Paul Engle Quotes

On this page you can find the TOP of Paul Engle's best quotes! We hope you will find some sayings from Poet Paul Engle's in our collection, which will inspire you to new achievements! There are currently 34 quotes on this page collected since October 12, 1908! Share our collection of quotes with your friends on social media so that they can find something to inspire them!
All quotes by Paul Engle: Hills Horses Language Writing more...
  • You come to know the aches and vanities and tastes and intrigues of an entire neighborhood at a drug store.

    Vanity   Drug   Taste  
  • But maybe it's up the hills or under the leaves or in a ditch somewhere. Maybe it's never found. But what you find, whatever you find, is only part of the missing, and writing is the way the poet finds out what it is he found.

  • I wanted to write poetry almost a little more than I wanted to eat.

  • The corncob was the central object of my life. My father was a horse handler, first trotting and pacing horses, then coach horses, then work horses, finally saddle horses. I grew up around, on, and under horses, fed them, shoveled their manure, emptied the mangers of corncobs.

    Horse   Father   Firsts  
  • Touch was important. The evening of the Third of July we would go around the neighborhood and look at the fireworks others had bought, taking them out of the brown paper sack and handling them cautiously as if they were precious stones. There was envy when we saw sacks with more in them than we had.

  • Soldiers of the American Revolution fought that 18th century war with heavy muskets. In the early 20th century, we kids fought it every Fourth of July not only with exploding powder and shimmering flares, but with all of our senses.

    War   Kids   July  
  • The sharpest memory of our old-fashioned Christmas eve is my mother's hand making sure I was settled in bed.

    Paul Engle (1996). “A Lucky American Childhood”, p.182, University of Iowa Press
  • Contrary to slanderous Eastern opinion, much of Iowa is not flat, but rolling hills country with a lot of timber, a handsome and imaginative landscape, crowded with constant small changes of scene and full of little creeks winding with pools where shiners, crappies and catfish hover.

  • I have published in 'The New Yorker,' 'Holiday,' 'Life,' 'Mademoiselle,' 'American Heritage,' 'Horizon,' 'The Ladies Home Journal,' 'The Kenyon Review,' 'The Sewanee Review,' 'Poetry,' 'Botteghe Oscure,' the 'Atlantic Monthly,' 'Harper's.'

    Home   Holiday   Horizon  
  • Writing is like this -- you dredge for the poem's meaning the way police dredge for a body. They think it is down there under the black water, they work the grappling hooks back and forth.

  • I had been warned about Jews by my gentile friends - they did terrible things with knives to boys.

    Boys   Knives   Terrible  
    Paul Engle (1996). “A Lucky American Childhood”, p.153, University of Iowa Press
  • Without vision you don't see, and without practicality the bills don't get paid.

    Vision   Bills   Paid  
  • All families had their special Christmas food. Ours was called Dutch Bread, made from a dough halfway between bread and cake, stuffed with citron and every sort of nut from the farm - hazel, black walnut, hickory, butternut.

    Nuts   Cake   Black  
    Paul Engle (1960). “Prairie Christmas”
  • I have lectured at Town Hall N.Y., The Library of Congress, Harvard, Yale, Amherst, Wellesley, Columbia, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Louisiana State University, Colorado, Stanford, and scores of other places.

    Illinois   Yale   Library  
  • The years rolled their brutal course down the hill of time. Still poor, my clothes still smelling of the horse barn, still writing those doubtful poems where too much emotion clashed with too many words.

    Horse   Writing   Years  
    Paul Engle (1996). “A Lucky American Childhood”, p.154, University of Iowa Press
  • I knew about holiness, never having missed a Sunday-school class since I started at four years. But if Jews were also religious, how could our neighbor with the grease-grimy shirt use the word 'damn' about them?

    Paul Engle (1996). “A Lucky American Childhood”, p.151, University of Iowa Press
  • I grew up in the prolonged survival of the great age of the horse, with harness and saddle and sleigh bells and horse pictures, not as antiques but the facts of our lives.

    Horse   Survival   Age  
  • To eat in the same room where food is cooked - that is the way to thank the Lord for His abundance.

    Way   Rooms   Abundance  
    Paul Engle (1996). “A Lucky American Childhood”, p.190, University of Iowa Press
  • There must be an alternative between Hollywood and New York, between those two places psychically as well as geographically. The University of Iowa tries to offer such a community, congenial to the young writer, with his uneasiness about writing as an honorable career, or with his excess of ego about calling himself a writer.

    New York   Writing   Iowa  
  • Human life is too difficult for people.

    Paul Engle (1996). “A Lucky American Childhood”, p.160, University of Iowa Press
  • Other families bought automobiles; we had a horse-headed hitching post in front of our house and drove horses.

  • Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power.

    New York Times, February 17, 1957.
  • Writing is rewriting what you have rewritten.

  • A barn with cattle and horses is the place to begin Christmas; after all, that's where the original event happened, and that same smell was the first air that the Christ Child breathed.

    Horse   Children   Air  
    Paul Engle (1960). “Prairie Christmas”
  • Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.

    New York Times, February 17, 1957.
  • All poetry is an ordered voice, one which tries to tell you about a vision in the un-visionary language of farm, city, and love.

    Love   Cities   Voice  
  • When your first marriage goes into tragedy, you become very battle-scarred... I even thought of suicide. Luckily, I had known some happy marriages.

  • Has the painter not always gone to an art school, or at least to an established master, for instruction? And the composer, the sculptor, the architect? Then why not the writer? Good poets, like good hybrid corn, are both born and made.

    Art   School   Gone  
  • Corncobs are the greatest fire-making tinder.

    Fire   Tinder  
    Paul Engle (1996). “A Lucky American Childhood”, p.152, University of Iowa Press
  • For my Oxford degree, I had to translate French and German philosophy (as it turned out, Descartes and Kant) at sight without a dictionary. That meant Germany for my first summer vacation, to learn the thorny language on my own.

    Paul Engle (1996). “A lucky American childhood”, Univ of Iowa Pr
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  • We hope you have found the saying you were looking for in our collection! At the moment, we have collected 34 quotes from the Poet Paul Engle, starting from October 12, 1908! We periodically replenish our collection so that visitors of our website can always find inspirational quotes by authors from all over the world! Come back to us again!
    Paul Engle quotes about: Hills Horses Language Writing