Voice

Famous quotes containing the word voice:

    And, shrilling from the solar course,
    Or from fruit of chemic force,
    Procession of a soul in matter,
    Or the speeding change of water,
    Or out of the good of evil born,
    Came Uriel’s voice of cherub scorn,
    And a blush tinged the upper sky,
    And the gods shook, they knew not why.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    My solitaria
    Are the meditations of a central mind.
    I hear the motions of the spirit and the sound
    Of what is secret becomes, for me, a voice
    That is my own voice speaking in my ear.
    Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)

    Prose—it might be speculated—is discourse; poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud; poetry overheard. The one is presumably articulate and social, a shared language, the voice of “communication”; the other is private, allusive, teasing, sly, idiosyncratic as the spider’s delicate web, a kind of witchcraft unfathomable to ordinary minds.
    Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)