A.A. Allen Quotes

Breakfast - which I didn't mind skipping; if the eggs had been any runnier and the bacon a little less fatty, I could have raced them against each other around my plate.

What is the poem, after it is written? That is the question. Not where it came from or why.

Men cannot live forever But they must die forever.

I believe the term modulation denotes in music the uninterrupted shift from one key to another: I do not know the term for change of rhythm without change of measure.

I had kept opaque Down deeper than the canyons undersea The sullen spectrum of a buried lake Nobody saw; not seen even by me.

A poem may be an instance of morality, of social conditions, of psychological history; it may instance all its qualities, but never one of them alone, nor any two or three; never less than all.

There is a calm for you where men and women Unroll the chill precision of moving feet.

Poets, in their way, are practical men; they are interested in results.

How does one happen to write a poem: where does it come from? That is the question asked by the psychologists or the geneticists of poetry.

we know our end A packet of worm-seed, a garden of spent tissues.

For intellect is a mansion where waste is without drain.

Let us begin to understand the argument. There is a solution to everything: Science.

So the dubbed conceit Played nursery of cheat To clear the I of sleet.

Walk in this faithless grass with studious tread, Lest mice, weasels, germane beasts, too soon The tall hat and eyes, the fierce feet, for dead Descry, and fix you prone in their revelling moon.

All the sea-gods are dead. You, Venus, come home To your salt maidenhead.

William Blake cursed the flesh for a clod, Yet of some of his sayings we Moderns have heard tell: 'The nakedness of woman is the work of God', Or that title--The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

Last night I fled until I came To streets where leaking casements dripped Stale lamplight from the corpse of flame; A nervous window bled.

The torrent of the reaching shade Broke shadow into all its parts, What then had been of shadow made Found exigence in fits and starts.

Death's long anabasis.

I say that what one loves is best: The midnight fastness of the heart.

Our loss put six feet under ground Is measured by the magnolia's root; Our gain's the intellectual sound Of death's feet round a weedy tomb.

Punctilious abyss, the yawn of space Come once a day to suffocate the sight.

And I have seen long fingers that would stare With fiery eyes, and then the eyes would crawl Deftly across the counterpane and fall Soundless, with a wink of mild despair.

What was I saying? An Egyptian king Once touched long fingers, which are not anything.

The idiot greens the meadow with his eyes, The meadow creeps implacable and still; A dog barks, the hammock swings, he lies. One two three the cows bulge on the hill.

Dark accurate plunger down the successive knell Of arch on arch, where ogives burst a red Reverberance of hail upon the dead Thunder like an exploding crucible!

Yevgeny Yevtushenko is a ham actor, not a poet.

Good manners, Madam, are had these days not For your asking, nor mine, nor what-we-used-to-be's. The day is a loud grenade that bursts a smile Of serious weeds in a comic lily plot.

Swimmer of noonday, lean for the perfect dive To the dead Mother's face, whose subtile down You had not seen take amber light alive.

We know the particular poem, not what it says that we can restate.

I am not ridiculing verbal mechanisms, dreams, or repressions as origins of poetry; all three of them and more besides may have a great deal to do with it.

My darling boy whom I shall never know, My son, I love you in my deepest fears.

Ah, Christ, I love you rings to the wild sky And I must think a little of the past: When I was ten I told a stinking lie That got a black boy whipped.

Let us lie down once more by the breathing side Of Ocean, where our live forefathers sleep As if the Known Sea still were a month wide-- Atlantis howls but is no longer steep!

The dreary flies, lazy and casual, Stick to the ceiling, buzz along the wall. O heart, the spider shuffles from the mould Weaving, between the pinks and grapes, his pall.

Struck in the wet mire Four thousand leagues from the ninth buried city I thought of Troy, what we had built her for.

I thought I heard the dark pounding its head On a rock, crying: Who are the dead?

Women add zest to the unlicensed hours.

When you're playing live, those people who you're trying to please and reach, they're right there giving you feedback. And you don't get that feedback in the studio.

To travel and to get around different places, especially in station wagons, you could really see America.

I never planned on being a live performer. My whole forte was about being in the studio, producing, playing the piano on recording sessions. I was all about the studio.

Whenever I wrote songs - particularly back then - it would always be for a particular artist.

The mother-in-laws themselves weren't natural jokes but most comedians used to use that.

Descartes recommended that we distrust the senses and rely on the ... use of our intellect.

People are often most proud of precisely those things of which they should most be ashamed.

Our procedures of deliberation are not ways of finding out independent moral truths but instead ways of "constructing" these truths, in the process of deciding what to do.

Since the Enlightenment, popular religion has rejected the Enlightenment path and transformed itself into a bastion of resistance against reason.

In general, those who defend capitalism are basically out of touch with reality.

The relation of the law to the self is only a helpful way of thinking about the law, that helps us better understand its validity for us.

Kant says that we may regard ourselves as legislator of the moral law, and consider ourselves as its author, but not that we are legislators or authors of the law.