Remarks by Maurice Thompson | V2Melody Quotations

Search

Topic

Browse topics

Showing 19 of 19 remarks

“The side-light of out-door nature is absolutely necessary to the historian, the poet, and the novelist, and he who neglects it fails in one of the prime requirements of the best art.”

Weather and landscape treated as a duty of literary art · Essay, Out-Door Influences in Literature

“The poetry of solitude stalks embodied as a sylvan toxophilite who goes alone into a primeval grove.”

The solitary archer as a walking figure of lyric isolation · Essay, An Archer on the Kankakee

“The craftsmanship of the true fletcher is next to the poet's.”

Arrow-making set beside verse as a precision art · Essay, An Archer on the Kankakee

“It is medicine, it is cheer, recreation, a return to the authentic standard, this draught of what my distant ancestors drank, from morning till night, all the days of their lives.”

The outdoor day taken as an inherited tonic · Essay, An Archer in the Cherokee Hills

“All is taken from my own experience; not a rule is laid down which I have not practically tested.”

Field practice offered as the only warrant for advice · Preface, The Witchery of Archery

“I have been forced to conclude that a good part of bird-song is the mechanical response to what may be called hereditary memory.”

Melody treated as inheritance as much as invention · Essay, The Motif of Bird-Song, in Sylvan Secrets

“Genuine bird-song is simply the highest form of avian vocalization, by which instinctively, if not premeditatedly, the bird finds expression of pleasure.”

Song defined as pleasure finding a voice · Essay, The Motif of Bird-Song, in Sylvan Secrets

“In a certain way, indeed, the birds are true poets, singing forth the influence of their environments—just as Burns sang his, just as Millet painted his.”

Bird-song ranked with human art as an answer to place · Essay, The Motif of Bird-Song, in Sylvan Secrets

“The poet who does not truly sing himself is like Eutychus, the painter in the epigram, who begat twenty sons and never got a single likeness, even among his children.”

Impersonal verse dismissed as a family without faces · Essay, The Personal Note

“Style is the artist's breath of life, which, with divine power, he blows into his clay and makes it a living soul in his own image.”

Form as animation rather than ornament · Essay, The Personal Note

“Style is not only the man himself, as Buffon guessed; it is the man himself plus what he has gathered from Nature and transmitted in his crucible of genius.”

Style treated as character refined by outdoor gathering · Essay, The Personal Note

“We Americans are too fast with whatever we undertake.”

Speed blamed for missing what is worth remembering on the road · Essay, Tangle-Leaf Papers, in By-Ways and Bird Notes

“Nature is always in earnest.”

Why most humorists, he thought, need four walls · Essay, Tangle-Leaf Papers, in By-Ways and Bird Notes

“Ten to one what had seemed quite perfect, read in the atmosphere of the library, will fall off to a mere skeleton in the open air.”

Books that thrive indoors may fail when set beside living weather · Essay, Tangle-Leaf Papers, in By-Ways and Bird Notes

“A novel that will bear the sunlight and the winds and the bird-songs may be put down as a thoroughly good one.”

Outdoor reading proposed as a test of literary worth · Essay, Tangle-Leaf Papers, in By-Ways and Bird Notes

“I sometimes read French novels out-of-doors, merely for the antiseptic effect that the sun and air have on the offensive passages; but at best I often find myself glad that American birds and flowers do not understand French.”

Open air used as a moral filter for racy fiction · Essay, Tangle-Leaf Papers, in By-Ways and Bird Notes

“After all, the title Sylvan Secrets does not necessarily signify that the Secrets are explained; they may be merely catalogued as precious mysteries, valuable for the very qualities which render them insoluble.”

Mystery kept as a good rather than a problem to be solved · Preface, Sylvan Secrets

“As for me, when I turn these leaves I hear the rustle of wild foliage and wilder wings, the songs of many birds, the babbling of innumerable brooks. Can the reader hear these by these same means? If so, my writing has not been in vain.”

Success measured by whether the page still carries the woods · Preface, Sylvan Secrets

“To me nature is romance. How shall I be mute when the very stars are eloquent?”

Nature treated as a language that obliges the writer to answer · Essay, Sylvan Secrets