Amy Lowell Quotes

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

All books are either dreams or swords, you can cut, or you can drug, with words.

When you came, you were like red wine and honey, and the taste of you burnt my mouth with its sweetness.

Oh! To be a butterfly Still, upon a flower, Winking with its painted wings, Happy in the hour.

How loud clocks can tick when a room is empty, and one is alone!

Poetry, far more than fiction, reveals the soul of humanity.

Everything mortal has moments immortal

The stigma of oddness is the price a myopic world always exacts of genius.

Life is a stream On which we strew Petal by petal the flower of our heart.

Poetry is the most concentrated form of literature; it is the most emotionalized and powerful way in which thought can be presented.

Sexual love is the most stupendous fact of the universe, and the most magical mystery our poor blind senses know.

Poets are always the advance guard of literature; the advance guard of life. It is for this reason that their recognition comes so slowly.

I do not suppose that anyone not a poet can realize the agony of creating a poem. Every nerve, even every muscle, seems strained to the breaking point. The poem will not be denied; to refuse to write it would be a greater torture. It tears its way out of the brain, splintering and breaking its passage, and leaves that organ in the state of a jelly-fish when the task is done.

This is America, This vast, confused beauty, This staring, restless speed of loveliness, Mighty, overwhelming, crude, of all forms, Making grandeur out of profusion, Afraid of no incongruities, Sublime in its audacity, Bizarre breaker of moulds.

Don’t ask a writer what he’s working on. It’s like asking someone with cancer on the progress of his disease.

Art is like politics. Any theory carried too far ends in sterility, and freshness is only gained by following some other line.

Great emotion always tends to become rhythmic, and out of that tendency the forms of art have been evolved. Art becomes artificial only when the forms take precedence over the emotion.

I never deny poems when they come; whatever I am doing, whatever I am writing, I lay it aside and attend to the arriving poem.

Hate is ravening vulture beaks descending on a place of skulls.

Without poetry the soul and heart of man starves and dies.

Lilacs, False Blue, White, Purple, Colour of lilac, Your great puffs of flowers Are everywhere in this my New England ... Lilacs in dooryards Holding quiet conversation with an early moon; Lilacs watching a deserted house; ... Lilacs, wind-beaten, staggering under a lopsided shock of bloom, You are everywhere.

So with the stretch of the white road before me, Shining snow crystals rainbowed by the sun, Fields that are white, stained with long, cool, blue shadows, Strong with the strength of my horse as we run. Joy in the touch of the wind and the sunlight! Joy! With the vigorous earth I am one.

All recurring joy is pain refined.

Happiness, to some, is elation; to others it is mere stagnation.

I am tired, Beloved, of chafing my heart against the want of you; of squeezing it into little inkdrops, And posting it.