Mary Engelbreit Quotes

With 'A Northern Light,' I've already heard from teenage readers, teachers, librarians - it's been so gratifying. It's amazing that you can take something that matters so deeply to you and make it matter to someone else.

If I love Etta James, it's not just the voice, and it's not just the song, but it's the energy that connects me to her, so if she is strong, I can be strong, too, and if she is sad, I know I am not alone, or if she is joyous, I can connect with that joy.

Perhaps it's the artist in me, but most days, I try to reflect the atmosphere my spirit is breathing in and let the wind carry me to the garments that can deliver that look and feeling in my closet.

It never ceases to amaze me how art can touch and inspire people.

Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

I believe in the relation between photography and music; And thats my inspiration.

whenever I read a passage that moves me, I transcribe it in my diary, hoping my fingers might learn what excellence feels like.

I try to find something that applies not to me only, but to others, but don't try to control it too much. Essentially it is about what moves us, teaches us about ourselves.

Growing up, my room was covered in posters. I was like, "I want to make posters."

That I make poetry and give pleasure - if I give pleasure - are because of you.

Picasso says that an artists paints not to ask a question but because he has found something and he wants to share—he cannot help it—what he has found.

I think I started writing because no one had ever told me you can write about the things you know in a musical. They don't have to come from some far off place.

A poet can't afford to be aloof. The tools of his trade are the people he bumps up against.

In the same way, I can wake up with a very positive idea of what I want to do for my collection, and be completely desperate at night regarding the same thing. And I do a lot of other things too: Writing for me is almost as important as drawing my collection.

An author accepting language's invitation to dance steps onto the floor of his her sensibility-charged consciousness and begins to move instinctively--even if with much dread--in ways that synchronize images, ideas, emotions, sounds, smells, ignorance, and knowledge.

It's always nice for me to get to explore somebody who's feeling that and then does something with it and takes it in a different direction or does something with it. It feels very powerful. It helps me with my own.

It's nice to have a little bit of art to fall back on.

I really love art and I always have in every single different form and I just hope that I'm able to give some art that will touch some people and help them to be more positive and stronger.

If a poet writes to save his soul, he may save the soul of others.

Personally I have a great deal of fun doing it, which is an inspiration in itself really. It really allows me to daydream, as in "schooldream" which is daydreaming with ink and get paid for it which is something I don't say to schools when I go in and talk to them.

Yeah, I'd say there's probably about a couple of hundred people I admire - but that has nothing to do with what a person does themselves. That's why I never mention these things. You can read a detective novel you really like, but it had no bearing on what you do yourself, you just think, "God, how this guy wove this together!" Or you get into the energy of it. Or you see a poem which makes a great statement about sentiment, but it's not sentimental.

Music just gives me so much energy and inspiration. Music and literature in a way probably influence me more than cinema does because they're different forms and yet related. I probably know as much about music history as I do about the history of cinema.

I think any good artist - and I'm not saying that I am one - takes notes and should first emulate their heroes and then try to move beyond them.

Poetry is the work of the bard and of the people who inspire him.

It is the specialist's task to talk about means, about centimeters. An artist's task is to talk about the goal, about kilometers, thousands of kilometers. The organizing role of art consists of infecting the reader, of arousing him with pathos or irony -- the cathode and anode in literature. But irony that is measured in centimeters is pathetic, and centimeter-sized pathos is ridiculous. No one can be carried away by it. To stir the reader, the artist must speak not of means but of ends, of the great goal toward which mankind is moving.