Quotes from Louise Bogan

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

... 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.

True revolutions ... restore more than they destroy.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

...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.

True revolutions in art restore more than they destroy.

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

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

Stupidity always accompanies evil. Or evil, stupidity.

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!

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

Up from the bronze, I sawWater without a flawRush to its rest in air,Reach to its rest, and fall.

I burned my life, that I might findA passion wholly of the mind,Thought divorced from eye and bone,Ecstasy come to breath alone.

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

There was so much to love I could not love it all;I could not love it enough.

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

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

Come, drunks and drug-takers; come perverts unnerved! Receive the laurel, given, though late, on merit; to whom and wherever deserved. Parochial punks, trimmers, nice people, joiners true-blue, Get the hell out of the way of the laurel. It is deathless And it isn't for you.