LOUISE BOGAN

No more pronouncements on lousy verse. No more hidden competition. No more struggling not to be a square.

Stupidity always accompanies evil. Or evil, stupidity.

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

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

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

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

The intellectual is a middle-class product; if he is not born into the class he must soon insert himself into it, in order to exist. He is the fine nervous flower of the bourgeoisie.

The measured blood beats out the year's delay.

O remember In your narrowing dark hours That more things move Than blood in the heart.

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.

True revolutions in art restore more than they destroy.

I don't like quintessential certitude.

Perhaps this very instant is your time.

The fact, and the intuition or logic about the fact, are severe coordinates in fiction. In the short story they must cross with hair-line precision.

Once form has been smashed, it has been smashed for good, and once a forbidden subject has been released, it has been released for good.

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

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.

Up from the bronze, I saw Water without a flaw Rush to its rest in air Reach to its rest, and fall.

... 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.

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.

The art of one period cannot be approached through the attitudes (emotional or intellectual) of another.