Quotes about sonnet

A collection of quotes on the topic of sonnet, love, likeness, writing.

Quotes about sonnet

“I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.”
— Pablo Neruda
From 100 Love Sonnets
like this quote”

Pablo Neruda (1904–1973) Chilean poet

Love, Secret, Quotes, Soul

“I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Lolita

Source: I'm thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art, And this is the only immortality that you and I may share, my Lolita.

Secret, Art, Angels, Thinking

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”

Robert A. Heinlein Time Enough for Love

Time Enough for Love (1973)

Problem, Change, Fight, Cooking

“O friendship, I too will press flowers between the pages of Shakespeare's sonnets!”

Virginia Woolf book The Waves

Source: The Waves

Friendship, Flowers

“Your days are your sonnets.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

“Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

Life, Art, Music

“April hath put a spirit of youth in everything. (Sonnet XCVIII)”

William Shakespeare book Shakespeare's Sonnets

Source: Shakespeare's Sonnets

Youth

“Rafael made a century of sonnets.”

Robert Browning (1812–1889) English poet and playwright of the Victorian Era

Stanza ii.
One Word More (1855)

“Scorn not the Sonnet; Critic, you have frowned,
Mindless of its just honours; with this key
Shakespeare unlocked his heart.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

Scorn Not the Sonnet, l. 1 (1827).

Heart

“In infancy I was afraid of the dark, which I peopled with all sorts of things; but my grandfather cured me of that by daring me to walk through certain dark parts of the house when I was 3 or 4 years old. After that, dark places held a certain fascination for me. But it is in dreams that I have known the real clutch of stark, hideous, maddening, paralysing fear. My infant nightmares were classics, & in them there is not an abyss of agonising cosmic horror that I have not explored. I don't have such dreams now—but the memory of them will never leave me. It is undoubtedly from them that the darkest & most gruesome side of my fictional imagination is derived. At the ages of 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, & 8 I have been whirled through formless abysses of infinite night and adumbrated horrors as black & as seethingly sinister as any of our friend Fafhrd's [a nickname Lovecraft used for Fritz Leiber] "splatter-stencil" triumphs. That's why I appreciate such triumphs so keenly, I have seen these things! Many a time I have awaked in shrieks of panic, & have fought desperately to keep from sinking back into sleep & its unutterable horrors. At the age of six my dreams became peopled with a race of lean, faceless, rubbery, winged things to which I applied the home-made name of night-gaunts. Night after night they would appear in exactly the same form—& the terror they brought was beyond any verbal description. Long decades later I embodied them in one of my Fungi from Yuggoth pseudo-sonnets, which you may have read. Well—after I was 8 all these things abated, perhaps because of the scientific habit of mind which I was acquiring (or trying to acquire). I ceased to believe in religion or any other form of the supernatural, & the new logic gradually reached my subconscious imagination. Still, occasional nightmares brought recurrent touches of the ancient fear—& as late as 1919 I had some that I could use in fiction without much change. The Statement of Randolph Carter is a literal dream transcript. Now, in the sere & yellow leaf (I shall be 47 in August), I seem to be rather deserted by stark horror. I have nightmares only 2 or 3 times a year, & of these none even approaches those of my youth in soul-shattering, phobic monstrousness. It is fully a decade & more since I have known fear in its most stupefying & hideous form. And yet, so strong is the impress of the past, I shall never cease to be fascinated by fear as a subject for aesthetic treatment. Along with the element of cosmic mystery & outsideness, it will always interest me more than anything else. It is, in a way, amusing that one of my chief interests should be an emotion whose poignant extremes I have never known in waking life!”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to Harry O. Fischer (late February 1937), in Selected Letters V, 1934-1937 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, pp. 416-417
Non-Fiction, Letters

Life, People, Youth, Age

“No one can escape the power of language, let alone those of English birth brought up from childhood, as Mrs. Hilbery had been, to disport themselves now in the Saxon plainness, now in the Latin splendor of the tongue, and stored with memories, as she was, of old poets exuberating in an infinity of vocables. Even Katharine was slightly affected against her better judgment by her mother's enthusiasm. Not that her judgment could altogether acquiesce in the necessity for a study of Shakespeare's sonnets as a preliminary to the fifth chapter of her grandfather's biography. Beginning with a perfectly frivolous jest, Mrs. Hilbery had evolved a theory that Anne Hathaway had a way, among other things, of writing Shakespeare's sonnets; the idea, struck out to enliven a party of professors, who forwarded a number of privately printed manuals within the next few days for her instruction, had submerged her in a flood of Elizabethan literature; she had come half to believe in her joke, which was, she said, at least as good as other people's facts, and all her fancy for the time being centered upon Stratford-on-Avon.”

