Singing Voice

Famous quotes containing the words singing and/or voice:

    Why, he was met even now
    As mad as the vexed sea, singing aloud,
    Crowned with rank fumiter and furrow-weeds,
    With hardocks, hemlock, nettles, cuckoo-flowers,
    Darnel, and all the idle weeds that grow
    In our sustaining corn.
    William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

    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)