Louise Bogan Quotes

41 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Louise Bogan
No more pronouncements on lousy verse. No more hidden competition. No more struggling not to be a square.

Louise Bogan
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!

Louise Bogan
The intellectual is a middle-class product; if he is not born into the class he must soon insert himself into it, in order to exist. He is the fine nervous flower of the bourgeoisie.

Louise Bogan
Because language is the carrier of ideas, it is easy to believe that it should be very little else than such a carrier.

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

Louise Bogan
It is almost impossible for the poetess, once laurelled, to take off the crown for good or to reject values and taste of those who tender it.

Louise Bogan
How much of our inner substance is it good for us to give to public griefs? The whole modern tendency to agonize over the suffering of the entire globe is surely something new.

Louise Bogan
But it's silly to suggest the writing of poetry is something ethereal, a sort of soul-crashing, devastating emotional experience that wrings you. I have no fancy ideas about poetry.... It doesn't come to you on the wings of a dove. It's something you have to work hard at.

Louise Bogan
I have lost faith in universal panaceas - work is the one thing in which I really believe.

Louise Bogan
The terrible beast, that no one may understand,
Came to my side, and put down his head in love.

Louise Bogan
But is there any reason to believe that a woman's spiritual fibre is less sturdy than a man's? Is it not possible for a woman to come to terms with herself if not with the world; to withdraw more and more, as time goes on, her own personality from her productions; to stop childish fears of death and eschew charming rebellions against facts?

Louise Bogan
O fortunate bride, who never again will become elated after
childbirth!
O lucky older wife, who has been cured of feeling unwanted!

Louise Bogan
O God, in the dream the terrible horse began
To paw at the air, and make for me with his blows.

Louise Bogan
Once form has been smashed, it has been smashed for good, and once a forbidden subject has been released, it has been released for good.

Louise Bogan
Intellectuals range through the finest gradations of kind and quality: from those who are merely educated neurotics, usually with strong hidden reactionary tendencies, through mediocrities of all kinds, to men of real brains and sensibility, more or less stiffened into various respectabilities or substitutes for respectability. The number of Ignorant Specialists is large. The number of hysterics and compulsives is also large.

Louise Bogan
The women rest their tired half-healed hearts; they are almost
well.

Louise Bogan
Song, like a wing, tears through my breast, my side,
And madness chooses out my voice again,
Again.

Louise Bogan
It is not possible, for a poet, writing in any language, to protect himself from the tragic elements in human life.... [ellipsis in source] Illness, old age, and death--subjects as ancient as humanity--these are the subjects that the poet must speak of very nearly from the first moment that he begins to speak.

Louise Bogan
All art, in spite of the struggles of some critics to prove otherwise, is based on emotion and projects emotion.

Louise Bogan
Politics are nothing but sand and gravel: it is art and life that feed us until we die. Everything else is ambition, hysteria or hatred.

Louise Bogan
What we suffer, what we endure, what we muff, what we kill, what we miss, what we are guilty of, is done by us, as individuals, in private.

Louise Bogan
I think that 'intellectuals' cause a great deal of trouble trying to do it all with the mind. It is the heart that counts.

Louise Bogan
The fact, and the intuition or logic about the fact, are severe coordinates in fiction. In the short story they must cross with hair-line precision.

Louise Bogan