The Border Ballads, for instance, and the Robin Hood Ballads, clearly suppose a state of society which is nothing but a very circumscribed and not very important heroic age. — Lascelles Abercrombie
The greatest poets are those with memories so great that they extend beyond their strongest experiences to their minutest observations of people and things far outside their own self-centeredness. — Stephen Spender
Achilles exists only through Homer . Take away the art of writing from this world , and you will probably take away its glory . — François-René de Chateaubriand
History is a symphony of echoes heard and unheard. It is a poem with events as verses. — Charles Angoff
Nature poets can't walk across the backyard without tripping over an epiphany. — Christian Wiman
The poets are only the interpreters of the Gods. — Socrates
Trees are poems that the earth writes upon the sky. — Kahlil Gibran
Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it. — Percy Bysshe Shelley
Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds. — Percy Bysshe Shelley
What you have to realize when you write poetry, or if you love poetry, is that poetry is just naturally the greatest god damn thing that ever was in the whole universe — James Dickey
Epic Poetry Quotes
The drama is complete poetry. The ode and the epic contain it only in germ; it contains both of them in a state of high development, and epitomizes both. — Victor Hugo
My secret dream is to write an epic poem. That's probably the most pretentious thing I've said. — Laurie Anderson
We ought, everyday, to hear a song, read a fine poem, and, if possible, to speak a few reasonable words.
Any long work in which poetry is persistent, be it epic or drama or narrative, is really a succession of separate poetic experiences governed into a related whole by an energy distinct from that which evoked them. — John Drinkwater
He passes from lyric to epic poetry in order to speak about the world and the torment in the world through man, rationally and emotionally. The poet then becomes a danger. — Salvatore Quasimodo
Epic poetry exhibits life in some great symbolic attitude. It cannot strictly be said to symbolize life itself, but always some manner of life. — Lascelles Abercrombie
If you cannot be a poet, be the poem.
If epic poetry is a definite species, the sagas do not fall within it. — Lascelles Abercrombie
That is to say, epic poetry has been invented many times and independently; but, as the needs which prompted the invention have been broadly similar, so the invention itself has been. — Lascelles Abercrombie
With several different kinds of poetry to choose from, a man would decide that he would like best to be an epic poet, and he would set out, in conscious determination, on an epic poem. — Lascelles Abercrombie
The true evolutionary epic, retold as poetry, is as intrinsically ennobling as any religious epic. — E. O. Wilson
Epic Stories Quotes
God is telling an amazing, glorious, epic story. We have to decide if we will trust Him with it. — Steven Curtis Chapman
Humans enter this world and awaken to a simple truth: We must find our story with this great epic of being. — Brian Swimme
Darwin matters because evolution matters. Evolution matters because science matters. Science matters because it is the preeminent story of our age, an epic saga about who we are, where we came from and where we are going. — Michael Shermer
Do Epic Shit!
I've always loved the old epics that tell a simple emotional story, whether it's the tumultuous relationship between Rhett and Scarlett or Lawrence of Arabia's passion to get lost in a faraway place. — Baz Luhrmann
It is important to tell good stories. You can tell stories even if they are not huge, epic, and wonderful. You can still take the responsibility for being a scribe of your tribe. — Ajay Naidu
Your life is meant to be an epic story. How you think, perform and live today is part of that script. — Robin Sharma
A picture is a poem without words.
