Verse Quotations

Statues and pictures and verse may be grand, But they are not the Life for which they stand.

The real Stephen Colbert is a practicing Catholic. He teaches Sunday school. He can recite chapter and verse of chapter and verse - from both the King James Bible and 'The Lord of the Rings.'

You don't really gotta rap no more; you can just say the verse with a swag now.

Music is rhythm, and all theater is rhythm. It's about tempo and change and pulse, whether you're doing a verse play by Shakespeare or a musical.

Metrics are not a device for restraining the mad, any more than 'open form' or free verse is a prairie where a man can do all kinds of manly things in a state of wholesome unrestrictedness.

I don't claim to be someone that knows every verse in the Bible. I wish I did. I truly do. It just means I need to spend more time in those pages.

I couldn't believe verse was supposed to be hard. It was a snap for me. I loved Shakespeare.

On the subject of literary genres, I've always felt that my response to poetry is inadequate. I'd love to be the kind of person that drifts off into the garden with a slim volume of Elizabethan verse or a sheaf of haikus, but my passion is story.

Believe it or not, I sold my first novel, 'Crank,' with only seventy-five pages complete. It was in verse then, and it was hard-hitting then.

The first two books that I did by myself were long stories in verse. I knew I could do that because I'd written a lot in verse. But, verse stories are hard to sell, so my editor encouraged me to try writing in prose.

The record Clef and I did was just sitting there. So I said, Clef, I got a record, hit a verse on it. He just went in, messed around and ended up doing the hook too.

Probably the one Bible passage that is read by Jews and Roman Catholics, Protestants, Islam, more than any other chapter is Psalm 23. And in Psalm 23 there is a verse that says, 'Surely, yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.'

My idea is to play with the people who you know want to get it right. Then it's fun and easy to record, and you can get down to details, like taking out cymbals so the verse doesn't dwarf the chorus, something like that.

Well, it's a badge of honour for any self-respecting poet to be criticized by Auberon Waugh. But in a lot of ways my poems are very conventional, and it's no big deal for me to write a poem in either free verse or strict form; modern poets can, and do, do both.

I would like to champion diverse forms like graphic novels and works told in verse and diverse writers and illustrators and diverse authors as well.

The main problem with writing in verse is, if your fourth line doesn't come out right, you've got to throw four lines away and figure out a whole new way to attack the problem. So the mortality rate is terrific.

I seem most instinctively to believe in the human value of creative writing, whether in the form of verse or fiction, as a mode of truth-telling, self-expression and homage to the twin miracles of creation and consciousness.

Sometimes I'll sing the same verse through the entire song, because the other verses aren't clicking. And when they do come to me, I'm in the middle of that same verse!

Poetry is the experience of liberty. The poet risks himself, chances all on the poem's all with each verse he writes.

Verse in itself does not constitute poetry. Verse is only an elegant vestment for a beautiful form. Poetry can express itself in prose, but it does so more perfectly under the grace and majesty of verse. It is poetry of soul that inspires noble sentiments and noble actions as well as noble writings.

The real challenge of writing songs isn't just writing a bunch of parts - like a verse, chorus, verse - but making something that flows together, that brings you back.

Most victims of my autobiographical verse are either far too polite, remarkably understanding unaware that I have written poems about them.

Most writers of verse have several different personalities. The ideal is to find a style or a method that includes them all.

My first attempt to write about Robert Owen was in the form of poetry. Then I turned it into a blank verse poem, but I discovered that I couldn't fit in all the facts, which are fabulous. I decided to rewrite it a third time, still retaining every image I had already written in the first two versions.

Nearly all children have a feeling for rhythm in words, for the delicate pattern of nursery rhymes. Many adults have lost this feeling and, if they read verse at all, demand a far cruder music than that which they once appreciated.

He falsifies who renders a verse just as it looks

Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough, / A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse - and Thou / Beside me singing in the Wilderness- / And Wilderness is Paradise enow.

He was able to cite chapter and verse from the seasons.

Just so I don't feel left out, ... I like to sing one (one verse of the hello song) to Rachael.