Virginia Woolf book Night and Day

Source: Night and Day (1919), Ch. 24

People, Way, Literature, Idea

“You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. What you say is completely up to you.”

Madeleine L'Engle book A Wrinkle in Time

Source: A Wrinkle in Time (1962)

“You mean you're comparing our lives to a sonnet? A strict form, but freedom within it? Yes. Mrs. Whatsit said. You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. What you say is completely up to you.”

Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer

Source: A Wrinkle in Time: With Related Readings

Freedom

“Life, with its rules, its obligations, and its freedoms, is like a sonnet: You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. - Mrs. Whatsit”

Madeleine L'Engle book A Wrinkle in Time

Source: A Wrinkle in Time

Life, Freedom

“Christopher Marlowe or Francis Bacon
The author of Lear remains unshaken
Willie Herbert or Mary Fitton
What does it matter? The Sonnets were written.”

Noel Coward (1899–1973) English playwright, composer, director, actor and singer

A Question of Values.

“First Shakespeare sonnets seem meaningless; first Bach fugues, a bore; first differential equations, sheer torture. But training changes the nature of our spiritual experiences. In due course, contact with an obscurely beautiful poem, an elaborate piece of counterpoint or of mathematical reasoning, causes us to feel direct intuitions of beauty and significance. It is the same in the moral world.”

Aldous Huxley book Ends and Means

Ends and Means (1937)

World, Beauty, Feeling, Mathematics

“The most important thing about me is that I am a Catholic. It's a superstructure within which you can work, like a sonnet.”

Jean Kerr (1922–2003) Irish-American author and playwright

Time magazine (April 14, 1961)

“I wanted to see that grizzly fucker. I wanted to see him flower. I wanted to see him blossom under the fact of love. I wanted to see where the sonnets came from. They came from the same pen of despair that wrote Timon of Athens— I wanted to see that guy. I wanted to see that guy with the sensibilities of a man that could create a body of work that would last century after century. I wanted to see that… I wanted to play that character. I loved the script. I mean, it was an incredibly well observed script about actors. That's why I thought it was so cool.”

Russell Crowe (1964) New Zealand-born Australian actor, film producer and musician

On Shakespeare In Love
GQ Interview (2005)

Love, Guy, Flowers, Despair

“A sonnet is a wave of melody
From heaving waters of the impassion'd soul.”

Theodore Watts-Dunton (1832–1914) English literary critic and poet

from The Sonnets Voice (A Meterical Lesson by the Seashore).

Soul, Water

“Shakespeare's relations with men and women of the court involved him at the outset in emotional conflicts, which form the subject-matter of his 'Sonnets”

Sidney Lee (1859–1926) English biographer and critic

Dictionary of National Biography, art. "William Shakespeare"

Women, Men

“Yes, there's love if you want it. Don't sound like no sonnet, my lord.”

Richard Ashcroft (1971) English singer-songwriter

Urban Hymns (1997)

Love

“I have spoken of the forceful sonnets of that tragic Portuguese, Antero de Quental, who died by his own hand. Feeling acutely for the plight of his country on the occasion of the British ultimatum in 1890, he wrote as follows: "An English statesman of the last century, who was also undoubtedly a perspicacious observer and a philosopher, Horace Walpole, said that for those who feel, life is a tragedy, and a comedy for those who think. Very well then, if we are destined to end tragically, we Portuguese, we who feel, we would rather prefer this terrible, but noble destiny to that which is reserved, and perhaps at no very remote future date, for England, the country that thinks and calculates, whose destiny it is to finish miserably and comically." …we twin-brothers of the Atlantic seaboard have always been distinguished by a certain pedantry of feeling, but there remains a basis of truth underlying this terrible idea — namely that some peoples, those who put thought above feeling, I should say reason above faith, die comically, while those die tragically who put faith above reason.”

Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), Conclusion : Don Quixote in the Contemporary European Tragi-Comedy

Life, People, Truth, Faith

“I do believe that encyclopedias are dead as dodos in the old fashioned way. Let me just go back, because earlier around I was interviewed and I said: The book will always be with us. Books - we used to read in scrolls and then they got invented the codex which is basically the form of the book. It has not been improved on. It's like scissors, like a spoon, and like a hammer. It's technology that's perfect in itself and will remain very good. But: What about the content inside of it? Now, there are books that you read for information. And there what you want to do is how to get the information. And it is infinitely more efficient, of higher quality, to use digital sources rather than the published sources for references. So dictionaries and encyclopedias are not going to be done in this very ponderous way of having old books that by the time they come out the information in them is obsolete. Second, you have to search in all of these and open the pages and then you go to an index and come back whereas you can type to search in. […] But if you want to hold in your hand a slim volume, nicely bound, of the love sonnets of Shakespeare or historical romans, that's a different story. There is the book as artifact, there is the joy in holding the book. And there is an efficiency in the book that you can carry with you in different ways. But I think that the encyclopedias and the dictionaries really are providing a service. And that service can be provided so much more efficiently online that they are bound to change. And if they don't change themselves and go online themselves … I mean, the old providers, like Britannica, will go online, will provide it, and will try to, in fact, compete with the model that Wikipedia pioneered.”

Ismail Serageldin (1944) egyptian academic

Wikimania 2008 press conference 0'33 (August 2008).

Love, Books, Way, Search

“[From Cecil Forrester]: Nothing like love-letters for filling up a rainy morning. A mistress gives a man such an interest in himself! You cannot run your fingers through your hair, without a vision of the locket wherein one of your curls reposes on the fairest neck in the world. An east-wind only conjures up a host of "sweet anxieties;" and if the worst comes to the worst, you can sit down and write sonnets to your inamorata's eyebrow.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Heath's book of Beauty, 1833 (1832)

Love, World

“Bruzundanga's literature is ruled by cute, rhyming and tasteless sonnets.”

Lima Barreto book Os Bruzundangas

Os Bruzundangas (1923)

Literature

“A good sonnet appears to be a confession-in a word either patently artificial, and then it is bad, or good, then it sounds like autobiography.”

George Lyman Kittredge (1860–1941) American scholar, literary critic, and folklorist

The Complete Works of Shakespeare, 1936. Chap XI

Appearance

“At the following morning, when the first citizens started walking around, he was found dead. So died the poor and brave Antônio da Silva Marramaque who, at the age of 18, dreamed with the glories of poetry and was now murdered due his great soul and brave moral! He didn't compose any sonnet and, if he did, he composed bad ones. But, by his way, he was a hero and a poet… that God bless him!”

Lima Barreto book Clara dos Anjos

Clara dos Anjos (1948)

God, Age, Dreams, Way

“My meaning (dear Mother) is in these sonnets, to declare my resolution to be, that my poor abilities in poetry, shall be all and ever consecrated to God's glory.”

George Herbert (1593–1633) Welsh-born English poet, orator and Anglican priest

Letter to His Mother (1609)

God

“A Sonnet is a moment's monument,—
Memorial from the Soul's eternity
To one dead deathless hour.”

Dante Gabriel Rossetti The House of Life

Introductory Sonnet.
The House of Life (1870—1881)

Soul, Memory, Dead

“There is no species of poetry which is better adapted to the taste of a melancholy man than a sonnet. Its brevity precludes the possibility of it becoming tiresome.”

Henry Kirke White (1785–1806) English poet

Melancholy hours, The Poetical Works and remains of Henry Kirke White, G. Routledge, London 1835.
Melancholy Hours

“He cursed Petrarch for redacting verses to sonnets, which he said were like that tyrant's bed, where some who were too short were racked, others too long cut short.”

Ben Jonson (1572–1637) English writer

Conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden (1711)

“But how shall this love be demonstrated? After what method shall it be expressed? Not by secret musings alone; not by the chanting of religious sonnets alone; not by grateful remembrances of Him — at His table only — but by deeds of love towards those who in a real sense represent Him, because partakers of that nature, our common humanity, which He condescended to assume.”

William Adams (1706–1789) Fellow and Master of Pembroke College, Oxford

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 396.

Love, Secret, Nature, Sense

“a purely literal interpretation of the impassioned protestations of affection for a "lovely boy", which course through the sonnets, casts a slur on the dignity of the poet's name which scarcely bears discussion”

Sidney Lee (1859–1926) English biographer and critic

Shakespeare's Sonnets, Facsimile of the First Edition 1609, ed. S. Lee, 1905

Love, Boy

““Tell me! What do you think of life? What do you think of ambition? What do you think of science, of learning, of love, of fame, of glory, of aspiration?”
“I think… that those are all very different things.”
“You are wrong. They are all one thing—a cunt.”
“Sir?”
“A cunt! Consider: The cunt is a nasty, ugly, filthy thing. Yet we desire it so greatly as to be willing to suffer any indignity to attain it. For the sake of it we labor and preen and whisper sugary words. We go to the theatre with flowers in our arms, climb over back walls by moonlight, write sonnets, jump out of windows with our trousers in our hands, give dangerous men their choice of weapons. We build love-nests for it sake, and cities, and civilizations. It is our all, our only, our ideal. It has created us and made us great. Such is life, such is ambition, such is science, learning, love, fame, glory, and aspiration. The Eternal Cunt,” he said significantly, “draws us onward.””

