, when the outcome will be known.
Poems, regardless of any outcome, cross the battlefields, tending the wounded, listening to the wild monologues of the triumphant or the fearful. They bring a kind of peace. Not by anaesthesia or easy reassurance, but by recognition and the promise that what has been experienced cannot disappear as if it had never been. Yet the promise is not of a monument. (Who, still on a battlefield, wants monuments?) The promise is that language has acknowledged, has given shelter, to the experience which demanded, which cried out. — John Berger

My heart cannot accept what my mind rejects. — Anonymous

What's so special about this team is that we all have the same mentality, this sort of, 'We've been knocked down, let's get back up' mentality. — Candace Parker

No sooner met but they looked; no sooner looked but they loved; no sooner loved but they sighed; no sooner sighed but they asked one another the reason; no sooner knew the reason but they sought the remedy; and in these degrees have they made a pair of stairs to marriage ... — William Shakespeare

I tried hard to imagine my poems or any poems as machines that could make things happen, changing the government, or the economy or even their language, the body or its sensorium, but I could not imagine this, could not even imagine imagining it. And yet when I imagined the total victory of those other things over poetry, when I imagined, with a sinking feeling, a world without even the terrible excuses for poems that kept faith with the virtual possibilities of the medium, without the sort of absurd ritual I'd participated in that evening then I intuited an inestimable loss, a loss not of artworks but of art, and therefore infinite, the total triumph of the actual, and I realized that, in such a world, I would swallow a bottle of white pills. — Ben Lerner

You can play a shoestring if you're sincere — John Coltrane