My motivation comes from the Lord. My favorite verse is, 'Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men ...' (Colossians 3:23). As long as that remains my motivation I can always work hard.

We learned a verse of this and that and we were having fun with the songs. Tommy would make up stories to go along with them and I would yell at him, 'Hey, stupid, that's not right,' and he was like a silly kid trying to impress.

Though he turned the pages with the sensuous joy of the book-lover, he did not know what he was reading, and one book after another dropped from his hand. Suddenly, among them, he lit on a small volume of verse which he had ordered because the name had attracted him: "The House of Life." He took it up, and found himself plunged in an atmosphere unlike any he had ever breathed in books; so warm, so rich, and yet so ineffebly tender, that it gave a new and haunting beauty to the most elementary of human passions.

You cannot find one single verse in the New Testament that calls for violence against non-believers. Jesus said to love your enemies. Muhammad said to butcher your enemies.

Creativity comes from awakening and directing men's higher natures, which originate in the primal depths of the uni- verse and are appointed by Heaven.

And this unpolished rugged verse I chose / As fittest for discourse and nearest prose.

Russell Baker writes columns as a poet writes light verse - with tongue in cheek and a steady hand.

'Are 'Friends' Electric?' was two songs: the verse part and the talking part. Two different songs I couldn't finish. One day I was playing the main verse part of 'Are 'Friends' Electric?' and after a few minutes I got frustrated, as normal, then started to play the other song, and realized they went together.

A verse may find him who a sermon flies, And turn delight into a sacrifice

A tympanic resonance, so rich and overpowering that it could give an air of verse to a recipe for stewed hare.

That third verse says in a nutshell who God is. It's my favorite.

At last came Malherbe, and made verse run smoothly - the first in France to do so.

It's a whole other level now, ... He will be one of the premier faces of the NBA. He is. With that being said, he understands there's responsibility that comes with that. It's like the Bible verse he follows, 'To whom much is given, much is expected.'

The blues is deceptively simple. Verse and chorus. Sometimes not even a chorus. Four bars that repeat, no Auto-Tune, electricity optional. It is the most direct, bare-bones of content. There is no interference between the head and heart.

It's been the same song, same verse all year long we don't hit the ball when we need too. We just didn't do it. We had the opportunities with runners in scoring position but we don't get it done. We are going get to work tomorrow. We are going to get after it and we aren't going to quit.

Their free verse was no form at all, yet it made history.

I like it when I can sing half of a verse and throw the mike in some kid's face, and they sing it right back to me.

In this nadir of poetic repute, when the only verse that most people read from one year's end to the next is what appears on greetings cards, it is well for us to stop and consider our poets. . . . Poets are the leaven in the lump of civilization.

I think my poetry was very influenced-it seems almost dumb to say it-but it was very influenced by Shakespeare. Very early on I read his plays... and, I don't know, I started speaking in blank verse at a rather early age.

He brings a gust of acrid provincial air to the ancient office. He is an angry young prophet rather than a smooth courtier. His verse is angular, savage, robust and very good.

All I really want is a beat from Kanye West. I've met him, and I think he's real cool with us. If I get that beat, I'm going to rap the best verse I ever dropped - even if it's his worst beat.

The iambic pentameter owes its pre-eminence in English poetry to its genius for variation. Good blank verse does not sound like a series of identically measured lines. It sounds like a series of subtle variations on the same theme.

And I'm no expert on the word I can't qoute you chapter and verse But I've heard you love the worst ones too And I'm the proof.

The line is a way of framing poetry. All verse is measured by lines. The poetic line immediately announces its difference from everyday speech and prose.

I would as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down

My verse represents a handle I can grasp in order not to yield to the centrifugal forces which are trying to throw me off of the world.

After the erection of the Chinese Wall of Milton, blank verse has suffered not only arrest but retrogression.

Storied of old in high immortal verse / Of dire chimeras and enchanted isles, / And rifted rocks whose entrance leads to Hell.

A poet who reads his own verse in public may have other nasty habits.

An artist that works in marble or colors has them all to himself and his tribe, but the man who molds his thoughts in verse has to employ the materials vulgarized by everybody's use, and glorify them by his handling