C. S. Lewis Quotes

In the hands of a great poet, words have ways of affecting us in ways we don't understand.

Every time I read Erin Belieu work I'm pierced in that wonderful way poetry can.

Don't you just love poetry that gives you a crinkly feeling up and down your back?

My poetry has become the way of my giving out what music is within me.

When words become a poem, it makes sense to me, but I don't know how to explain to someone why the words are the way they are. It's just the logic of the poem to me.

The job of the poet (a job which can't be learned) consists of placing those objects of the visible world which have become invisible due to the glue of habit, in an unusual position which strikes the soul and gives them a tragic force.

Many readers judge of the power of a book by the shock it gives their feelings.

Poetry is not the proper antithesis to prose, but to science. Poetry is opposed to science, and prose to meter. The proper and immediate object of science is the acquirement, or communication of truth; the proper and immediate object of poetry is the communication of immediate pleasure.

The effective in art is what rapes the emotions of your audience without nourishing its values.

The more you love, the more loving you become. That's just the way it works. It is a generosity of spirit.

Beauty is the experience that gives us a sense of joy and a sense of peace simultaneously.

The universe of poetry is the universe of emotional truth. Our material is in the way we feel and the way we remember.

It's not that I wrote those details, but photos can give you the confidence that you have a real feel for the landscape. Then you can invent with a solid kind of faith, and recreate a feel and flavor of the time, and, one hopes, a tonality, a sense of that time having been lived by those characters.

What counts more than style is whether architecture improves our experience of the built world; whether it makes us wonder why we never noticed places in quite this way before.

Music is one of the ways by which you can know everything which is going on in the world. You can feel... through music... Whew... you can feel the vibrations of everybody in the world at any given moment.

Understand that the only way to get happiness is by giving it away to others.

Take a report. It's dry, the sentences are clunky and unfelicitous, they're just conveying information. But it seems to me that if you're fully engaged in a great piece of literature, once you enter the rhythms of the language, which is a kind of music, meanings are being conveyed that you're not fully aware of. They enter into your subconscious.

Poetry, I thought then, and still do, is a matter of space on the page interrupted by a few well-chosen words, to give them importance. Prose is a less grand affair which has to stretch to the edges of the page to be convincing.

A film like Hoop Dreams is what the movies are for. It takes us, shakes us, and makes us think in new ways about the world around us. It gives us the impression of having touched life itself.

The best way to come to terms with anything that is out of harmony is never to fear it - that gives it power. Bring good influences to bear upon it; make yourself a good example.

Irving Berlin has no place in American music. He is American music. Emotionally, he honestly absorbs the vibrations emanating from the people, manners and life of his time and, in turn, gives these impressions back to the world -- simplified, clarified and glorified.

Giving orders you know won't be obeyed is one of the best ways I know to destroy your own authority.

We should pray and seek for knowledge which would enable us to portray and project the things we love in music, in a way that might wholly or in some part, be appreciated as having been conceived and composed or performed and presented with dedication and in positive taste

I hope readers will do what I do when I read a novel I like: talk in ways that will illuminate their own lives.

We all have spirits present with us who are feeling the way we are.