I think it is our job, as writers, to be epic. Epic and tiny at the same time. If you're going to be a fiction writer, why not take on something that means something. In doing this, you must understand that within that epic structure it is the tiny story that is possibly more important. — Colum McCann
Nature is a book of many pages and each page tells a fascinating story to him who learns her language. Our fertile valleys and craggy mountains recite an epic poem of geologic conflicts. The starry sky reveal gigantic suns and space and time without end. — A. E. Douglass
The epic implications of being human end in more than this: We start our lives as if they were momentous stories, with a beginning, a middle and an appropriate end, only to find that they are mostly middles. — Anatole Broyard
And for the city's birthday, we will host events in every neighborhood of the city, inviting all of our residents to share in the celebration of Boston's great epic - the story of neighbors who support one another where it matters most. — Thomas Menino
Epic Quotes
Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly. — Franz Kafka
Never make permanent decisions on temporary feelings. — Wiz Khalifa
Life has become immeasurably better since I have been forced to stop taking it seriously. — Hunter S. Thompson
A belief is something you will argue about. A conviction is something you will die for. — Howard G. Hendricks
Anything that gets your blood racing is probably worth doing. — Hunter S. Thompson
How big is your God? The size of your God determines the size of everything. — Howard G. Hendricks
All classes of people under social pressure are permeated with a common experience; they are emotionally welded as others cannot be. With them, even ordinary living has epic depth and lyric intensity, and this, their material handicap, is their spiritual advantage. — Alain LeRoy Locke
You teach what you know, but you reproduce what you are. — Howard G. Hendricks
Epic things start with small humble steps. Pay respect to your beginnings. And if you're just starting out, know that it's OK to be sucky. To be small. To be messy and chaotic. Just make sure to never ever stop dreaming. — Vishen Lakhiani
Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence. — Leonardo da Vinci
Anyone with gumption and a sharp mind will take the measure of two things: what's said and what's done. — Seamus Heaney
Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past. — G. K. Chesterton
We imagine that when we are thrown out of our usual ruts all is lost, but it is only then that what is new and good begins. While there is life there is happiness. There is much, much before us. — Leo Tolstoy
Even though we've written epic poems and made incredible films about love, I still don't think anyone can understand what it is, or why it means everything. — Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor
If a chap can't compose an epic poem while he's weaving tapestry, he had better shut up, he'll never do any good at all. — William Morris
The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal. Some of their most esteemed inventions have no other apparent purpose - for example, the dinner party of more than two, the epic poem, and the science of metaphysics. — H. L. Mencken
Fear? What has a man to do with fear? Chance rules our lives, and the future is all unknown. Best live as we may, from day to day. — Sophocles
Why haven't we fixed sick yet? You scientists there-- put down those starfish and HELP us. I hereby demand that all the people who are good at math make the world free of illness. The rest of us will write you epic poems and staple them together into a booklet. — Daniel Handler
The fact that The Bridge contains folk lore and other material suitable to the epic form need not therefore prove its failure as a long lyric poem, with interrelated sections. — Hart Crane
Troy is based on the epic poem The Iliad by Homer , according to the credits. Homer's estate should sue. — Roger Ebert
A lot of people, when you ask if they want to read your epic poem, start bolting for the door. — Toby Barlow
I visited Paterson many years ago - 20 some years ago as a kind of day trip because of William Carlos Williams, because of Allen Ginsberg having lived there. And I went to the Great Falls and sat really in the exact same spot as Adam Driver does as Paterson. And I walked around the factory buildings, and I was rereading - I was reading at the time the epic length poem "Paterson" by Williams. — Jim Jarmusch
Homer must have felt this pressure to come up with an epic poem that would sound totally new to an audience that had loved his previous best-seller. — Anne Carson
In a way, that's also a recognition that Dante needs Virgil and that the Inferno needs the Aeneid and that the epic needs a model and that for Dante to write this great poem he needs someone to come before him and he turns to Virgil's text, especially book six where Aeneas goes down into the underworld. And for me, that's a model of the poet's relationship to previous poetry, to another poetry as calling out for guidance. — Edward Hirsch
This is a city of absolute enchantment in the literal sense of the word. It loosens all the bonds binding the traveller to his own age and sets him free to live in a past that is vital and crude but never ugly. Herat is as old as history and as moving as a great epic poem - if Afghanistan had nothing else it would have been worth coming to experience this. — Dervla Murphy
In designing a house and gardens, it is happy when there is an opportunity of maintaining a subordination of parts; the house so luckily place as to exhibit a view of the whole design. I have sometimes thought that there was room for it to resemble a epic or dramatic poem. — William Shenstone
He oft finds med'cine, who his griefe imparts; But double griefs afflict concealing harts, As raging flames who striveth to supresse. — Edmund Spenser
It's all about time, dimwit time, inferior time, people checking watches and other devices, other reminders. This is time draining out of our lives. Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There's an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away surfaces, when you see into it, what's left is terror. This is the thing that literature was meant to cure. The epic poem, the bedtime story. — Don Delillo
It is one thing to write as poet and another to write as a historian: the poet can recount or sing about things not as they were, but as they should have been, and the historian must write about them not as they should have been, but as they were, without adding or subtracting anything from the truth. — Miguel de Cervantes
I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket-knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past. — Gilbert K. Chesterton
In Conclusion
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