Written In Verse Quotes & Sayings

I have a book of poetry I believe many should read but in each verse you'll discover it wasn't written for greed. — Stanley Victor Paskavich

For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word or a verse and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem. The men of more delicate ear write down these cadences more faithfully, and these transcripts, though imperfect, become the songs of the nations. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The whole creation of God preaches, as Jonathan Edwards — Nancy Pearcey

Now nothing can be more important than that the work of a soldier should be well done. — Plato

I never even considered writing a career option. I just liked the play of words. I was certainly interested in story, but the stories I was telling then were in narrative verse and prose poems, short and succinct, except for one novel-length poem written in narrative couplets. — Charles De Lint

Most victims of my autobiographical verse are either far too polite, remarkably understanding unaware that I have written poems about them. — John Barton

Success never goes on sale. Be willing to pay the market price. — Randy Gage

They have written volumes out of which a couplet of verse, a period in prose, may cling to the rock of ages, as a shell that survives a deluge. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

In the camp, this meant committing my verse-many thousands of lines-to memory. To help me with this I improvised decimal counting beads and, in transit prisons, broke up matchsticks and used the fragments as tallies. As I approached the end of my sentences I grew more confident of my powers of memory, and began writing down and memorizing prose-dialogue at first, but then, bit by bit, whole densely written passages. My memory found room for them! It worked. But more and more of my time-in the end as much as one week every month-went into the regular repetition of all I had memorized. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Verse is not written, it is bled; Out of the poet's abstract head. Words drip the poem on the page; Out of his grief, delight and rage. — Paul Engle

I hold too that whatever may be true of other countries, a bloody revolution will not succeed in India. — Mahatma Gandhi

Much verse fails of being poetry because it was not written exactly at the right crisis, though it may have been inconceivably near to it. It is only by a miracle that poetry is written at all. It is not recoverable thought, but a hue caught from a vaster receding thought. — Henry David Thoreau

Breath slipped from her. His was the face from her dreams. The most beautiful creature she had ever seen, yet he no longer looked angelic. He was terrifying. — Megan Shepherd

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

No verse can give pleasure for long, nor last, that is written by drinkers of water. — Horace

Originally, I didn't want to say too much about the art ... — Joel Houston

Now and then I am asked as to "what books a statesman should read," and my answer is, poetry and novels - including short stories under the head of novels. I don't mean that he should read only novels and modern poetry. If he cannot also enjoy the Hebrew prophets and the Greek dramatists, he should be sorry. He ought to read interesting books on history and government, and books of science and philosophy; and really good books on these subjects are as enthralling as any fiction ever written in prose or verse. — Theodore Roosevelt

Geneva has the sleepy tidiness of a man who combs his hair while yet in his pyjamas. — Lewis Mumford

You cannot learn what you are made of if you rely on anyone or anything else to help you. — Christopher Paolini

He robbed him of a great deal of his natural force, and so do all those who try to turn books written in verse into another language, for, with all the pains they take and all the cleverness they show, they never can reach the level of the originals as they were first produced. — Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

Sometimes you have to fight in order to be free. — Jared Leto

Sex is about where you can take me, not what you can do to me. — Esther Perel

A master of will can teach you how to use will. You watch them and observe them use that will, guided by wisdom, with a happy balance. — Frederick Lenz

The poet Robert Browning caused considerable consternation by including the word twat in one of his poems, thinking it an innocent term. The work was Pippa Passes, written in 1841 and now remembered for the line "God's in His heaven, all's right with the world." But it also contains this disconcerting passage:
Then owls and bats
Cowls and twats
Monks and nuns in a cloister's moods,
Adjourn to the oak-stump pantry!
Browning had apparently somewhere come across the word twat
which meant precisely the same then as it does now
but pronounced it with a flat a and somehow took it to mean a piece of headgear for nuns. The verse became a source of twittering amusement for generations of schoolboys and a perennial embarrassment to their elders, but the word was never altered and Browning was allowed to live out his life in wholesome ignorance because no one could think of a suitably delicate way of explaining his mistake to him. — Bill Bryson

