Sonnets Quotes

1. "Most girls want love sonnets, and you want a song about a cowboy wanted dead or alive. He hung the guitar back up on the wall"
Author: Abbi Glines

2. "When sonneteering Wordsworth re-creates the landing of Mary Queen of Scots at the mouth of the Derwent -Dear to the Loves, and to the Graces vowed,The Queen drew back the wimple that she wore- he unveils nothing less than a canvas by Rubens, baroque master of baroque masters; this is the landing of a TRAGIC Marie de Medicis.Yet so receptive was the English ear to sheep-Wordsworth's perverse 'Enough of Art' that it is not any of these works of supreme art, these master-sonnets of English literature, that are sold as picture postcards, with the text in lieu of the view, in the Lake District! it is those eternally, infernally sprightly Daffodils."
Author: Brigid Brophy

3. "I've seen many strange things in my work, my friend, but a wealthy lawyer who leaves everything to go write sonnets is not part of the repertoire.-Ricardo Salvador"
Author: Carlos Ruiz Zafón

4. "I write quite a lot of sonnets, and I think of them almost as prayers: short and memorable, something you can recite."
Author: Carol Ann Duffy

5. "My friends, tonight we bring you something entirely different. Something special. The poets will rest, the sonnets will be silent, and what words of love there are will not be spoken. Tonight, my friends, and I can hear you out there, sitting alone, like me, in your chairs, your beds, driving down an empty street with no one but me to listen to your weeping; tonight, I'm going to bring you Armageddon."
Author: Charles Grant

6. "Don't they feed you at Navarre house?""They throw out some gruel between the indoctrination sessions and propaganda films. Then we're off marching around the grounds and the recitation of sonnets to Celina's loveliness."
Author: Chloe Neill

7. "As his widow, she knew who she was and what she had inherited. She had loved him in her way and sometimes missed him. She knew what words like "loved" and "missed" meant when she thought of her husband. When she thought of Blunt, on the other hand, she was unsure what anything meant except the sonnets she had written about their love affair."
Author: Colm Tóibín

8. "I mean this is the kind of love people dream about, poets write sonnets for, and well it's the kind of love that keeps people from losing faith in humanity and encourages people to believe that true love still exists and it's still powerful and still wonderful. (Quote from a reviewer of Loving Lily Lavender)"
Author: DeAnna Kinney

9. "No, life cannot be understood flat on a page. It has to be lived; a person has to get out of his head, has to fall in love, has to memorize poems, has to jump off bridges into rivers, has to stand in an empty desert and whisper sonnets under his breath... We get one story, you and I, and one story alone. God has established the elements, the setting and the climax and resolution. It would be a crime not to venture out, wouldn't it?" -Donald Miller,Through Painted Deserts"
Author: Donald Miller

10. "Sweetheart, darling, dearest, it was funny to think that these endearments, which used to sound exceedingly sentimental in movies and books, now held great importance, simple but true verbal affirmations of how they felt for each other. They were words only the heart could hear and understand, words that could impart entire pentameter sonnets in their few, short syllables."
Author: E.A. Bucchianeri

11. "In the case of Michel Angelo we have an artist who with brush and chisel portrayed literally thousands of human forms; but with this peculiarity, that while scores and scores of his male figures are obviously suffused and inspired by a romantic sentiment, there is hardly one of his female figures that is so,—the latter being mostly representative of woman in her part as mother, or sufferer, or prophetess or poetess, or in old age, or in any aspect of strength or tenderness, except that which associates itself especially with romantic love. Yet the cleanliness and dignity of Michel Angelo's male figures are incontestable, and bear striking witness to that nobility of the sentiment in him, which we have already seen illustrated in his sonnets."
Author: Edward Carpenter

12. "Shakespeare had all these sonnets where what he said came down to this: Youth is fleeting and you'd better get married and have children and make a copy of the beauty you own because the world owns it too."
Author: Elizabeth Knox

