The life you have led doesn't need to be the only life you have.
Anna QuindlenRead
People who are knowledgeable about poetry sometimes discuss it in that knowing, rather hateful way in which oenophiles talk about wine: robust, delicate, muscular. This has nothing to do with how most of us experience it, the heart coming around the corner and unexpectedly running into the mind. Of all the words that have stuck to the ribs of my soul, poetry has been the most filling.
Interpretation
Poetry is deeply personal and subjective, often misunderstood by those who analyze it academically.
In this quote, Anna Quindlen reflects on the way poetry is often discussed by experts in a detached and technical manner, contrasting it with the genuine and emotional experience that most people have when they encounter poetry. She emphasizes that for her, poetry is not just an art form, but something that nourishes the soul and resonates on a deeper level, highlighting the emotional connection we can have with words.
In practice
In a discussion about the importance of art in our lives, you could use this quote to highlight the emotional depth of poetry.
The life you have led doesn't need to be the only life you have.
The future is built on brains, not prom court, as most people can tell you after attending their high school reunion. But you'd never know it by talking to kids or listening to the messages they get from the culture and even from their schools.
I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me.
With reference to the younger generation..."If the experience of their exhausted, insomniac, dispirited elders makes them decide they'd prefer not to go straight from the classroom to the cubicle to the coffin, it doesn't mean they're lazy. It means they're sane."
Ideas are only lethal if you suppress and don't discuss them. Ignorance is not bliss, it's stupid. Banning books shows you don't trust your kids to think and you don't trust yourself to be able to talk to them.
I conveniently forgot to remember that people only have two hands, or, as another parent once said of having a third child, it's time for a zone defense instead of man-to-man.
A portrait photographer depends upon another person to complete his picture. The subject imagined, which in a sense is me, must be discovered in someone else willing to take part in a fiction he cannot possibly know about.
Sometimes, it's all about the casting.
I am more a friend of art than a producer of painting.
What is certain is that setting a piece of nature in place and drawing it are two very different things.
Writing is the hardest work in the world. I have been a bricklayer and a truck driver, and I tell you β as if you haven't been told a million times already β that writing is harder. Lonelier. And nobler and more enriching.
It is only by presenting those portions of the race in my pictures, in the light and backround of their true state, that we can raise our people to greater heights.
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