But there is one cool thing
about having a weirdo mother.
She works so hard at remembering
where she left herself
she doesn't have time
to work on me. — Linda Vigen Phillips

We worked the medley on side two of "Abbey Road" out carefully in advance. All of those mini songs were partly completed tunes; some were written while we were in India a year before. So there was just a bit of chorus here and a verse there. We welded them all together into a routine. — George Harrison

Isn't it curious how one has only to open a book of verse to realise immediately that it was written by a very fine poet, or else that it was written by someone who is not a poet at all. In the case of the former, the lines, the images, though they are inherent in each other, leap up and give one this shock of delight. In the case of the latter, they lie flat on the page, never having lived. — Edith Sitwell

Reviewers have called my books 'novels in verse.' I think of them as written in prose, but I do use stanzas. Stanza means 'room' in Latin, and I wanted there to be 'room' - breathing opportunities to receive thoughts and have time to come out of them before starting again at the left margin. — Virginia Euwer Wolff

Everything that Traffic ever did, I'd give Steve a complete lyric, titled, written out with the verse, the bridge, the shape and rhyme and then Steve had to figure out how the meter of the words would fit musically. — Jim Capaldi

OF writing many books there is no end;
And I who have written much in prose and verse
For others' uses, will write now for mine,-
Will write my story for my better self,
As when you paint your portrait for a friend,
Who keeps it in a drawer and looks at it
Long after he has ceased to love you, just
To hold together what he was and is. — Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Years since. It was written in 1675, in the home-spun verse of that time and people, — Benjamin Franklin

Bryan pulled back and laid his forehead against Zahara's, his breath ragged and intense enough to set her on fire. "You'e making this difficult."
"Making what difficult?" Zahara huffed.
"Leaving you." Bryan closed his eyes and kissed her again. — Annabell Cadiz

I've written probably over 200 songs that have a verse and a chorus and that's it. — Hunter Parrish

When you read the history of the human family, it slowly comes to you that all the world's oceans once fell as tears. — Paul Lutus

Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content. — Alfred De Musset

But Jesus wanted the crowd to know, look, 'John's (the baptist) the one who got this whole thing started.' In verse ten He says, 'This is the one about whom it is written, 'I'll send my messenger ahead of you who will prepare Your way before You.' Jesus says, 'If it wasn't for John, I wouldn't even be here performing these miracles.' — Steven Furtick

I am a tale, I am a book, written in different languages and styles

I can't be read, can't be understood,
neither by me nor the greatest of minds

I am too big, I am too small, to be processed or seen by the naked eye

I am too dim, I am too bright, to appear in the shadows or the sunshine. — Sanober Khan

Captain Harvile: Poor Phoebe, she would not have forgotten him so soon. It was not in her nature.
Anne Elliot: It would not be in the nature of any woman who truly loved.
Captain Harvile: Do you claim that for your sex?
Anne Elliot: We do not forget you as soon as you forget us. We cannot help ourselves. We live at home, quiet, confined, and our feelings prey upon us. You always have business of some sort or other to take you back into the world.
Captain Harvile: I won't allow it to be any more man's nature than women's to be inconstant or to forget those they love or have loved. I believe the reverse. I believe ... Let me just observe that all histories are against you, all stories, prose, and verse. I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which did not have something to say on women's fickleness.
Anne Elliot: But they were all written by men. — Jane Austen

The first two books that I did by myself were long stories in verse. I knew I could do that because I'd written a lot in verse. But, verse stories are hard to sell, so my editor encouraged me to try writing in prose. — Natalie Babbitt

Starlight beats when heart twinkles
Youthful sky beyond cloudy wrinkles
Muse of glory to flame the night
Verse inscribed as written light — Munia Khan

I've written many extra verses to songs that I learned to sing - an extra verse about a friend, or just add some verse - and that led to writing my own songs. — Jackson Browne

The radical deficiency of imagist verse, as such, is in its lack of general ideas. Much of it might have been written by an infinitely sensitive decapitated frog. It is hemisphereless poetry. — Bliss Perry

(A novel is) a paper where your thesis is that these people are real, and you have to prove it. — Maggie Stiefvater