Louise Bogan Quotes

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.

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

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

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!

... 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.

Perhaps this very instant is your time.

Stupidity always accompanies evil. Or evil, stupidity.

...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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

... 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.

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

True revolutions in art restore more than they destroy.

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

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

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.

The measured blood beats out the year's delay.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

At midnight tears Run into your ears.

I don't like quintessential certitude.

True revolutions ... restore more than they destroy.