Life ain't nothin' but a funny, funny riddle

--From “Thank God, I’m a Country Boy” by John Denver


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Hard work without talent is a shame, but talent without hard work is a tragedy.

--From a 7/16/2007 fortune cookie


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Laughter is an instant vacation.

--Milton Berle


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Poetry's project is to use every aspect of language to its maximum effectiveness, finding within it nuances and powers we otherwise could not hear. So the poet needs to be a supreme handler of the figurative speech we all use everyday, employing language's tendency to connect like and disparate things to the richest possible effects. In poetry, figuration is at its most sophisticated: condensed, alive with meaning, pointing in multiple directions at once.

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It's a kind of perceptual signature, a record of a way of an individual way of seeing. This is one of the central things which poetry is: a vessel of individuality, a distillation of the way one person experiences the world, knows herself in time and in place.

--From “Speaking in Figures” by Mark Doty