
“Poetry is a search for the inexplicable.”
Opus Posthumous (1955), Adagia
Source: Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
“Poetry is a search for the inexplicable.”
Opus Posthumous (1955), Adagia
“I did not set out to be a writer. It's something that came to me after I was 50 years of age.”
Robert Fulghum : Philosopher King
Context: I did not set out to be a writer. It's something that came to me after I was 50 years of age. And I already had the life that I wanted and the wife I wanted and at that age I was fairly clear about what was important. The success that my writing is enjoying is like finding out your rich uncle has left you a train full of hammers. I mean, how many hammers can you use? It's chocolate syrup. It's an extra. So I take it very lightly. And if I were to fall off the charts tomorrow, I've already had more fame than I deserve and more money than I've ever had in my life. The thought that I could finally pay off my Visa bill! That's rich.
“Logic, like lyrical poetry, is no employment for the middle-aged”
Source: Essays In Biography (1933), F. P. Ramsey, p. 296
Originally published in The Economic Journal, March 1930. and The New Statesman and Nation, October 3, 1931
Ingeborg Glier, in Boris Ford (ed.) Medieval Literature: The European Inheritance (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983) p. 184.
Praise
"Orphée Noir (Black Orpheus)"
John Paul II, General Audience of 27 December 1978 https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/audiences/1978/documents/hf_jp-ii_aud_19781227.html
Other Quotes by Pope John Paul II
“The Epicureans especially made sport with the paltry Poetry that came from Delphos.”
The History of Oracles, and the Cheats of the Pagan Priests (1688)
Context: [A]bout the time of Alexander the Great, a little before Pyrrhus's days, there appear'd in Greece certain great Sects of Philosophers, such as the Peripateticks and Epicureans, who made a mock of Oracles. The Epicureans especially made sport with the paltry Poetry that came from Delphos. For the Priests hammered out their Verses as well as they could, and they often times committed faults against the common Rules of Prosodia. Now those Fleering Philosophers were mightily concerned that Apollo, the very God of Poetry, should come so far behind Homer, who was but a meer mortal, and was beholding to the same Apollo for his inspirations.<!--p. 220
“This is an age in which one cannot find common sense without a search warrant.”
Column, May 9, 1996, "FDR's memorial hides character" http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1996-05-09/news/1996130096_1_memorial-felix-frankfurter-cigarette-holder at baltimoresun.com
1990s
“In the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.”
Pg 5
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part One: Lightness and Weight
“Critics search for ages for the wrong word, which, to give them credit, they eventually find.”
BBC obituary (2004)