Recitation Quotes

“Breath control is crucial to most of the contemplative traditions... Qur'anic reciters chant long phrases for meditation. It is natural for the audience to adjust their breathing too and find that this has a calming, therapeutic effect, which enables them to grasp the more elusive teachings of the text.”
― Karen Armstrong, Muhammad: A Prophet for Our Time

“No matter how you are taught by your teacher about how to recite a poem, it is impossible to wear your teacher's smiling face to the stage. You got to change your own face into a smiling one!”
― Israelmore Ayivor, Shaping the dream

“As I spent those years saying the same collect for purity, the Nicene Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and various other unchanging parts of the liturgy, I learned that common prayer can open the door to deeper levels of engagement and internalization. Like the lyrics of an old favorite song, the words take up residence deep down in our souls. Every recitation "above the surface" draws from memories and associations that shoot out like roots beneath our conscious thoughts and words.”
― Terry J. Stokes, Prayers for the People: Things We Didn't Know We Could Say to God

“Like song or dance, poetry needs to be experienced in performance before it can be fully understood.”
― Dana Gioia, Poetry as Enchantment

“Campus

Shirt sleeves half out of the jeans,
Eyes grounding the green while looking
All around for Christmas nights.

Blue sounds of church bells ringing
On morning streets and alleys
Are rewritten in archways beneath.

The campus is clear of recitation,
And the steps lead to none other than doors
That keep opening to New Year’s hope.”
― Laura Chouette

“Readers my age were made to memorize and recite: their yawns of boredom were discounted. Younger readers have been spared such indignities. Who was lucky? Isn't a form of teaching that avoids all prescription really a form of therapy? In a course called Classical Studies taught by teachers who possess scarcely a word of Latin or Greek, suffering is avoided, but isn't it true that nothing is gained except the absence of suffering?... What have we gained, except a classroom in which no one need feel excluded?”
― Clive James, Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts