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Quotes by American Authors
- Page 3130
Everything comes down so pasteurizedeverything comes down 16 degreesthey say your amplifier is too loudturn your amplifier downare we high all alone on our kneesmemory is just hips that swinglike a clockthe past projects fantastic scenestic/toc tic/toc tic/tocfuck the clock!
Patti Smith
Even this late it happens:the coming of love, the coming of light.
Mark Strand
I am obnoxious to each carping tongue/ Who says my hand a needle better fits./ A poet's pen all scorn I should thus wrong/ For such despite they cast on female wits;/ If what I do prove well, it won't advance,/ They'll say it's stolen, or else, it was by chance.
Anne Bradstreet
Pirate Captain Jim"Walk the plank," says Pirate Jim"But Captain Jim, I cannot swim.""Then you must steer us through the gale.""But Captain Jim, I cannot sail.""Then down with the galley slaves you go.""But Captain Jim, I cannot row.""Then you must be the pirate's clerk.""But Captain Jim, I cannot work.
Shel Silverstein
If you are of the opinion that the contemplation of suicide is sufficient evidence of a poetic nature, do not forget that actions speak louder than words.
Fran Lebowitz
The grass as bristly and stout as chives and me wondering when the ground will break and me wondering how anything fragile survives
Anne Sexton
For books are more than books, they are the lifeThe very heart and core of ages past,The reason why men lived and worked and died,The essence and quintessence of their lives.
Amy Lowell
You are ice and fire The touch of you burns my hands like snow
Amy Lowell
My love runs by like a day in June, And he makes no friends of sorrows. He'll tread his galloping rigadoon In the pathway of the morrows. He'll live his days where the sunbeams start, Nor could storm or wind uproot him. My own dear love, he is all my heart, -- And I wish somebody'd shoot him.
Dorothy Parker
No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.
T.S Eliot
I saw my face todayAnd it looked older,Without the warmth of wisdomOr the softnessBorn of pain and waiting.The dreams were gone from my eyes,Hope lost in hollownessOn my cheeks,A finger of deathPulling at my jaws.So I did my push-upsAnd wondered if I'd ever find you,To see my faceWith friendlier eyes than mine.
James Kavanaugh
...if you do not even understand what words say,how can you expect to pass judgementon what words conceal?
H.D.
Anyone who has no need of anybody but himself is either a beast or a God."Aristotle
Bruce Wayne Sullivan
I'm like the weather, never really can predict when this rain cloud's gonna burst; when it's the high or it's the low, when you might need a light jacket.Sometimes I'm the slush that sticks to the bottom of your work pants, but I can easily be the melting snowflakes clinging to your long lashes.I know that some people like:sunny and seventy-five,sunny and seventy-five,sunny and seventy-five,but you take me as I am and neverforget to pack an umbrella.
Naomi Shihab Nye
No man can reveal to you aught but that which already lies half asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.
Kahlil Gibran
And medecine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love: these are what we stay alive for.
Tom Schulman
Great poetry needs no interpreter other than a responsive heart.
Helen Keller
I have been happy, though in a dream.I have been happy-and I love the theme:Dreams! in their vivid colouring of lifeAs in that fleeting, shadowy, misty strife
Edgar Allan Poe
Twas the night before Thanksgiving. All the food's in the oven. And I'm in the bedroom performin' self lovin'.
Craig Ferguson
Books are carefully folded forests/void of autumn/bound from the sun
Saul Williams
Hearts rebuilt from hope resurrect dreams killed by hate.
Aberjhani
I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume,For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
Walt Whitman
In my darkest night,when the moon was coveredand I roamed through wreckage,a nimbus-clouded voicedirected me:“Live in the layers,not on the litter.”Though I lack the artto decipher it,no doubt the next chapterin my book of transformationsis already written.I am not done with my changes.
