The life you have led doesn't need to be the only life you have.
Anna QuindlenRead
People who are knowledgeable about poetry sometimes discuss it in that knowing, rather hateful way in which oenophiles talk about wine: robust, delicate, muscular. This has nothing to do with how most of us experience it, the heart coming around the corner and unexpectedly running into the mind. Of all the words that have stuck to the ribs of my soul, poetry has been the most filling.
Interpretation
Poetry is deeply personal and subjective, often misunderstood by those who analyze it academically.
In this quote, Anna Quindlen reflects on the way poetry is often discussed by experts in a detached and technical manner, contrasting it with the genuine and emotional experience that most people have when they encounter poetry. She emphasizes that for her, poetry is not just an art form, but something that nourishes the soul and resonates on a deeper level, highlighting the emotional connection we can have with words.
In practice
In a discussion about the importance of art in our lives, you could use this quote to highlight the emotional depth of poetry.
The life you have led doesn't need to be the only life you have.
The future is built on brains, not prom court, as most people can tell you after attending their high school reunion. But you'd never know it by talking to kids or listening to the messages they get from the culture and even from their schools.
I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me.
With reference to the younger generation..."If the experience of their exhausted, insomniac, dispirited elders makes them decide they'd prefer not to go straight from the classroom to the cubicle to the coffin, it doesn't mean they're lazy. It means they're sane."
Ideas are only lethal if you suppress and don't discuss them. Ignorance is not bliss, it's stupid. Banning books shows you don't trust your kids to think and you don't trust yourself to be able to talk to them.
I conveniently forgot to remember that people only have two hands, or, as another parent once said of having a third child, it's time for a zone defense instead of man-to-man.
Sculpture occupies real space like we do... you walk around it and relate to it almost as another person or another object.
The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, doth glance from heaven to Earth, from Earth to heaven; and as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet's pen turns them to shape, and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name; such tricks hath strong imagination.
Jazz is not background music. You must concentrate upon it in order to get the most of it. _x000D_ You must absorb most of it. The harmonies within the music can relax, soothe, relax, and uplift the _x000D_ mind when you concentrate upon and absorb it. Jazz music stimulates the minds and uplifts the souls _x000D_ of those who play it was well as of those who listen to immerse themselves in it. As the mind is _x000D_ stimulated and the soul uplifted, this is eventually reflected in the body.
Music makes me forget myself, my true condition, it carries me off into another state of being, one that isn't my own.
There comes a moment in a young artist's life when he knows he has to bring something to the stage from within himself. He has to put in something in order to be able to take something.
Sometimes just to paint a head you have to give up the whole figure. To paint a leaf, you have to sacrifice the whole landscape. It might seem like you're limiting yourself at first, but after a while you realize that having a quarter of an inch of something you have a better chance of holding on to a certain feeling of the universe than if you pretended to be doing the whole sky.
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