Quotes by American Authors - Page 3124

I will try to disappoint youbetter than anyone else has.
Stephen Dunn
Why does a heart wear its eyesinto helllike slivers of false sunshine
Fanny Howe
Let me remember you, soon will the winter be on us,Snow-hushed and heartless.
Sara Teasdale
I have no riches but my thoughts, Yet these are wealth enough for me
Sara Teasdale
Let your love flow where the beautiful things are and something beautiful will always come your way.
Robert M. Drake
Maple. MaypoleCatch and carry.Ash and Ember.Elderberry.Woolen. Woman.Moon at night.Willow. Window.Candlelight.Fallow farrow.Ash and oak.Bide and borrow.Chimney smoke.Barrel. Barley.Stone and stave.Wind and water.Misbehave.
Patrick Rothfuss
We are each what never leaves us, what we never seethe back ofis the self. But what loves usis at the back, as Eurydice wasescorting him outwithout his knowing.
Christina Davis
One cannot make bargains for blissesOr catch them like fishes in netsAnd sometimes the things that life misses Help more than the things that it gets.
Alice Carey
...few young poets [are] testing their poems against the ear. They're writing for the page, and the page, let me tell you, is a cold bed.
Stanley Kunitz
Poetry is the scholar's art.
Wallace Stevens
Shit is disgusting and horrible. A lot of people and things are disgusting and horrible, and I want to be a nice person, and I am. When you are speaking about rejected people whose suffering makes them disgusting, you are speaking about shit. I do not mean that we should all eat shit and love what we can’t help rejecting. I am saying that I tried to do that, just to see if it was possible.It’s not possible.
Ariana Reines
It was not like everyone had said.Not like being needed,or needing; not desperate;it did not whisperthat I'd come to harm. I didn't losemy head. No, I was notgoing to leap from a greatheight and flapmy wings.It was in factthe opposite of flying:it contained the wishto be toppled, to be on the floor,the ground, anywhere I mightlie down. . . .On my back, and you on me.
Deborah Garrison
I came here to be for all and with all,and what I do today in my solitudewill be echoed tomorrow by the multitude.What I say now with one heartwill be said tomorrow by thousands of hearts...
Kahlil Gibran
A poet must discover that it’s his own story that is true, even if the truth is small indeed.
Jim Harrison
...if you do not even understand what words say, how can you expect to pass judgement on what words conceal?
H.D.
Your friends, and your associates, and the people around you, and the environment that you live in, and the speakers around you - the speakers around you - and the communicators around you, are the poetry makers.If your mother tells you stories, she is a poetry maker.If your father says stories, he is a poetry maker.If your grandma tells you stories, she is a poetry maker.And that’s who forms our poetics.
Juan Felipe Herrera
Title: Blue Light Lounge Sutra For The Performance Poets At Harold Park Hotelthe need gotta beso deep words can'tanswer simple questionsall night long notesstumble off the tongue& color the air indigoso deep fragments of gut& flesh cling to the songyou gotta get into itso deep salt crystalizes on eyelashesthe need gotta beso deep you can vomit up ghosts& not feel brokentill you are no morethan a half ounce of goldin painful brightnessyou gotta get into itblow that saxophoneso deep all the sex & dope in this worldcan't erase your needto howl against the skythe need gotta beso deep you can'tjust wiggle your hips& rise up out of itchaos in the cosmosmodern man in the pepperpotyou gotta get hookedinto every hungry grooveso deep the bomb lockedin rust opens like a fistinto it into it so deeprhythm is pre-memorythe need gotta be basicanimal need to see& know the terrorwe are made of honeycause if you wanna dancethis boogie be readyto let the devil use your headfor a drum
Yusef Komunyakaa
i laced my shoes with sorrowand walked a weary roaddead end streetsdon't come undonewith double knots wing tipped shoesthat walk on airthrough vacant lots
Saul Williams
Imagination is a very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study, but by the intellect being where and what it sees, by sharing the path, or circuits of things through forms, and so making them translucid to others.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Wherever we go we do harm, forgivingourselves as wheels do cement for wearingeach other out. We set this houseon fire, forgetting that we live within.(from "To a Meadowlark," for M.L. Smoker)
Jim Harrison
i want to go to the gymand pretend the weight machines are drumsand play the longest drum solo on them
Megan Boyle
Poetry is the language of the soul;Poetic Prose, the language of my heart.Each line must flow as in a song,and strike a chord that rings forever.To me, words are music!