Stanley Kunitz
The Children's HourBetween the dark and the daylight,When the night is beginning to lower,Comes a pause in the day's occupations,That is known as the Children's Hour.I hear in the chamber above meThe patter of little feet,The sound of a door that is opened,And voices soft and sweet.From my study I see in the lamplight,Descending the broad hall stair,Grave Alice, and laughing Allegra,And Edith with golden hair.A whisper, and then a silence:Yet I know by their merry eyesThey are plotting and planning togetherTo take me by surprise.A sudden rush from the stairway,A sudden raid from the hall!By three doors left unguardedThey enter my castle wall!They climb up into my turretO'er the arms and back of my chair;If I try to escape, they surround me;They seem to be everywhere.They almost devour me with kisses,Their arms about me entwine,Till I think of the Bishop of BingenIn his Mouse-Tower on the Rhine!Do you think, o blue-eyed banditti,Because you have scaled the wall,Such an old mustache as I amIs not a match for you all!I have you fast in my fortress,And will not let you depart,But put you down into the dungeonIn the round-tower of my heart.And there will I keep you forever,Yes, forever and a day,Till the walls shall crumble to ruin,And moulder in dust away!
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Ask him why there are hypocrites in the world.''Because it is hard to bear the happiness of others.''When are we happy?''When we desire nothing and realize that possession is only momentary, and so are forever playing.''What is regret?''To realize that one has spent one's life worrying about the future.''What is sorrow?''To long for the past.''What is the highest pleasure?''To hear a good story.
Vikram Chandra
That's not a run in your stocking, it's a hand on your leg.
Frank O'Hara
Anyone who says, “Here’s my address,write me a poem,” deserves something in reply.So I’ll tell a secret instead:poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes,they are sleeping. They are the shadowsdrifting across our ceilings the moment before we wake up. What we have to dois live in a way that lets us find them.
Naomi Shihab Nye
My HeartI'm not going to cry all the timenor shall I laugh all the time,I don't prefer one "strain" to another.I'd have the immediacy of a bad movie,not just a sleeper, but also the big,overproduced first-run kind. I want to be at least as alive as the vulgar. And if some aficionado of my mess says "That's not like Frank!," all to the good! I don't wear brown and grey suits all the time, do I? No. I wear workshirts to the opera,often. I want my feet to be bare,I want my face to be shaven, and my heart--you can't plan on the heart, butthe better part of it, my poetry, is open.
Frank O'Hara
Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies.And be it gash or gold it will not comeAgain in this identical disguise.
Gwendolyn Brooks
come back so i can say yes this time do it again now that i know what to call what you didthis time i'll be ready i like it rough now and i'm done with romance i never met another man who loved me so much at first sight he had to hurt me to do it
Daphne Gottlieb
the only thing required to be a woman is to identifyas one.- period, end of story.
Amanda Lovelace
O stand, stand at the window As the tears scald and start;You shall love your crooked neighbour With your crooked heart.
W.H. Auden
So come to the pond, or the river of your imagination, or the harbor of your longing,and put your lips to the world.And live your life.
Mary Oliver
All those other girls are cake...I'm Crème brûlée...Tiramisu, if you will. Just a few notches above.
Brandi L. Bates
If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it's to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.
Jim Morrison
One need not be a Chamber — to be Haunted — One need not be a House — The Brain has Corridors — surpassing Material Place —
Emily Dickinson
Writing poetry and reading books causes brain damage.
Pat Conroy
I'd rather be thin than famousbut I'm fatpaste that in your broadway show
Jack Kerouac
Unasked, Unsought, Love gives itself but is not bought
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Used to be hewas my heart's desire.His forthright gaze,his expert hands:I'd lie on the couch with my eyesclosed just thinking about it.Never about the factthat everything changes,that even this,my best passion,would not be immune.No, I would bask on in aneternal daydream of the handsfinding me, the gaze like a windingstair coaxing me down. . . .Until I caught a glimpseof something in the mirror:silly girl in her lingerie,dancing with the furniture--a hot little bundle, flush withcliches. Into that pairof too-bright eyes I lookedand saw myself. And something else: would never look that way.
Deborah Garrison
Writing, then, was a substitute for myself: if you don't love me, love my writing & love me for my writing. It is also much more: a way of ordering and reordering the chaos of experience.
