Recitation Quotes

One of the disadvantages of poetry over popular music is that if you write a pop song, it naturally gets into people's heads as they listen in the car. You don't have to memorize a Paul Simon song; it's just in your head, and you can sing along. With a poem, you have to will yourself to memorize it.

The first time I got onstage was when I was about 5 years old. It was at a church social, and I had a poem to recite.

The relation of repetitions for learning and for repeating English stanzas needs no amplification. These were learned by heart on the first day with less than half of the repetitions necessary for the shortest of the syllable series.

Twice and thrice over, as they say, good is it to repeat and review what is good.

It is of no use to commit whole pages to memory, merely to recite them once without hesitation; you must think of the meaning more than the words - of the ideas more than the language.

The Rosary is my favorite prayer. A prayer so simple and so rich; from deepest heart, I exhort all to recite it.

I'm terrified of learning lines, and I've always been terrified that I won't learn them.

My mother's father taught English literature. When I was about ten or eleven, I could recite Macaulay's 'Lays of Ancient Rome.' While other kids were playing pedestrian war games, I'd be Horatius keeping the bridge.

Teachers and parents who incline toward the authoritarian attitude are scornful of “frills.” They consider lecturing, memorization, recitation, and grading to be the basics, as they remember them from their own school days. They believe in withholding promotion form children who have not satisfactorily completed the year’s work in all subjects, despite the evidence that when children are made to repeat a grade, they do not do as well in the following years as similar children who were promoted. To authoritarians, education is not a means to help each child to mature but a series of hurdles over which everyone, of no matter what capability, must jump. A policy of withholding promotion means ignoring the fundamental and complex question of why the children failed and what needs to be done to correct that problem.

I think it's fun playing a part that lots of other people have played, in a way.

When people say, "I've told you fifty times," They mean to scold, and very often do; When poets say, "I've written fifty rhymes," They make you dread that they'll recite them too; In gangs of fifty, thieves commit their crimes; At fifty love for love is rare, 't is true, but then, no doubt, it equally as true is, a good deal may be bought for fifty Louis.

I think many poets, including myself, write both for the voice and for the page. I certainly write for the person alone in the library, who pulls down a book and it opens to a poem. I am also very conscious of what it means to read these poems aloud.

I grew up in the church and began to recite set pieces at the age of four and five, like many of the other kids.

One of my earliest memories... I knew three full verses of the Star Spangled Banner when I was seven or eight years old. And one of the nuns discovered this phenomenon and I was actually sent around from classroom to classroom to do the whole thing.

There is a time for reciting poems and a time for fists.

Memorizing lines isn't really hard. Only with really hard words and stuff.

Verse is a set of specially related sounds, repeated aloud.

I can say the Lord's prayer in 10 seconds.

Literature, the study of literature in English in the 19th century, did not belong to literary studies, which had to do with Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, but instead with elocution and public speaking. So when people read literature, it was to memorize and to recite it.

I think the actor has two responsibilities. One is to be visually compelling, and the other to recite the lines as written by the writers.

I've got an awful memory, and I can't read or write, but you can read me a script once or twice, and I've got it.

They're not your words, but you're reciting the lines.

There are many reasons our prayers may lack power. Sometimes they become routine. Our prayers become hollow when we say similar words in similar ways over and over so often that the words become more of a recitation than a communication.

'Who's been repeating all that hard stuff to you?' 'I read it in a book,' said Alice. 'But I had some poetry repeated to me, much easier than that, by - Tweedledee, I think it was.' 'As to poetry, you know,' said Humpty Dumpty, stretching out one of his great hands, 'I can repeat poetry as well as other folk, if it comes to that - ' 'Oh, it needn't come to that!' Alice hastily said, hoping to keep him from beginning.

It's difficult to learn poems off by heart that don't rhyme.