13. "The ordinary detective discovers from a ledger or a diary that a crime has been committed. We discover from a book of sonnets that a crime will be committed."
Author: G.K. Chesterton

14. "The work of the philosophical policeman," replied the man in blue, "is at once bolder and more subtle than that of the ordinary detective. The ordinary detective goes to pot-houses to arrest thieves; we go to artistic tea-parties to detect pessimists. The ordinary detective discovers from a ledger or a diary that a crime has been committed. We discover from a book of sonnets that a crime will be committed. We have to trace the origin of those dreadful thoughts that drive men on at last to intellectual fanaticism and intellectual crime. We were only just in time to prevent the assassination at Hartlepool, and that was entirely due to the fact that our Mr. Wilks (a smart young fellow) thoroughly understood a triolet."
Author: G.K. Chesterton

15. "Some of the books the Ministry's confiscated — Dad's told me — there was one that burned your eyes out. And everyone who read Sonnets of a Sorcerer spoke in limericks for the rest of their lives. And some old witch in Bath had a book that you could never stop reading! You just had to wander around with your nose in it, trying to do everything one-handed. And —""All right, I've got the point," said Harry."
Author: J.K. Rowling

16. "Even now, Dickon was upstairs, writing sonnets to his new love, while back at Seadown House, Marianne was writing 'Ella' on scraps of paper and then burning them."
Author: Jessica Day George

17. "No, I can't stop for sonnets; my mother is sitting up. I'll look you up tomorrow, sometime or other, and do for goodness' sake try and realise that you're a pestilential scourge, or your find yourself in a most awful fix. Good-night!"
Author: Kenneth Grahame

18. "The Sunlight on the GardenThe sunlight on the gardenHardens and grows cold,We cannot cage the minuteWithin its nets of gold,When all is toldWe cannot beg for pardon.Our freedom as free lancesAdvances towards its end;The earth compels, upon itSonnets and birds descend;And soon, my friend,We shall have no time for dances.The sky was good for flyingDefying the church bellsAnd every evil ironSiren and what it tells:The earth compels,We are dying, Egypt, dyingAnd not expecting pardon,Hardened in heart anew,But glad to have sat underThunder and rain with you,And grateful tooFor sunlight on the garden."
Author: Louis MacNeice

19. "Some people lusted after cars, which had never made sense to me. For me, bookshelves could inspire whole spontaneous sonnets, so maybe it was an each to her own scenario."
Author: Megan Crane

20. "A poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry he cannot write. The others write the poetry they dare not realise."
Author: Oscar Wilde

21. "Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets."
Author: Oscar Wilde

22. "The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize."
Author: Oscar Wilde

23. "I made these sonnets out of wood; I gave them the sound of that opaque pure substance, and that is how they should reach your ears. Walking in forests or on beaches, along hidden lakes, in latitudes sprinkled with ashes, you and I have picked up pieces of pure bark, pieces of wood subject to the comings and goings of water and the weather. Out of such softened relics, then, with hatchet and machete and pocketknife, I built up these lumber piles of love, and with fourteen boards each I built little houses, so that your eyes, which I adore and sing to, might live in them. Now that I have declared the foundations of my love, I surrender this century to you: wooden sonnets that rise only because you gave them life."
Author: Pablo Neruda

24. "Again? Honestly, do you guys think she's hiding in Shakespeare's Sonnets?" - Tina Lewis"
Author: R.J. Morse

25. "Sonnets To Orpheus, Part Two, XIIWant the change. Be inspired by the flamewhere everything shines as it disappears.The artist, when sketching, loves nothing so muchas the curve of the body as it turns away.What locks itself in sameness has congealed.Is it safer to be gray and numb?What turns hard becomes rigidand is easily shattered.Pour yourself like a fountain.Flow into the knowledge that what you are seekingfinishes often at the start, and, with ending, begins.Every happiness is the child of a separationit did not think it could survive. And Daphne, becoming a laurel,dares you to become the wind."
Author: Rainer Maria Rilke

