Louise Bogan Quotes

The Initial Mystery that attends any journey is: how did the traveler reach his starting point in the first place?

I cannot believe that the inscrutable universe turns on an axis of suffering; surely the strange beauty of the world must somewhere rest on pure joy!

... politics are nothing but sand and gravel: it is art and life that feed us until we die. Everything else is ambition, hysteria or hatred.

...in a time lacking in truth and certainty and filled with anguish and despair, no woman should be shamefaced in attempting to give back to the world, through her work, a portion of its lost heart.

Perhaps this very instant is your time.

Stupidity always accompanies evil. Or evil, stupidity.

But childhood prolonged, cannot remain a fairyland. It becomes a hell.

A thousand kindnesses do not make up for a thousand blows.

But it's silly to suggest the writing of poetry is something ethereal, a sort of soul-crashing, devastating emotional experience that wrings you. I have no fancy ideas about poetry. ... It doesn't come to you on the wings of a dove. It's something you have to work hard at.

Poetry is often generations in advance of the thought of its time.

Innocence of heart and violence of feeling are necessary in any kind of superior achievement: The arts cannot exist without them.

It is through the acceptance of a variety of aethetic and intellectual points of view that a culture is given breadth and density.

I don't like quintessential certitude.

The terrible beast, that no one may understand, Came to my side, and put down his head in love.

I'll lie here and learn How, over their ground, Trees make a long shadow And a light sound.

I have lost faith in universal panaceas - work is the one thing in which I really believe.

Women have no wilderness in them They are provident instead Content in the tight hot cell of their hearts To eat dusty bread.

What we suffer, what we endure, what we muff, what we kill, what we miss, what we are guilty of, is done by us, as individuals, in private.

Your work is carved out of agony as a statue is carved out of marble.

The poem is always the last resort. In it the poet makes a world in little, and finds peace, even though, under complete focused emotion, the evocation be far more bitter than reality, or far more lovely.

... how much of our inner substance is it good for us to give to public griefs? The whole modern tendency to agonize over the suffering of the entire globe is surely something new.

Intellectuals range through the finest gradations of kind and quality: from those who are merely educated neurotics, usually with strong hidden reactionary tendencies, through mediocrities of all kinds, to men of real brains and sensibility, more or less stiffened into various respectabilities or substitutes for respectability. The number of Ignorant Specialists is large. The number of hysterics and compulsives is also large.

At midnight tears Run into your ears.

It is not possible, for a poet, writing in any language, to protect himself from the tragic elements in human life.... [ellipsis in source] Illness, old age, and death--subjects as ancient as humanity--these are the subjects that the poet must speak of very nearly from the first moment that he begins to speak.

Because language is the carrier of ideas, it is easy to believe that it should be very little else than such a carrier.