Lyricism Quotes

The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy, but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically. (Ralph Ellison)

Sexuality is the lyricism of the masses.

Charles Baudelaire

What can be considered human emotions? Surely not only lyricism, sadness, tragedy? Doesn't laughter also have a claim to that lofty title? I want to fight for the legitimate right of laughter in "serious" music.

Dmitri Shostakovich

The truth lies somewhere between these two aesthetics [static Cubism and dynamic Futurism]. The 'pure form' of w:Ingres led inevitably to a life-less Platonism; the lyricism and Romanticism of Eugène Delacroix no longer tailed with our cerebral and geometric age.... as in all great ages, today's artwork must be the synthesis of these two things.

Gino Severini

Once we reject lyricism, to blacken a page becomes an ordeal: what's the use of writing in order to say exactly what we had to say?

Emil Cioran

One of the biggest box-office successes in movie history - probably because for young audiences it's like getting a box of Cracker Jack that is all prizes. Written and directed by George Lucas, the film is enjoyable in its own terms, but it's exhausting, too: like taking a pack of kids to the circus. There's no breather in the picture, no lyricism; the only attempt at beauty is in the image of a double sunset. The loudness, the smash-and-grab editing, and the relentless pacing drive every idea out of your head, and even if you've been entertained, you may feel cheated of some dimension - a sense of wonder, perhaps. It's an epic without a dream.

Pauline Kael

The circle of day and night is the law of the classical world: the most restricted but most demanding of the necessities of the world, the most inevitable but the simplest of the legislations of nature. This was a law that excluded all dialectics and all reconciliation, consequently laying the foundations for the smooth unity of knowledge as well as the uncompromising division of tragic existence. It reigns on a world without darkness, which knows neither effusiveness nor the gentle charms of lyricism. All is waking or dreams, truth or error, the light of being or the nothingness of shadow.

Michel Foucault

Dancing is very like poetry. It's like poetic lyricism, sometimes, it's like the rawness of dramatic poetry, it's like the terror - or it can be like a terrible revelation of meaning. Because when you light on a word it strikes you to your heart.

Martha Graham

I think there's a certain lyricism in the telling of a scientific story.

Janna Levin

There is also, for instance, a direct symbolic strength in the words 'Say it with flowers', which makes that poem one of the cornerstones of Danish lyricism. It has stood out like a boot of an exceptionally fine fit..

Asger Jorn

English is much drier. You can get away with a lot less. Pathos, lyricism, these are things you have to tone down if you want the English version of the book to work. (Daniel Kehlmann)

I love the sound of words, the feel of them, the flow of them. I love the challenge of finding just that perfect combination of words to describe a curl of the lip, a tilt of the chin, a change in the atmosphere. Done well, novel-writing can combine lyricism with practicality in a way that makes one think of grand tapestries, both functional and beautiful. Fifty years from now, I imagine I'll still be questing after just that right combination of words.

Lauren Willig

In art progress does not consist in extension, but in the knowledge of limits. Limitation of means determines style, engenders new form, and give impulses to creation. Limited means often constitute the charm and force of primitive painting. Extension, on the contrary, leads the arts to decadence. New means, new subjects. The subject is not the object; it is a new unity, a lyricism which grows completely from the means.

Georges Braque

I find in my poetry and prose the rhythms and imagery of the best - I mean, when I'm at my best - of the good Southern black preachers. The lyricism of the spirituals and the directness of gospel songs and the mystery of blues are in my music or in my poetry and prose, or I missed everything.

Maya Angelou

Joseph Brodsky, writing about Mandelstam, called lyricism the ethics of language. Larkin's wit is the ethics of his poetry. It brings his distress under our control. It makes his personal unhappiness our universal exultation. Armed with his wit, he faces the worst on our behalf, and brings it to order.

Clive James

When I look at the arc of my career, my focus is on lyricism, right? I own that.

Talib Kweli

I love the stuff and material of writing: words. The games you can play with them. The rhythm and lyricism in a good passage of writing. The power of a simple sentence. I also love the paradoxical bind of writing as both freedom and constraint. You start creating characters and scenes out of thin air. But if you do it well enough, that freedom constricts, because your characters are no longer inside you. They become their own people, agents on the page who need to act and think and feel in ways true to who they are...

Randa Abdel-Fattah

A man who is not touched by the earthy lyricism of hot pastrami, the pungent fantasy of corned beef, pickles, frankfurters, the great lusty impertinence of good mustard is a man of stone and without heart.

Herb Gardner

Nature has a million answers. Even as I observe tree trunks, roots, branches, idling in some corner, to be burnt down as wood, it affords an excellent laboratory to the mind. It is exciting, sensuous and intoxicating. If one submits oneself to the form and the raw energy of the tree even when it can no longer bear fruit and leaves, one can see great poetry and lyricism in its intertwining branches and roots. The functional sculptures and paintings are a result of this experiment. The process takes over thereafter, but it is just an ode to nature's beauty.

Manav Gupta