Depth of Meaning Quotes

Because I write very simply, but inside the simplicity, there's a lot of subtlety. That's what I'm proud of.

You can't learn pathos or profundity.

It is with fine sentiments that bad literature is made. Descend to the bottom of the well if you wish to see the stars.

A work of art is like a person: it has more than one soul in its breast.

The magical story is not a microscope but a mirror, not a drop of water but a well. It is not simply one thing or two, but a multitude. It is at once both lucid and opaque, it accepts both dark and light, speaks to youth and old age.

Sometimes if something is entertaining and amusing, people tend to think that it doesn't have the depth of something that's dramatic. I don't think that's true.

A poet's mission is to make words do more work than they normally do, to make them work on more than one level.

The water in a vessel is sparkling; the water in the sea is dark. The small truth has words which are clear; the great truth has great silence.

Poetry has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time.

I'm far more interested in putting a little more meat into the lyrics than some people are.

In every object there is inexhaustible meaning.

There is nothing wrong with the love of Beauty. But Beauty-unless she is wed to something more meaningful-is always superficial

I sometimes find the surface interesting. To say that the mark of a good portrait is whether you get them or get the soul - I don't think this is possible all of the time.

To look for some kind of insight or meaning in pop songs is not really - well there's plenty of other places where you should probably look first before you start looking for it in a pop song.

Good poems ask us to have complex minds and hearts. Even simple-of-surface poems want that. Perhaps those are the ones that want it most of all, since that's where they do their work: in the unspoken complexities, understood off the page.

There's a lot of music out there that's like, 'I'm so mad! I'm sad! I'm into skulls and crossbones and the color black,' and that's just meaningless and shallow. So much of metal is about that and it's hard to find metal that is substantial and meaningful in terms of its content.

When works get too intellectual, they lose their intensity.

It would be a lowly art that allowed itself to be understood all at once.

As the beautiful does not exist for the artist and poet alone—though these can find in it more poignant depths of meaning than other men—so the world of Reality exists for all; and all may participate in it, unite with it, according to their measure and to the strength and purity of their desire.

What you think is the point is not the point at all but only the beginning of the sharpness.

The way I work, and the material we work with, I think if you analyze too much and have too many specific ideas, it just becomes a little bit too superficial, and then performances might become too self-conscious and project relatively narrow things.

The amount of chiaroscuro an idea harbors is the only index of its profundity.

A poem makes clear without making simple. Poetry's language carries what lives outside language. It's as if you were given a 5-gallon bucket with 10 gallons of water in it. Mysterious thirsts are answered. That alchemical bucket carries secrets also, even the ones we keep from ourselves.

In every object there is inexhaustible meaning; the eye sees in it what the eye brings means of seeing.

I need words that mean more than they mean, words not just with height and width, but depth and weight and, and other dimensions that I cannot even name.