Lori R. Lopez
They kept me in a cage for too long because now every room I am standing in is just another cell.
Raegan Butcher
Enjoy yourselves. And Hap: Don't let Umber near the arrows and bows; he's liable to shoot himself in the nose." Dodd grinned and snapped the reins, and the carriage rolled away. Umber sniffed. "One of his lesser poems. Come, Hap.
P.W. Catanese
Song of myselfSmile O voluptuous cool-breath'd earth! Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees! Earth of departed sunset--earth of the mountains misty-topt! Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon just tinged with blue! Earth of shine and dark mottling the tide of the river! Earth of the limpid gray of clouds brighter and clearer for my sake! Far-swooping elbow'd earth--rich apple-blossom'd earth! Smile, for your lover comes.
Walt Whitman
But neither money nor machines can create. They shuttle tokens of energy, but they do not transform. A civilization based on them puts people out of touch with their creative powers.
Lewis Hyde
What happens to a dream deferred?
Langston Hughes
There is nothinggoing on. I took nothingyou wanted. You can'thave it back.
Daphne Gottlieb
Higgledy piggledy, my black hen,She lays eggs for gentlemen.Gentlemen come every dayTo count what my black hen doth lay.If perchance she lays too many,They fine my hen a pretty penny;If perchance she fails to lay,The gentlemen a bonus pay.Mumbledy pumbledy, my red cow,She’s cooperating now.At first she didn’t understandThat milk production must be planned;She didn’t understand at firstShe either had to plan or burst,But now the government reportsShe’s giving pints instead of quarts.Fiddle de dee, my next-door neighbors,They are giggling at their labors.First they plant the tiny seed,Then they water, then they weed,Then they hoe and prune and lop,They they raise a record crop,Then they laugh their sides asunder,And plow the whole caboodle under.Abracadabra, thus we learnThe more you create, the less you earn.The less you earn, the more you’re given,The less you lead, the more you’re driven,The more destroyed, the more they feed,The more you pay, the more they need,The more you earn, the less you keep,And now I lay me down to sleep.I pray the Lord my soul to takeIf the tax-collector hasn’t got it before I wake.
Ogden Nash
As she bends for a Kleenex in the dark, I am thinking of other girls: the girl I loved who fell in love with a lion--she lost her head over it--we just necked a lot; of the girl who fell in love with the tightrope, got addicted to getting high wired and nothing else was enough; all the beautiful, damaged women who have come through my life and I wonder what would have happened if I'd met them sooner, what they were like before they were so badly wounded. All this time I thought I'd been kissing, but maybe I'm always doing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, kissing dead girls in hopes that the heart will start again. Where there's breath, I've heard, there's hope.
Daphne Gottlieb
Much Madness is Divinest Sense, to a Discerning Eye....
Emily Dickinson
You are my brother and I love you. I love you worshipping in your church, kneeling in your temple, and praying in your mosque. You and I and all are children of one religion, for the varied paths of religion are but the fingers of the loving hand of the Supreme Being, extended to all, offering completeness of spirit to all, anxious to receive all.
Kahlil Gibran
Why are there trees I never walk under but large and melodious thoughts descend upon me?
Walt Whitman
A garden should make you feel you've entered privileged space -- a place not just set apart but reverberant -- and it seems to me that, to achieve this, the gardener must put some kind of twist on the existing landscape, turn its prose into something nearer poetry.
Michael Pollan
So very lovely His blood on her swollen lips His first vampireSo very lovely He would have to remember Each salacious cutHe took her slowly Bled her of secrets and screams He smiled contemplating That vampires bled just like whores.
Wrath James White
All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking
Robert Hass
You can make a difference in another person's life and not realize it, just by giving them One Moment of your time, One Memory to recall, One Motion that tells them they are not alone! OM!
