Amy Lowell Quotes

60 Sourced Quotes

You are ice and fire the touch of you burns my hands like snow.

Amy Lowell
Moon!
Moon!
I am prone before you.
Pity me,
And drench me in loneliness.

Amy Lowell
For books are more than books, they are the life,
The very heart and core of ages past.
The reason why men lived, and worked, and died,
The essence and quintessence of their lives.

Amy Lowell
Happiness, to some, elation;
Is, to others, mere stagnation.

Amy Lowell
All books are either dreams or swords,
You can cut, or you can drug, with words.

Amy Lowell
Art, true art, is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

Amy Lowell
A man must be sacrificed now and again
To provide for the next generation of men.

Amy Lowell
I am tired, Beloved, of chafing my heart against the want of you; of squeezing it into little inkdrops, And posting it.

Amy Lowell
My heart is tuned to sorrow, and the strings Vibrate most readily to minor chords, Searching and sad; my mind is stuffed with words Which voice the passion and the ache of things: Illusions beating with their baffled wings Against the walls of circumstance.

Amy Lowell
I must be mad, or very tired, When the curve of a blue bay beyond a railroad track Is shrill and sweet to me like the sudden springing of a tune, And the sight of a white church above thin trees in a city square Amazes my eyes as though it were the Parthenon.

Amy Lowell
When I go away from you
The world beats dead
Like a slackened drum.

Amy Lowell
Oh! To be a butterfly Still, upon a flower, Winking with its painted wings, Happy in the hour.

Amy Lowell
What is the thing I would say to you
Ere the time when we can say nothing at all,
Neither you to me nor I to you,
And between us is sprung a smoky wall?

Amy Lowell
And now a month has passed and not a word have I had from you,
Not so much as a scrawl to say you could not write!

Amy Lowell
Oh! To be a flower Nodding in the sun, Bending, then upspringing As the breezes run.

Amy Lowell
Heart-leaves of lilac all over New England,
Roots of lilac under all the soil of New England,
Lilac in me because I am New England.

Amy Lowell
I do not suppose that anyone not a poet can realize the agony of creating a poem. Every nerve, even every muscle, seems strained to the breaking point. The poem will not be denied; to refuse to write it would be a greater torture. It tears its way out of the brain, splintering and breaking its passage, and leaves that organ in the state of a jelly-fish when the task is done.

Amy Lowell
Fifteen millions of soldiers with popguns and horses All bent upon killing, because their "of courses" Are not quite the same.

Amy Lowell
Time! Joyless emblem of the greed of millions, robber of the best which earth can give.

Amy Lowell
Poetry is the most concentrated form of literature; it is the most emotionalized and powerful way in which thought can be presented.

Amy Lowell
Underneath my stiffened gown Is the softness of a woman bathing in a marble basin, A basin in the midst of hedges grown So thick, she cannot see her lover hiding, But she guesses he is near, And the sliding of the water Seems the stroking of a dear Hand upon her.

Amy Lowell
For hate is old as eagle peaks,
And hate is new as sunrise gulls,
And hate is ravening vulture beaks
Descending on a place of skulls.

Amy Lowell
Poets are always the advance guard of literature; the advance guard of life. It is for this reason that their recognition comes so slowly.

Amy Lowell
But a place is nothing, not even space,
Unless at its heart a figure stands.

Amy Lowell
Life is a stream
On which we strew
Petal by petal the flower of our heart.

Amy Lowell