Louise Bogan Quotes

This was Shakespeare's form; who walked in every path of human life, felt every passion; and to all mankind doth now, will ever, that experience yield which his own genius only could acquire.

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

For in the works of Robert Burns we see the whole cosmos of man's experience and emotion, from zenith to nadir, from birth until death.

Because death and illness are the most horrible things in life, of course that's where the most absurdly funny things are going to happen.

Disease, insanity, and death were the angels that attended my cradle, and since then have followed me throughout my life.

A man does not die of love or his liver or even of old age; he dies of being a man.

You're trying to write about something that's sacred. You're trying to bring the seriousness of life and death to it, and you're trying to find a way to dramatize it, and you're trying to give language to it, which is inadequate. But it's important to try.

All my life I've been taught how to die, but no one ever taught me how to grow old.

Any art worthy of its name should address 'life', 'man', 'nature', 'death' and 'tragedy'.

The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.

We all die, we all get sick, we all feel hunger and lust and pain, and therefore human life is consistent from one generation to the other. We all - most of us, anyway - want connections with other people and spend our lives looking for them.

Human life moves only in one direction - toward disease, damage, and death. The best you can hope for is to remain stagnant or, in certain cases, return to a previous condition when things weren't as bad as they've become for you.

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

It is the province of poetry to be more realistic and present than the artificial narratives of an outer discourse, and not afraid of the truthful difficulty of the average human life.

I hadn't published a book of poetry in over a decade because I've been very ill. As I got better and started to write, I said, 'Wow, even as an old woman, I could have a selected book of poems.'

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.

Both sex and death are eternal themes. You could make thousands of movies on this theme, and whether you have a human being who is painting, singing, making a film, writing, these are the themes that you will come back to and return to. If you don't have any of these artistic expressions, sex is one of the only gifts that nature gave you for free, so it is very important to celebrate it. And then, with death, we are condemned to that. This is absolutely present in our lives.

Nobody wants to get old, but nobody wants to die young either.

There are only two things to write about: life and death.

Poetry will exist as long as there is a problem of life and death

Death means that a form of life dissolves or that the imminent possibility of dissolution exists, whether through our own death or through illness or old age.

love make us poets, and the approach of death should make us philosophers.

Writing does not resurrect. It buries.

Literature can teach us how to live before we live, and how to die before we die. I believe that writing is practice for death, and for every (other) transformation human beings encounter.