Quotes by Louise Bogan

“Your work is carved out of agony as a statue is carved out of marble.”

“Innocence of heart and violence of feeling are necessary in any kind of superior achievement: The arts cannot exist without them.”

“But childhood prolonged, cannot remain a fairyland. It becomes a hell.”

“The art of one period cannot be approached through the attitudes (emotional or intellectual) of another”

“Stupidity always accompanies evil. Or evil, stupidity.”

“Women have no wilderness in them. They are provident instead content in the tight hot cell of their hearts. To eat dusty bread.”

“The intellectual is a middle-class product; if he is not born into the class he must soon insert himself into it, in order to exist. He is the fine nervous flower of the bourgeoisie.”

“Because language is the carrier of ideas, it is easy to believe that it should be very little else than such a carrier.”

In the country whereto I goI shall not see the face of my friendNor her hair the color of sunburnt grasses;Together we shall not findThe land on whose hills bends the new moonIn air traversed of birds.What have I thought of love?I have said, It is beauty and sorrow.I have thought that it would bring me lost delights, and splendorAs a wind out of old time . . .But there is only the evening here,And the sound of willowsNow and again dipping their long oval leaves in the water.-- from Betrothed

Come, drunks and drug-takers; come perverts unnerved!Receive the laurel, given, though late, on merit; to whom and wherever deserved.Parochial punks, trimmers, nice people, joiners true-blue,Get the hell out of the way of the laurel. It is deathless And it isnt for you.

The Initial Mystery that attends any journey is: how did the traveler reach his starting point in the first place?

True revolutions ... restore more than they destroy.