Quotes from Amy Lowell

For books are more than books, they are the life, the very heart and core of ages past.

Quand vous êtes venue, vous m'étiez vin rouge et miel, Et votre goût me brûla la langue de sa douceur, À présent vous voilà pain matinal, Mou et agréable. Je vous goûte à peine, tellement votre saveur m'est connue, Pourtant je suis complètement nourrie.

A Lover" If I could catch the green lantern of the firefly I could see to write you a letter. Poetry: A Magazine of Verse 1912–22. Edited by Harriet Monroe. (Chicago: 1912–22; New York: Bartleby.com, 2011)

Nightmare: A Tale for an Autumn Evening

A motor-car cuts a swathe through the bright air, sharp-beaked, irresistible, shouting to the wind to make way.

Stippling the white-washed walls with dancing shades and quavers. A bed-post, grown colossal, jigs about the ceiling, And shadows, strangely altered, stain the walls, revealing Eagles, and rabbits, and weird faces pulled awry, And hands which fetch and carry things incessantly.

This is America, This vast, confused beauty, This staring, restless speed of loveliness, Mighty, overwhelming, crude, of all forms, Making grandeur out of profusion, Afraid of no incongruities, Sublime in its audacity, Bizarre breaker of moulds, Laughing with strength, Charging down on the past, Glorious and conquering, Destroyer, builder, Invincible pith and marrow of the world, An old world remaking, Whirling into the no-world of all-colored light.

Life is a stream On which we strew Petal by petal the flower of our heart.

Poets are always the advance guard of literature; the advance guard of life. It is for this reason that their recognition comes so slowly.

Moon! Moon! I am prone before you. Pity me, and drench me in loneliness.

To-night when the full-bellied moon swallows the stars. Grant that I know.

For books are more than books, they are the life, the very heart and core of ages past, the reason why men worked and died, the essence and quintessence of their lives.

Take everything easy and quit dreaming and brooding and you will be well guarded from a thousand evils.

Time! Joyless emblem of the greed of millions, robber of the best which earth can give.

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

I am tired, beloved, of chafing my heart against the want of you; of squeezing it into little ink drops, and posting it. And I scald alone, here, under the fire of the great moon.

Love is a game-yes? I think it is a drowning.

Let us be of cheer, remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never come.

I am tired, Beloved, of chafing my heart against the want of you; of squeezing it into little inkdrops, And posting it.

You are ice and fire The touch of you burns my hands like snow

Watching the iris, The faint and fragile petals — How am I worthy?

Night lies beside me Chaste and cold as a sharp sword. It and I alone.

Don't ask a writer what he's working on. It's like asking someone with cancer on the progress of his disease.

Great emotion always tends to become rhythmic, and out of that tendency the forms of art have been evolved. Art becomes artificial only when the forms take precedence over the emotion.