U-V Quotations
Dieter Uchtdorf
The desire to create is one of the deepest yearnings of the human soul.
Giuseppe Ungaretti
I flood myself with the light of the immense.
Lisa Unger
The universe doesn't like secrets. It conspires to reveal the truth, to lead you to it.
John Updike
Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?
In a country this large and a language even larger . . . there ought to be a living for somebody who cares and wants to entertain and instruct a reader.
Writing is only reading turned inside out.
Creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity. Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.
Célestine Hitiura Vaite
It takes courage for a fruit to fall far from her tree.
When I started writing I didn’t feel intimidated at all because I thought, ‘It’s just like telling a story!’ A lot of people feel overwhelmed or think ‘I’ve got to be clever,’ but I thought it was just a story, and I come from a strong story-telling culture.
I really believe in reading . . . so my mission is to increase the literacy rate because at the moment, still only people from the middle-class read, poor people don’t read—the literacy rate among Tahitians is very low.
Paul Valery
There is in you what is beyond you.
The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.
Abigail Van Buren
The best index to a person's character is how he treats people who can't do him any good, and how he treats people who can't fight back.
Vincent Van Gogh
Great things are not done by impulse, but a series of small things brought together.
Helen Vendler
If you like the precision and concision of poetry, a page of prose is unsatisfying in a certain way. And poetry is so direct.
I've absorbed so much poetry over the years, that there are just hundreds and hundreds of lines in my mind. And when one of them floats up out of the mass, I know it's telling me something.
Twentieth-century American poetry has been one of the glories of modern literature.
Donatella Versace
Creativity comes from a conflict of ideas.
Gore Vidal
Constant work, constant writing and constant revision. The real writer learns nothing from life. He is more like an oyster or a sponge. What he takes in he takes in normally, the way any person takes in experience. But it is what is done with it in his mind, if he is a real writer, that makes his art.
Vanessa Angélica Villarreal
Not enough is said or written about the lost art of middle school note writing! The codes, the intricate envelope origami!
When I started writing poetry more seriously, I became obsessed with liminality, hybridity, formal experimentation, duende. I was always drawn to lyric and image, but I wanted to give it dimension beyond the line and work more with how the poem could appear on the page, how visual play could add tension. I wanted to write into the silences of my adolescence, go back to sites of guilt and shame and illuminate them, exonerate the girl I was. These memories were inevitably also queer spaces, times my body was in conflict with the world, with authority, in trouble, alienated, vulnerable. To write about race, gender, and colonial violence is to write about the failure of normativity, write against imposed roles, write against domination.
Ellen Bryant Voigt
There’s no right way for a poem to begin, or unfold. At some point in the process, the poet needs to look at the word choices, the rhythm, the images, the tone, the structure, all of it. When one does what — that is so much a matter of temperament, and may also change from poem to poem. It always feels like a mystery, and a gift — which is why we throw up our hands and call it inspiration. We don’t have sufficient access to our own brains to explain it any other way.
Set aside whatever editors may or may not prefer, since that’s the business of publishing, not writing.
When meter is honored over rhythm, line over syntax, form over structure, even the most prodigious manipulation of traditional patterns may be rendered purely decorative.
I’ve learned a great deal about a particular connection between language and music: that is, the crucial role of syntactical rhythm in the way the brain processes both spoken and written language.
Any poem can start anywhere.
Ignorance is extremely dangerous — it doesn’t enhance a life but restricts it. At the same time, knowledge is also dangerous; it leads us to overlook things, to assume things, to fall in love with categories and systems. The poem is actually about power, whatever its source (and knowledge is indeed a power), and its limitations.
Almost all poems have some inherent aural component.
Beyond this constitutional similarity, poetry has other connections to music as well, especially if you think of music as not just sounds but as an architecture. And I try to analyze this also in the book. The main thing to remember, though, is that while there are resemblances, there are also huge differences between the two; even if poems “aspire to the condition of music,” as Walter Pater put it, they are in language, and the rhythmic elements of pitch and duration, for instance, are much more variable, less easily quantified.
Voltaire
Dare to think for yourself.
I disapprove of what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
Common sense is genius in homespun.
Judge of a man by his questions rather than by his answers.
If there were no God, it would be necessary to invent him.
A witty saying proves nothing.
It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.
Originality is nothing but judicious imitation.
Roger Von Oech
Remember the two benefits of failure. First, if you do fail, you learn what doesn’t work; and second, the failure gives you the opportunity to try a new approach.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.
Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?
The most damning revelation you can make about yourself is that you do not know what is interesting and what is not.
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.
To practice any art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. So do it.
Those who try their best to save the planet will find a loose, cheerful, sexy brass band waiting to honor them right outside the Pearly Gates.
Ocean Vuong
I wonder if balance is possible, but I think in attempting it, we begin to parse out who we are, what made us, where we are going—all of which are means toward self-knowledge.
They say nothing lasts forever but they're just scared it will last longer than they can love it.
The gaze, human or animal, is a powerful thing. When we look at something, we decide to fill our entire existence, however briefly, with that very thing.
Remember: The rules, like streets, can only take you to known places.
