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Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within
Kim Addonizio
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Maybe you're one of those people who writes poems, but rarely reads them. Let me put this as delicately as I can: If you don't read, your writing is going to suck.”
“Imagine a sentence as a hall with a series of doors. Each door is a possible way to use what you’ve already written to generate new material.”
“This is your genius: your own profound desire to write. Your love of words and language, your attempt to get to what poet Donald Hall called “the unsayable said.” If”
“Today I found a twenty in the red-lined pocket of my wool coat. There’s no twenty-dollar bill in the red lining of my uterus.”
“Poems are what you make when you experience life in a certain way. Alive to yourself in the world, observant of inner and outer reality, and connected to language”
“The truth is, life is difficult and intense. The beauty is that we have art and love to give us solace, and joy, a reason to live and a reason to care about what happens in, and to, the world.”
“The artists who copied Rembrandt did so to learn about painting, not to be lesser versions of the master. They imitated as a way of looking closely, and then used what they had learned to develop their own work, brushstroke by brushstroke. Line by line, you can do the same.”
“Reading is like food to a writer; without it, the writer part of you will die—or become spindly and stunted.”
“Picasso said, “Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.”
“Forget wondering, Am I good enough? Can I do this? The only thing you really need to ask yourself is: Is writing my genius? If it is, then apprentice yourself.”
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Book Keywords:
poetry, writing, reading