Quotes from Louise Bogan

Goodbye, goodbye! There was so much to love, I could not love it all; I could not love it enough.

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.

At midnight tears Run into your ears.

Perhaps this very instant is your time.

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

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

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!

Unaccustomed sense of peace did not depend on...'the whim of any fallible creature, or...economic security, or the weather. I don't know where it comes from. Jung states that such serenity is always a miracle...I am so glad that the therapists of my maturity and the saints of my childhood agree on one thing.

Pasture, stone wall, and steeple, What most perturbs the mind: The heart-rending homely people, Or the horrible beautiful kind?

You have put your two hands upon me, and your mouth, You have said my name as a prayer. Here where trees are planted by water I have watched your eyes, cleansed from regret, And your lips, closed over all that love cannot say.

You need some place to work in. That's the door half open.

Slipping in blood, by his own hand, through pride, Hamlet, Othello, Coriolanus fall. Upon his bed, however, Shakespeare die, Having endured them all.

Tea instead of gin will warm the heart.

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

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

The soprano studies for seven years in order to be able to open her mouth and make loud sounds for three hours on end.

Goodbye, goodbye! There was so much to love, I could not love it all; I could not love it enough. — Louise Bogan, from "After the Persian," The Blue Estuaries: Poems: 1923-1968 . (Farrar, Straus and Giroux October 31, 1995) Originally published November 1st 1974.

No woman should be shame-faced in attempting to give back to the world, through her work, a portion of its lost heart.

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

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