Amy Lowell Quotes

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

Let us be of cheer, remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never come.

Moon! Moon! I am prone before you. Pity me, and drench me in loneliness.

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

Youth condemns; maturity condones.

Happiness, to some, elation; Is, to others, mere stagnation.

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

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

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

You are ice and fire the touch of you burns my hands like snow.

My heart is tuned to sorrow, and the strings Vibrate most readily to minor chords, Searching and sad; my mind is stuffed with words Which voice the passion and the ache of things: Illusions beating with their baffled wings Against the walls of circumstance.

Now you are come! You tremble like a star Poised where, behind earth’s rim, the sun has set. Your voice has sung across my heart, but numb And mute, I have no tones to answer.

All recurring joy is pain refined.

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

Everything mortal has moments immortal

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

Time! Joyless emblem of the greed of millions, robber of the best which earth can give.

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

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.

For books are more than books, they are the life, the very heart and core of ages past, the reason why men worked and died, the essence and quintessence of their lives.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Moon! Moon! I am prone before you. Pity me,and drench me in loneliness.

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.

In science, read by preference the newest works. In literature, read the oldest. The classics are always modern.

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.

I am tired, beloved, of chafing my heart against the want of you; of squeezing it into little ink drops, and posting it. And I scald alone, here, under the fire of the great moon.

Take everything easy and quit dreaming and brooding and you will be well guarded from a thousand evils.

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