Let's stop reflexively comparing Chinese writers to Chinese writers, Indian writers to Indian writers, black writers to black writers. Let's focus on the writing itself: the characters, the language, the narrative style.
Celeste NgRead
A good poem is an amazing thing: a perfectly distilled, articulate moment. It opens you up - sometimes slowly, like the blooming of a flower, and sometimes with a quick knife-slice.
Interpretation
What this quote means
A good poem encapsulates profound emotions and moments, impacting the reader deeply and uniquely.
In this quote, Celeste Ng highlights the extraordinary nature of a good poem, describing it as a distilled moment that can evoke strong feelings. It can gently unfold its meaning or deliver a sudden impact, similar to a flower's blossoming or a sharp cut, emphasizing poetry's ability to resonate with the human experience in varied and impactful ways.
Themes
PoetryArtEmotionExperienceImpact
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be shared during a poetry reading to highlight the significance of the art form.
More from Celeste Ng
All quotes →Spend enough time wrangling a toddler, and you get good at being kind but firm. Like your child, you must be doggedly single-minded when it matters.
Celeste NgRead
For me, any story I tackle begins with the human relationships and not the plot.
Celeste NgRead
It's so easy, as a writer, to get stuck in your own head, to live in the little worlds you create. To forget that there are people out there reading your work, people who may be deeply affected by what you do, that you are writing not just for yourself, but for them.
Celeste NgRead
What I remember about race relations in the 1990s is that you showed your awareness by saying you didn't see race, that you were colour-blind.
Celeste NgRead
In fiction you're not often writing about the typical; you are interested in outliers, the points of interest. Part of it comes from feeling I was the only Asian or person of colour... another part comes from my personality: I'm an introvert, and my usual survival mode in a large group is to stand by a wall and watch everybody.
Celeste NgRead
Similar quotes
The authour who imitates his predecessors only by furnishing himself with thoughts and elegances out of the same general magazine of literature, can with little more propriety be reproached as a plagiary, than the architect can be censured as a mean copier of Angelo or Wren, because he digs his marble out of the same quarry, squares his stones by the same art, and unites them in columns of the same orders.
Samuel JohnsonRead
The best thing about being a writer is it gives you readers who understand your deepest feelings and fears.
Katherine PatersonRead
Although cover notes for classical music albums tend to say that the trill of flutes suggests mountain streams and so on, I don't think anybody listens to music with the expectation that they're going to be presented with a sort of landscape painting.
Brian EnoRead
Chess is no whit inferior to the violin, and we have a large number of professional violinists
Mikhail BotvinnikRead
There are lots of similarities between being a writer and a lawyer: to tell a story to a jury, hold their attention, make them laugh, make them like you. But what makes being a barrister less satisfying than being a writer is, finally, that it's about what someone else wants you to say.
John MortimerRead
In the belly of the furnace of creativity is a sexual fire; the flames twine about each other in fear and delight. The same sort of coiling, at a cooler, slower pace, is what the life of this planet looks like. The enormous spirals of typhoons, the twists and turns of mountain ranges and gorges, the waves and the deep ocean currents - a dragonlike writhing.
Gary SnyderRead