Michael Swanwick book Jack Faust

Source: Jack Faust (1997), Chapter 16, “The Wild Hunt” (p. 276)

Love, Life, Men, Flowers

“It is a conjunction of images I have always loved in his Sonnets to Orpheus and this work is, in a way, a kind of eye which is reflecting images endlessly”

Anish Kapoor (1954) British contemporary artist of Indian birth

On his Tall Tree And The Eye bubbled towards the heavens in the courtyard of The Royal Academy of Arts in London. Quoted in "Anish Kapoor Opens the Door:Modern Artist Creates Monuments that Transcend Space & Time."

Love, Way

“Natural law is not applicable to the unseen world behind the symbols, because it is unadapted to anything except symbols, and its perfection is a perfection of symbolic linkage. You cannot apply such a scheme to the parts of our personality which are not measurable by symbols any more than you can extract the square root of a sonnet.”

Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882–1944) British astrophysicist

Source: Science and the Unseen World (1929), Ch. V, p.53

World, Law, Nature, Parting

“If you want to know something about these people and enjoy them somewhat, before buying the map of the city you should buy the sonnets of Gioacchino Belli, the true guide of Rome. It's easy reading, educational and fun. Dante should be read to understand Florence and the Florentines; Belli, to understand Rome and the Romans. The first one never makes you laugh, the second makes you laugh all the time. And then get to know the inns.”

Aldo Palazzeschi book Roma

Page 168, Est! Est! Est!
Roma (1953)

People, Education, Understanding, Time

“When a sonnet is mediocre it is bad, for it should be sublime.”

Giacomo Casanova (1725–1798) Italian adventurer and author from the Republic of Venice

History of My Life (trans. Trask 1967), 1997 reprint, v. 7, chapter 7, p. 143
Referenced

“All at once I loathed her, because she had hurt me. This girl! She had torn up my sonnet by Dowson, she had shown my telegram to everybody in the Columbia Buffet. She had made a fool of me at the beach. She suspected my virility, and her suspicion was the same as the scorn in her eyes. I watched her face and lips and thought how it would be a pleasure to strike her, send my fist with all force against her nose and lips.”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

Pleasure, Fools, Girl, Hurt

“My sonnet asserts that the sonnet still lives. My epic, should such fortune befall me, asserts that the heroic narrative is not lost — that it is born again.”

James Fenton (1949) poet

Source: An Introduction to English Poetry (2002), Ch. 22: Poetic Drama and Opera (p. 125)

“When my sonnet was rejected, I exclaimed, 'Damn the age; I will write for Antiquity!”

Charles Lamb (1775–1834) English essayist

Letter to Proctor (January 22, 1829), in Oxford Dictionary of Quotations by Subject (2000), p. 526

Age

“Why, you might read two sonnets, ere they reach
To where the hurrying freshnesses aye preach
A natural sermon o’er their pebbly beds;
Where swarms of minnows show their little heads,
Staying their wavy bodies ’gainst the streams,
To taste the luxury of sunny beams
Temper’d with coolness.”

John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet

"I Stood Tiptoe", l. 72
Poems (1817)

Nature, Reading

“I've just finished reading Shakespeare's Sonnets, that is, I've read and understood them for the first time. One passionate, desolate lament - immeasurable and inconsolable - for the waning, wasting and passing of beauty. At the same time there's something disturbingly un-Christian here - the utterly heathen, desperate keening of the dirges, the grisly dances of death, danses macabres, in which death is nothing but the end, finality - destruction, not transition.”

Ida Friederike Görres (1901–1971) Austrian writer and noble

Broken Lights p. 38 Diaries 1951

Death, Beauty, Passion, Time

“Just because science can't in practice explain things like the love that motivates a poet to write a sonnet, that doesn't mean that religion can. It's a simple and logical fallacy to say, ' If science can't do something, therefore religion can.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

Love, Religion, Motivation, Science

“I believe that the luxuriance of Shakespeare's dramatic instinct largely dominates that outburst of lyric melody which gives the Sonnets their life.”

