Quotation Saturday

POETRY

“All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.”
~ J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.”
~ Plato

“Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.”
~ Leonardo da Vinci

“Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.”
~ W.H. Auden, New Year Letter

ART

“A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.”
~ George Bernard Shaw

“A painter should begin every canvas with a wash of black, because all things in nature are dark except where exposed by the light.”
~ Leonardo da Vinci

“I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.”
~ Anaïs Nin

“It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is well done.”
~ Vincent van Gogh

“Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.”
~ Pablo Picasso

PASSION

“When someone loves you, the way they say your name is different. You know that your name is safe in their mouth.”
~ Jess C. Scott, The Intern

“As if you were on fire from within.
The moon lives in the lining of your skin.”
~ Pablo Neruda

“Passion has little to do with euphoria and everything to do with patience. It is not about feeling good. It is about endurance. Like patience, passion comes from the same Latin root: pati. It does not mean to flow with exuberance. It means to suffer.”
~ Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“There is scarcely any passion without struggle.”
~ Albert Camus

A WRITER

“You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander. We build this place with the sand of memories; these castles are our memories and inventiveness made tangible. So part of us believes that when the tide starts coming in, we won't really have lost anything, because actually only a symbol of it was there in the sand. Another part of us thinks we'll figure out a way to divert the ocean. This is what separates artists from ordinary people: the belief, deep in our hearts, that if we build our castles well enough, somehow the ocean won't wash them away. I think this is a wonderful kind of person to be.”
~ Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“He was a writer and words were his weapons.”
~ Christopher Moore, Bloodsucking Fiends

When you write about what you dream, you become a writer.

When you dream about what you write, you become haunted by a curse.”
~ A. Saleh, Poetry Eyes

“Literature always anticipates life. It doesn't copy it but moulds it to it's purpose.”
~ Oscar Wilde