Patricia MacLachlan Quotes

What raises great poetry above all else--it is the entire person and also the entire world.

Even the greatest poets can't express tragedy in a way that is larger than their immediate circumstances.

We all need poetry. The moments in our lives that are characterized by language that has to do with necessity or the market, or just, you know, things that take us away from the big questions that we have, those are the things that I think urge us to think about what a poem can offer.

Rather than numbing or drowning out the difficult-to-describe but urgently sensed feelings that are part of being human, poetry invites us to tease them out, to draw them into language that is rooted in intricate thought and strange impulse.

Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed. Having once experienced the mystery, plenitude, contradiction, and composure of a work of art, we afterward have a built-in resistance to the slogans and propaganda of oversimplification that have often contributed to the destruction of human life. Poetry is a verbal means to a nonverbal source. It is a motion to no-motion, to the still point of contemplation and deep realization.

Poetry reminds us of the truths about life and human nature that we knew all along, but forgot somehow because they weren't yet in memorable language.

A lot of poems seem, in some sense, to pull the outside world into the interior. They aren't perhaps emotion recollected in tranquillity but perception recollected in interiority.

Poetry contains almost all you need to know about life.

Poetry never loses its appeal. Sometimes its audience wanes and sometimes it swells like a wave. But the essential mystery of being human is always going to engage and compel us. We're involved in a mystery. Poetry uses words to put us in touch with that mystery. We're always going to need it.

For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion.

Poetry is the statement of a relation between a man and the world

I wanted to write the most beautiful poem but that is impossible; the world has written its own.

The finest poetry was first experience.

I have always thought of poetry as an act of celebration. Just by nature of writing a poem you are taking the time to dwell on whatever it is that you're writing about...you can be celebrating anger, you can be celebrating sorrow... you are spending the time to focus and observe and try to understand the various parts of being human.

Maybe all pain in the world requires poetry.

All emotions are the ore from which poetry may be sifted.

The inmost spirit of poetry, in other words, is at bottom, in every recorded case, the voice of pain – and the physical body, so to speak, of poetry, is the treatment by which the poet tries to reconcile that pain with the world.

Art comes from joy and pain...But mostly from pain.

Music contains a whole gamut of experience, from sensuous elements to ultimate intellectual harmonies.

[Personal life] doesn't affect my creative process. It just gives me more subjects to talk about. Basically whatever you put in your music is how you want people to view you.

You cannot define electricity. The same can be said of art. It is a kind of inner current in a human being, or something which needs no definition.

Poetry is enthusiasm with wings of fire; it is the angel of high thoughts, that inspires us with the power of sacrifice.

Music is the reaching out towards the utmost realities by means of ordered sound.

We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race.