Thursday Thirteen #17

Dear Me,

Ever since I was in high school, I've always loved poetry. It is so amazing how the interplay of words can create such beauty and evoke emotions of great meaning and extent. Because of that, I dare say that I attribute my simple passion of composing light poems to this.

I admire a number of poets and one of them is Emily Dickinson.

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830 and lived almost all of her life in her family's houses in Amherst, which has been preserved as the Emily Dickinson Museum. In 1840, Emily was educated at the nearby Amherst Academy, a former boys' school which had opened to female students just two years earlier. She studied English and classical literature, learning Latin and reading the Aeneid over several years and was taught in other subjects including religion, history, mathematics, geology and biology. An American poet, though virtually unknown in her lifetime, Dickinson has come to be regarded, along with Walt Whitman, as one of the two quintessential American poets of the 19th century.

Anyway, here are some beautiful lines (can be considered as quotations, too) from Emily Dickinson's countless poems.


graphic courtesy of Lisa

Thirteen Favorite Lines from Emily Dickinson

1. A word is dead when it is said, some say. I say it just begins to live that day.
   
   
2. Behavior is what a man does, not what he thinks, feels, or believes.
   
   
3. Find ecstasy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough.
   
   
4. Forever is composed of nows.
   
   
5. Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul - and sings the tunes without the words - and never stops at all.
   
   
6. How strange that nature does not knock, and yet does not intrude!
   
   
7. I do not like the man who squanders life for fame; give me the man who living makes a name.
   
   
8. If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain.
   
   
9. If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.
   
   
10. Luck is not chance, it is toil. Fortune is expensive smile is earned.
    
    
11. Old age comes on suddenly, and not gradually as is thought.
    
    
12. Success is counted sweetest by those who never succeed.
    
    
13. Truth is so rare that it is delightful to tell it.

Links to other Thursday Thirteens!
1. Erin The Innocent
2. Emmyrose
3. Rae
4. The Rock Chick
5. damozel
6. Denise


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