Emily Dickinson Quotes

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.

Don't you just love poetry that gives you a crinkly feeling up and down your back?

It is music that causes the heart to broaden and the listener to grow cold with ecstasy and fright.

She was not filled up with the sight of him, the way she had seen her sisters fill up, like silk balloons, like wineskins. Instead, he seemed to land heavily within her, like a black stone falling.

When I read Andrew Motion's biography, I wept. It's something about the purity of the story and how fresh it was because of the love letters Keats wrote.

I think that the cinema is a physical thing. What I'm looking for is creating a physical shock with the audience. I don't care of the meaning. I don't care of the idea. I don't want to say something. I want to make a 'shock physique.'

I like when my face tingles, when the hair on the back of my neck stands up.

Your hand is cold, mine burns like fire. How blind you are, Nastenka!

The poet, therefore, is truly the thief of fire. He is responsible for humanity, for animals even; he will have to make sure his visions can be smelled, fondled, listened to; if what he brings back from beyond has form, he gives it form; if it has none, he gives it none. A language must be found…of the soul, for the soul and will include everything: perfumes, sounds colors, thought grappling with thought

I want to see the thirst inside the syllables I want to touch the fire in the sound: I want to feel the darkness of the cry. I want words as rough as virgin rocks.” - Verb.

Whereas story is processed in the mind in a straightforward manner, poetry bypasses rational thought and goes straight to the limbic system and lights it up like a brushfire. It's the crack cocaine of the literary world.

The success of the poem is determined not by how much the poet felt in writing it, but by how much the reader feels in reading it.

I close my eyes and it's so real and all at once I know just what I feel - And baby it's the kind of rush that terrifies.

The other day, when my 4-year-old saw a flowering tree and said, "Daddy, it's raining petals," that was poetry that just melted my heart into a mushy, yummy Fudgsicle.

As a reader I feel included a lot in Julie Carr’s hard and beautiful book. I can pretty much hear its author speak—a whispering that enables us into its world . . . a masterfully sutured journey, painfully useful. Sarah—Of Fragments and Lines is a book I know I will return to. And urge it on my friends who have lives too and write in them.

I endeavor to make a picture, for instance, exert a positive influence on the observer by its coloring, mood, and compositional idea, encouraging, say, activation, tranquilization, concentration, or harmony.

Many readers judge of the power of a book by the shock it gives their feelings.

I sense a scream passing through nature. I painted ... the clouds as actual blood. The colour shrieked.

Sublime is something you choke on after a shot of tequila.

A book is meant not only to be read, but to haunt you, to importune you like a lover or a parent, to be in your teeth like a piece of gristle.

A wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle.

The poet should try to give his poem the quiet swiftness of flame, so that the reader will feel and not think while he is reading. But the thinking will come afterwards.

Turn the goddam music up! My heart feels like an alligator!

Something clenched in my chest, and for a moment, the whole world narrowed down to the green of his eyes.