Louise Bogan Quotations

Your work is carved out of agony as a statue is carved out of marble.

The intellectual is a middle-class product; if he is not born into the class he must soon insert himself into it, in order to exist. He is the fine nervous flower of the bourgeoisie.

No more pronouncements on lousy verse. No more hidden competition. No more struggling not to be a square.

Because language is the carrier of ideas, it is easy to believe that it should be very little else than such a carrier.

Innocence of heart and violence of feeling are necessary in any kind of superior achievement: The arts cannot exist without them.

But childhood prolonged, cannot remain a fairyland. It becomes a hell.

The women rest their tired half-healed hearts; they are almost well.

The fact, and the intuition or logic about the fact, are severe coordinates in fiction. In the short story they must cross with hair-line precision.

I have lost faith in universal panaceas - work is the one thing in which I really believe.

... how much of our inner substance is it good for us to give to public griefs? The whole modern tendency to agonize over the suffering of the entire globe is surely something new.

Song, like a wing, tears through my breast, my side, And madness chooses out my voice again, Again.

The measured blood beats out the year's delay.

All art, in spite of the struggles of some critics to prove otherwise, is based on emotion and projects emotion.

True revolutions in art restore more than they destroy.

What we suffer, what we endure, what we muff, what we kill, what we miss, what we are guilty of, is done by us, as individuals, in private.

It is almost impossible for the poetess, once laurelled, to take off the crown for good or to reject values and taste of those who tender it.

Women have no wilderness in them They are provident instead Content in the tight hot cell of their hearts To eat dusty bread.

Hate does not present many choices; if hate is your solution, you are fairly certain to hate all phemonena with equal joy and intensity, without troubling to drag into prominence any one feature from the loathsome whole.

O fortunate bride, who never again will become elated after childbirth! O lucky older wife, who has been cured of feeling unwanted!

O God, in the dream the terrible horse began To paw at the air, and make for me with his blows.

I hope that one or two immortal lyrics will come out of all this tumbling around.

At midnight tears Run into your ears.

O remember In your narrowing dark hours That more things move Than blood in the heart.

I don't like quintessential certitude.

Once form has been smashed, it has been smashed for good, and once a forbidden subject has been released, it has been released for good.

The art of one period cannot be approached through the attitudes (emotional or intellectual) of another.

But is there any reason to believe that a woman's spiritual fibre is less sturdy than a man's? Is it not possible for a woman to come to terms with herself if not with the world; to withdraw more and more, as time goes on, her own personality from her productions; to stop childish fears of death and eschew charming rebellions against facts?

Intellectuals range through the finest gradations of kind and quality: from those who are merely educated neurotics, usually with strong hidden reactionary tendencies, through mediocrities of all kinds, to men of real brains and sensibility, more or less stiffened into various respectabilities or substitutes for respectability. The number of Ignorant Specialists is large. The number of hysterics and compulsives is also large.

The poem is always the last resort. In it the poet makes a world in little, and finds peace, even though, under complete focused emotion, the evocation be far more bitter than reality, or far more lovely.

It is not possible, for a poet, writing in any language, to protect himself from the tragic elements in human life.... [ellipsis in source] Illness, old age, and death--subjects as ancient as humanity--these are the subjects that the poet must speak of very nearly from the first moment that he begins to speak.

The terrible beast, that no one may understand, Came to my side, and put down his head in love.

Poetry is often generations in advance of the thought of its time.

I'll lie here and learn How, over their ground, Trees make a long shadow And a light sound.

But it's silly to suggest the writing of poetry is something ethereal, a sort of soul-crashing, devastating emotional experience that wrings you. I have no fancy ideas about poetry. ... It doesn't come to you on the wings of a dove. It's something you have to work hard at.

It is through the acceptance of a variety of aethetic and intellectual points of view that a culture is given breadth and density.

Up from the bronze, I saw Water without a flaw Rush to its rest in air Reach to its rest, and fall.

...in a time lacking in truth and certainty and filled with anguish and despair, no woman should be shamefaced in attempting to give back to the world, through her work, a portion of its lost heart.

Stupidity always accompanies evil. Or evil, stupidity.

A thousand kindnesses do not make up for a thousand blows.

Perhaps this very instant is your time.

... politics are nothing but sand and gravel: it is art and life that feed us until we die. Everything else is ambition, hysteria or hatred.

I cannot believe that the inscrutable universe turns on an axis of suffering; surely the strange beauty of the world must somewhere rest on pure joy!

The Initial Mystery that attends any journey is: how did the traveler reach his starting point in the first place?