26. "We are made aware that magnitude of material things is relative, and all objects shrink and expand to serve the passion of the poet. Thus, in his sonnets, the lays of birds, the scents and dyes of flowers, he finds to be the shadow of his beloved; time, which keeps her from him, is his chest; the suspicion she has awakened, is her ornament"
Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson

27. "Not only to myself or before the mirror or at the hour of my death, which I hope will be long in coming, but in the presence of my children and my wife and in the face of the peaceful life I'm building, I must acknowledge: (1) That under Stalin I wouldn't have wasted my youth in the gulag or ended up with a bullet in the back of my head. (2) That in the McCarthy era I wouldn't have lost my job or had to pump gas at a gas station. (3) That under Hitler, however, I would have been one of those who chose the path of exile, and that under Franco I wouldn't have composed sonnets to the caudillo or the Holy Virgin like so many lifelong democrats. One thing is as true as the other. My bravery has its limits, certainly, but so does what I'm willing to swallow. Everything that begins as comedy ends as tragicomedy."
Author: Roberto Bolaño

28. "I thought about evolutionary historians who argued that walking was a central part of what it meant to be human. Our two-legged motion was what first differentiated us from the apes. It freed our hands for tools and carried us onthe long marches out of Africa. As a species, we colonized the world on foot. Most of human history was created through contacts conducted at walking pace, even when some rode horses. I thought of the pilgrimages to Compostela in Spain; to Mecca; to the source of the Ganges; and of wandering dervishes, sadhus; and friars who approached God on foot. The Buddha meditated by walking and Wordsworth composed sonnets while striding beside the lakes.Bruce Chatwin concluded from all this that we would think and live better and be closer to our purpose as humans if we moved continually on foot across the surface of the earth. I was not sure I was living or thinking any better."
Author: Rory Stewart

29. "The War Sonnets: V. The Soldier If I should die, think only this of me: That there's some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England. There shall be In that rich earth a richer dust concealed; A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam, A body of England's, breathing English air, Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home. And think, this heart, all evil shed away, A pulse in the eternal mind, no less Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given; Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day; And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness, In hearts at peace, under an English heaven."
Author: Rupert Brooke

30. "That is because he's a gentleman," I spat, through with this little game of his.He laughed but his grip had yet to loosen. "Yeah, that's right. Luke is candy hearts, love sonnets and roses. I'm edible body lotion and lost panties," he said, disgustedly.Somehow through all of this, I managed to feel sorry for him. "Flynn," I uttered."God, Mercy, stop saying my name like that."
Author: Shannon Dermott

31. "I used to write sonnets and various things, and moved from there into writing prose, which, incidentally, is a lot more interesting than poetry, including the rhythms of prose."
Author: Shelby Foote

32. "Sonnets are guys writing in English, imitating an Italian song form. It was a form definitely sung as often as it was recited."
Author: Steve Earle

33. "I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head."
Author: Sylvia Plath

34. "Snow-melt in the stream: Mama Nature turning winter's storms into nourishment for the soil, fecundity, and beauty. This is what I must now learn to do with the stormy weather I've been passing through: turn it into beauty, turn it into art, so new life can germinate and bloom.One example of a creative artist who does this is my friend Jane Yolen, who wrote her exquisite book of poems The Radiation Sonnets while her husband was undergoing treatment for the cancer that would eventually claim his life. This is what all artists must do: take whatever life gives us and "alchemize" it into our art (either directly and autobiographically, as in Jane's book, or indirectly; whatever approach works best), turning darkness into light, spinning straw into gold, transforming pain and hardship into what J.R.R. Tolkien called 'a miraculous grace."
Author: Terri Windling

35. "No decent man ought to read Shakespeare's sonnets because it was like listening at keyholes."
Author: Virginia Woolf

36. "O friendship, I too will press flowers between the pages of Shakespeare's sonnets!"
Author: Virginia Woolf

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