Deb Simpson
Across the centuries the moral systems from medival chivalry to Bruce Springsteen love anthems have worked the same basic way. They take immediate selfish interests and enmesh them within transcendent, spiritual meanings. Love becomes a holy cause, an act of self-sacrifice and selfless commitment.But texting and the utilitarian mind-set are naturally corrosive toward poetry and imagination. A coat of ironic detachment is required for anyone who hopes to withstand the brutal feedback of the marketplace. In today's world, the choice of a Prius can be a more sanctified act than the choice of an erotic partner.This does not mean that young people today are worse or shallower than young people in the past. It does mean they get less help. People once lived within a pattern of being, which educated the emotions, guided the temporary toward the permanent and linked everyday urges to higher things. The accumulated wisdom of the community steered couples as they tried to earn each other's commitment.Today there are fewer norms that guide that way. Today's technology seems to threaten the sort of recurring and stable reciprocity that is the building block of trust.
David Brooks
My best testimonies are from the times I thought I couldn't survive.
Tanya R. Liverman
We made love outdoorsWithout a roof, I like most, Without stove, to make love, assuming the weather be fair and balmy, and the earth beneath be clean. Our souls intertwined and gushing of dew.
Roman Payne
I love my love with a b because she is peculiar.
Gertrude Stein
A poet could kill the dead.
Cameron Conaway
She has learned to love. To fear. To hate. And then to love again. Through it all, she writes.” ~Once Upon A Time There Was A Girl
Kimberly Kinrade
A skillful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect. If his very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition there should be no words written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design. And by such means, with such care and skill, a picture is at length painted which leaves in the mind of him who contemplates it with a kindred art, a sense of the fullest satisfaction. The idea of the tale has been presented unblemished because undisturbed: and this is an end unattainable by the novel. Undue brevity is just as exceptionable here as in the poem; but undue length is yet more to be avoided.
Edgar Allan Poe
As a poet and as a mathematician, he would reason well; as a mere mathematician, he could not have reasoned at all.
Edgar Allan Poe
If I bet on humanity, I'd never cash a ticket.
Charles Bukowski
I - will have poetry in my life. And adventure. And love. Love above all.
Marc Norman
Poetry isn't like any writing I've ever heard before. I don't understand all of it, just bits of images, sentences that appear half-finished, all fluttering together like brightly colored ribbons in the wind.
Lauren Oliver
I ask for nothing. / In return I give All. / There is no earning my Love. / No work needed, no effort / Save to listen to what is already heard, / To see what is already seen. / To know what is already known. / Do I seem to ask too little? / Would you give although I ask not? / Then this you can give me and I will accept. / I will take your heart. / You will find it waiting for you / When you return.
Ki Longfellow
. . . chasing after words like trying to grab the tails of comets.
Libba Bray
What is madness but nobility of the soul at odds with circumstance.
Theodore Roethke
That's what I want, that kind of recklessness where the poem is even ahead of you. It's like riding a horse that's a little too wild for you, so there's this tension between what you can do and what the horse decides it's going to do.
Li-Young Lee
So all night long the storm roared on:The morning broke without a sun;In tiny spherule traced with linesOf Nature’s geometric signs,In starry flake, and pellicle,All day the hoary meteor fell;And, when the second morning shone,We looked upon a world unknown,On nothing we could call our own.Around the glistening wonder bentThe blue walls of the firmament,No cloud above, no earth below,—A universe of sky and snow!
John Greenleaf Whittier
CALL YOURSELFLook deep in the mirrorAnd say: 'I LOVE YOU'And immediatelyAn electric current willRipple throughout your soulAnd burst through your eyesLike shooting starsDancing across the skiesIn ecstasy.To tell your soul you love it -Is like rememberingWHO YOU AREAfter being in a comaFor a hundred years.Your face will beam the lightOf a hundred galaxies.
Suzy Kassem
I was the first Chicano to write in complete sentences.
Gary Soto
If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?
Joyce Carol Oates
Every good poem asks a question, and every good poet asks every question.
Dorianne Laux
The music is a vibration in the brain rather than the ear.
Amy Clampitt
Is Bliss then, such Abyss,I must not put my foot amissFor fear I spoil my shoe? I'd rather suit my footThan save my Boot --For yet to buy another Pairis possible,At any store -- But Bliss, is sold just once.The Patent lostNone buy it any more --
Emily Dickinson
The fact that Iam writing to youin Englishalready falsifies what Iwanted to tell you.My subject:how to explain to youthat I don't belong to Englishthough I belong nowhere else,if not herein English.
Gustavo Perez Firmat