Sylvia Plath
Nobody reads poetry, we are told at every inopportune moment. I read poetry. I am somebody. I am the people, too. It can be allowed that an industrious quantity of contemporary American poetry is consciously written for a hermetic constituency; the bulk is written for the bourgeoisie, leaving a lean cut for labor. Only the hermetically aimed has a snowball's chance in hell of reaching its intended ears. One proceeds from this realization. A staggering figure of vibrant, intelligent people can and do live without poetry, especially without the poetry of their time. This figure includes the unemployed, the rank and file, the union brass, banker, scientist, lawyer, doctor, architect, pilot, and priest. It also includes most academics, most of the faculty of the humanities, most allegedly literary editors and most allegedly literary critics. They do so--go forward in their lives, toward their great reward, in an engulfing absence of poetry--without being perceived or perceiving themselves as hobbled or deficient in any significant way. It is nearly true, though I am often reminded of a Transtromer broadside I saw in a crummy office building in San Francisco:We got dressed and showed the houseYou live well the visitor saidThe slum must be inside you.If I wanted to understand a culture, my own for instance, and if I thought such an understanding were the basis for a lifelong inquiry, I would turn to poetry first. For it is my confirmed bias that the poets remain the most 'stunned by existence,' the most determined to redeem the world in words..
C.D. Wright
part memory part distance remainingmine in the ways that I learn to miss you
W.S. Merwin
I choose to love this time for oncewith all my intelligence-from "Splittings
Adrienne Rich
Out of love,No regrets--Though the goodnessBe wasted forever.Out of love,No regrets--Though the returnBe never.
Langston Hughes
I will love you forever" swears the poet. I find this easy to swear too. "I will love you at 4:15 pm next Tuesday" - Is that still as easy?
W.H. Auden
You have played, (I think) And broke the toys you were fondest of, And are a little tired now; Tired of things that break, and— Just tired. So am I.
E.E. Cummings
I sense the world might be more dreamlike, metaphorical, and poetic than we currently believe--but just as irrational as sympathetic magic when looked at in a typically scientific way. I wouldn't be surprised if poetry--poetry in the broadest sense, in the sense of a world filled with metaphor, rhyme, and recurring patterns, shapes, and designs--is how the world works. The world isn't logical, it's a song.
David Byrne
Rocket shipsare excitingbut so are roseson a birthday.
Leonard Nimoy
Poetry is the language of intensity. Because we are going to die, an expression of intensity is justified.
C.D. Wright
MISERABLERelease the toxic and infectious-Spreaders of misery,Souls destroying souls-And poisonous liars.Awaken from the hallucinations-And take back your heart.Reclaim your self-esteem-And leave the toxic be.
Giorge Leedy
The war to preserve the privilege of mythmaking
Marvin Bell
I believe in the flesh and the appetites; Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle. Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touch’d from;The scent of these arm-pits, aroma finer than prayer; This head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds.
Walt Whitman
A certain person wondered whya big strong girl like mewouldn't keep a jobwhich paid a normal salary.I took my time to lead herand to read her every page.Even minimal peoplecan't survive on minimal wage.A certain person wondered whyI wait all week for you.I didn't have the wordsto describe just what you do.I said you had the motionof the ocean in your walk,and when you solve my riddlesyou don't even have to talk.
Maya Angelou
Cheap little rhymesA cheap little tuneAre sometimes as dangerousAs a sliver of the moon.
Langston Hughes
Hinged to forgetfulness like a door,she slowly closed out of sight,and she was the woman I loved,but too many times she slept likea mechanical deer in my caresses,and I ached in the metal silenceof her dreams.
Richard Brautigan
I once broke up with a boy because he wrote me an awful poem.
Karen Joy Fowler
I am ashamed of my century, but I have to smile.
Frank O'Hara
By a route obscure and lonelyHaunted by ill angels only,Where an eidolon, named NIGHT,On a black throne reigns upright,I have reached these lands but newlyFrom an ultimate dim Thule --From a wild, weird clime that lieth, sublime,Out of SPACE, out of TIME.
Edgar Allan Poe
LightLightThe visible reminder of Invisible Light.
T.S Eliot
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