Quotes about John Donne

6 Sourced Quotes

You should read in your own field only when you're young. When I was 8, 10, 12, 16, 25, I read science fiction. But then I went on to Alexander Pope and John Donne and Moliere to mix it up.

All problems have to be solved eventually by ONESELF, and that's where all your lovely John Donne stuff turns out to be a load of crap because, in the last analysis, A MAN IS AN ISLAND

Kenneth Williams

[Kenneth Patchen] has a real, but disorganized, self-indulgent, but rather commonplace talent.
This is not Mr. Patchen's opinion of himself. (Nor is it that of William Carlos Williams, who almost invents a new language, a kind of system of emotional nonsense syllables, in his effort to praise Mr. Patchen properly. For instance, Mr. Patchen is a hawk on the grave of John Donne. I should have called him a parrot on the stones of half a cemetery.)

Randall Jarrell

I was clever enough to know that John Donne was offering something that was awfully enjoyable. I just wasn't clever enough to actually enjoy it.

And as if reporting some felony to the police they let you know you were not John Donne.

A human being without the proper empathy or feeling is the same as an android built so as to lack it, either by design or mistake. We mean, basically, someone who does not care about the
fate which his fellow living creatures fall victim to; he stands detached, a spectator, acting out by his indifference John Donne's theorem that "No man is an island," but giving that
theorem a twist: that which is a mental and a moral island is not a man.