Lyricism Quotes

“Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations.”
― Lawrence Ferlinghetti

“Despair is the state in which anxiety and restlessness are immanent to existence. Nobody in despair suffers from “problems”, but from his own inner torment and fire. It’s a pity that nothing can be solved in this world. Yet there never was and there never will be anyone who would commit suicide for this reason. So much for the power that intellectual anxiety has over the total anxiety of our being! That is why I prefer the dramatic life, consumed by inner fires and tortured by destiny, to the intellectual, caught up in abstractions which do not engage the essence of our subjectivity. I despise the absence of risks, madness and passion in abstract thinking. How fertile live, passionate thinking is! Lyricism feeds it like blood pumped into the heart!”
― Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

“When the lyrical muse sings the creative pen dances.”
― Aberjhani, Splendid Literarium: A Treasury of Stories, Aphorisms, Poems, and Essays

“Unless the object of the singer’s affection is a vampire, surely what Hart means is unphotogenic. Only vampires are unphotographable, but affectionate ‘-enic’ rhymes are hard to come by.”
― Stephen Sondheim, Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics, 1954-1981, With Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines, and Anecdotes

“...his [Mayakovsky] genius was as indispensable to the Russian Revolution as Dzherzhinsky's police. Lyricism, lyricization, lyrical talk, lyrical enthusiasm are an integrating part of what is called the totalitarian world; that world is not the gulag as such; it's a gulag that has poems plastering its outside walls and people dancing before them.”
― Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts

“Poets who write mostly about love, roses and moonlight, sunsets and snow, must lead a very quiet life. Seldom, I imagine, does their poetry get them into difficulties. Beauty and lyricism are really related to another world, to ivory towers, to your head in the clouds, feet floating off the earth. Unfortunately, having been born poor--and also colored--in Missouri, I was stuck in the mud from the beginning. Try as I might to float off into the clouds, poverty and Jim Crow would grab me by the heels, and right back on earth I would land.”
― Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings

“...Paul Dermée. In the inaugural issue of L’Esprit Nouveau in October 1920, Dermée published “Découverte du lyrisme” (Discovery of lyricism), a piece connecting lyricism, automatism, dream, Freud, cinema, and surrealism:

 "This background activity that became autonomous and functions blindly without the use of conscious will, this is what we call “automatism” [automatisme].

"We dream, kaleidoscope of images, sensations and emotions function. The film unfolds, varied and captivating [captivant] and the whole richness of inner life traverses consciousness as a broad current: our soul fills up with a spontaneous melody, it is the lyrical flux that sings!

"As for images, they must be handled with great care, by preventing them from giving objects an existence in the exterior world. For nothing must make the reader come out of his deep self. Thus no images realizable through plastic means: only their surrealism [surréalisme].”
― Christophe Wall-Romana, Cinepoetry: Imaginary Cinemas in French Poetry

“I get awkwardly sturdy with a frigid liquid backbone. I get swept in the pressure cooker, tryin' to paddle back home...i'm gonna be a big bang, gotta be, never bottle me up in a probably...i huddle in a tunnel of big dreams, i think big things. I'm gonna burn w/ this little light of mine & a prime concern to earn thanks, I'm gonna be a Big Bang...' --Big Bang”
― Aesop Rock, The Living Human Curiosity Sideshow

“Sexuality is the lyricism of the masses.”
― Charles Baudelaire, Intimate Journals

“That what is imprisoned
In a name and not seen
Daylight, shall one day
Spurt out as Spring. With
The hope of recognition,
Thus words here would
Transform into Word Prism.”
― Al Mamoon Mohit, Word Prism

“I only live to love so many
Fig trees but could never
Sleep under one. One is too
Little in one lifetime.”
― Al Mamoon Mohit, Word Prism

“elbows-out walk like a scorpion all burred up for a fight”
― Tim Winton, The Shepherd's Hut

“If you haven’t facts make up with lyricism.”
― Anton Chekhov

“…if I had assumed a beach it was because of that other shipwreck in my brain,[/]
where early early[/]
and from the start[/]
I had figmented a sandbar the color of gold,[/]
and a yellow shoal glowering with mist,[/]
and rocking there a figure tugged[/]
and secreted like a sculpture by tide,[/]
or like the raised effigy on a coin of some overrun civilization,[/]
the lineaments of its caesar’s profile swathed in undersea moss,[/]
the eye of a rubbed freckle,[/]
the noble nose worn to a snub,[/]
conquest sea-dyed pale dead tan.[/]
My father’s body lay in my brain,[/]
and in the same sea-vessel[/]
yet elsewhere on still another beach[/]
the body of my governess spread itself flat on a flat rock,[/]
sporting motionless;[/]
and here is the lizard of my father’s tread, crouching;[/]
and Palestine burning;[/]
while beyond, in the water, as they join,[/]
a book opens wings without lungs and drowns.”
― Cynthia Ozick, Trust