Virginia Woolf Quotes

There's something immediate about the experience of reading a poem. It makes sense in my own mind, but I'm trying to figure out a way to articulate it... It's like looking at a painting: you're able to take in the totality of the work all at once, and so processing whatever information that painting is giving you is almost secondary to simply apprehending what's in front of you.

All great art ... creates in the beholder not self-satisfacti on but wonder and awe. Its great liberation is to lift us out of ourselves.

As a consumer, I don't create art, but I think whatever the message is, art has to touch you.

In music, you can use metaphors with ease - if a person doesn't understand the parable, they can still enjoy the melody of the music. If, however, a person reads a book and misses the meaning of its metaphors, this will be extremely disheartening for both the reader as well as the author.

Listening to music and lyrics and watching movies, I think, uses a lot of the same muscles we use in reading and experiencing poetry - and yet we somehow forget that we have those when it comes to sitting down with a book of poems.

Art is an infinitely precious good, a draught both refreshing and cheering which restores the stomach and the mind to the natural equilibrium of the ideal.

Nothing is as uplifting as standing before a great painting whether it was painted in 1505 or last Tuesday.

Poetry can open locked chambers of possibiity, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.

Poetry is no more a narcotic than a stimulant; it is a universal bittersweet mixture for all possible household emergencies and its action varies accordingly as it is taken in a wineglass or a tablespoon, inhaled, gargled or rubbed on the chest by hard fingers covered with rings.

That's the real power of art, I think. Not to chide but to provoke challenge. Otherwise why bother?

A good poem is like a bouillon cube. It's concentrated and it nourishes you when you need it.

When, after having read a work, loftier thoughts arise in your mind and noble and heartfelt feelings animate you, do not look for any other rule to judge it by; it is fine and written in a masterly manner.

Poetry is a section of river-fog and moving boat-lights, delivered between bridges and whistles, so one says, 'Oh!' and another, 'How?'

Art can excite, titillate, please, entertain, and sometimes shock; but its ultimate function is to ennoble.

The nourishment of Cezanne's awkward apples is in the tenderness and alertness they awaken inside us.

If I go to the National Gallery and I look at one of the great paintings that excite me there, it's not so much the painting that excites me as that the painting unlocks all kinds of valves of sensation within me which return me to life more violently.

Poetry is another space, like love, where we extend that extra credit to the writer.

Poetry, with all its obscurity, has a more general as well as a more powerful dominion over the passions than the art of painting.

Poetry is a sleep-maker for that which sits up late in us listening for the footfall of the future on to-day's doorstep.

There is no piece of music that could relate to anything else but itself and its world. It is truly an independent. The one thing coplanar with music is the compositional aspect, the fact that you are composing something. Architecture is essentially a score, and what happens with it depends on the people who play it, enjoy it, use it, or hate it.

Quite often, lyrics get misunderstood - and I never mind that. I guess what all artists want is for their work to touch someone or for it to bethought provoking.

A novel is like a bow, and the violin that produces the sound is the reader's soul.

Where does beauty begin? Where does it end? Where it ends is where the artist begins.

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

Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be 'the expression of the imagination': and poetry is connate with the origin of man.