Poems, even when narrative, do not resemble stories. All stories are about battles, of one kind or another, which end in victory or defeat. Everything moves towards the end, when the outcome will be known. Poems, regardless of any outcome, cross the battlefields, tending the wounded, listening to the wild monologues of the triumphant or the fearful. They bring a kind of peace. Not by anaesthesia or easy reassurance, but by recognition and the promise that what has been experienced cannot disappear as if it had never been. Yet the promise is not of a monument. (Who, still on a battlefield, wants monuments?) The promise is that language has acknowledged, has given shelter, to the experience which demanded, which cried out. John Berger
I wore your promise on my finger for one year I'll wear your name on my heart til I die Because you were my boy, you were my only boy forever.
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Coco J. Ginger
When male authors write love stories, the heroine tends to end up dead.
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Susan Elizabeth Phillips
I wondered if the person who really loves you is the person who knows all your stories, the person who WANTS to know all your stories.
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Gabrielle Zevin
Stories make us more alive, more human, more courageous, more loving.
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Madeleine LEngle
I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without...
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Gilda Radner
More Quotes By John Berger
Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.
A man's death makes everything certain about him. Of course, secrets may die with him. And of course, a hundred years later somebody looking through some papers may discover a fact which throws a totally different light on his life and of which all the...
My heart born nakedwas swaddled in lullabies. Later alone it worepoems for clothes. Like a shirt I carried on my backthe poetry I had read. So I lived for half a centuryuntil wordlessly we met. From my shirt on the back of the chair I...
The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.
When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything...