Sidney Lee (1859–1926) English biographer and critic

"The Impersonal Aspect of Shakespeare's Art" (English Association Leaflet, 13, July 1909)

Life

“I have three phobias which, could I mute them, would make my life as slick as a sonnet, but as dull as ditch water — I hate to go to bed, I hate to get up, and I hate to be alone.”

Tallulah Bankhead (1902–1968) American actress

Tallulah: My Autobiography (1952)

Life, Hate, Water

“Our host received a piece of paper from my familiar spirit. I asked if he were giving him a check or note to pay the bill. He answered no, that he had settled the account with a poem.
"What? A poem?" I asked. "Are innkeepers curious about rhymes?"
"It's the local currency," he answered. "The sextain I've just given him will cover our expenses. I wasn't afraid of coming up short. Even if we'd spent a week in luxury, it wouldn't have cost a sonnet, and I have four on me. Along with two epigrams, two odes and an eclogue."”

Cyrano de Bergerac (1619–1655) French novelist, dramatist, scientist and duelist

The Other World (1657)

“At certain times I read a lot of poetry. My favorite poets are Shelley and Keats. Rimbaud is so identifiable. Lord Byron. I don't know. Lately if I read poems, it's like I can always hear the guitar. Even with Shakespeare's sonnets I can hear a melody because it's all broken up into timed phrases so I hear it. I always keep thinking, 'What kind of song would this be?”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Interview with Denise Worrell, "'It's All Right in Front': Dylan on Life and Rock" in Time Magazine (25 November 1985)

Thinking, Time, Reading

“On the last great day, when Gabriel blows his trumpet, even if he blows it in sonnets, he will not do it for the money that is in it. If he does do it for the cash he will not be Gabriel and it will not be the last great day.”

Vachel Lindsay (1879–1931) American poet

What It Means to Be a Poet in America (1926)
Context: Most years I owe no money and I have no money. Every university pays my way to the next town. That’s about all. No poet has ever made any money out of having his poetry published, and no poet ever will. If the fee is two hundred dollars, it is one hundred dollars for coming to town and one hundred for leaving inside of twenty-four hours. There has been no poetry in the history of the world that has made money for the poet. The New Poetry Movement began when Abel made a more acceptable sacrifice than Cain; but the sacrifice of Abel was not intended as a money-making idea. On the last great day, when Gabriel blows his trumpet, even if he blows it in sonnets, he will not do it for the money that is in it. If he does do it for the cash he will not be Gabriel and it will not be the last great day. It will be a second-rate Hollywood movie of the last great day, and business will continue as usual.

Money

“Cease from sonneting, my brothers; let us fashion songs from life.”

James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) American author

"Auctorial Induction"
The Certain Hour (1916)
Context: We are talking over telephones, as Shakespeare could not talk;
We are riding out in motor-cars where Homer had to walk;
And pictures Dante labored on of mediaeval Hell
The nearest cinematograph paints quicker, and as well. But ye copy, copy always; — and ye marvel when ye find
This new beauty, that new meaning, — while a model stands behind,
Waiting, young and fair as ever, till some singer turn and trace
Something of the deathless wonder of life lived in any place.
Hey, my masters, turn from piddling to the turmoil and the strife!
Cease from sonneting, my brothers; let us fashion songs from life.

Life, Fashion

“…here’s the thing about all the titles. It’s so great to not have to think about that. The title is a gesture to categorize it, reduce it, and frame it. In the sonnets I can carry an idea and know that I have to turn that idea…”

Terrance Hayes (1971) American poet

On avoiding titling an unfinished work in “Interview with Terrance Hayes” http://katonahpoetry.com/interviews/interview-terrance-hayes/ in the Katonah Poetry Series (2017 Sep 21)

Idea, Thinking

“I scribble on oak trees
Pretty please you can sing
my syllables credible
My cordon bleu sonnets
you just wishing they edible”

Example (musician) (1982) English rapper and singer

"So Many Roads" (song) <br class="br"> ("So Many Roads" - video on YouTube) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IbYJoWrOIg <br class="br"> (+ Lyrics version of "So Many Roads" on YouTube) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBUt6gyNgQI <br class="br">Studio albums, What We Made (2007)

Singing, Tree

“Creativity is the result of a struggle between vitality and form. As anyone who has tried to write a sonnet or scan poetry, is aware, the forms ideally do not take away from the creativity but may add to it.”

Rollo May book Love and Will

Source: Love and Will (1969), Ch. 13 : Communion of Consciousness, p. 320