Quotes by American Authors - Page 3134

The Girl With Many EyesOne day in the parkI had quite a surprise.I met a girlwho had many eyes.She was really quite pretty(and also quite shocking!)and I noticed she had a mouth,so we ended up talking.We talked about flowers,and her poetry classes,and the problems she'd haveif she ever wore glasses.It's great to know a girlwho has so many eyes,but you really get wetwhen she breaks down and cries.
Tim Burton
Only my books anoint me, and a few friends, those who reach into my veins.
Anne Sexton
Poetry is a naked woman, a naked man, and the distance between them.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance.
Anne Sexton
when I am feelinglowall i have to do iswatch my catsand mycouragereturns
Charles Bukowski
I do not know which to prefer,The beauty of inflectionsOr the beauty of innuendosThe blackbird whistlingOr just after.
Wallace Stevens
Here is the repeated image of the lover destroyed.
Richard Siken
Time present and time pastAre both perhaps present in time futureAnd time future contained in time past.
T.S Eliot
Speak against unconscious oppression,Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative,Speak against bonds.
Ezra Pound
A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.
Randall Jarrell
We sit and talk,quietly, with long lapses of silenceand I am aware of the streamthat has no language, coursingbeneath the quiet heaven ofyour eyeswhich has no speech
William Carlos Williams
sweet spring is yourtime is my time is ourtime for springtime is lovetimeand viva sweet love(all the merry little birds areflying in the floating in thevery spirits singing inare winging in the blossoming)lovers go and lovers comeawandering awonderingbut any two are perfectlyalone there's nobody else alive(such a sky and such a suni never knew and neither did youand everybody never breathedquite so many kinds of yes)not a tree can count his leaveseach herself by openingbut shining who by thousands meanonly one amazing thing(secretly adoring shylytiny winging darting floatingmerry in the blossomingalways joyful selves are singing)sweet spring is yourtime is my time is ourtime for springtime is lovetimeand viva sweet love
E.E. Cummings
The TypeEveryone needs a place. It shouldn't be inside of someone else. -Richard SikenIf you grow up the type of woman men want to look at,you can let them look at you. But do not mistake eyes for hands.Or windows.Or mirrors.Let them see what a woman looks like.They may not have ever seen one before.If you grow up the type of woman men want to touch,you can let them touch you.Sometimes it is not you they are reaching for.Sometimes it is a bottle. A door. A sandwich. A Pulitzer. Another woman.But their hands found you first. Do not mistake yourself for a guardian.Or a muse. Or a promise. Or a victim. Or a snack.You are a woman. Skin and bones. Veins and nerves. Hair and sweat.You are not made of metaphors. Not apologies. Not excuses.If you grow up the type of woman men want to hold,you can let them hold you.All day they practice keeping their bodies upright--even after all this evolving, it still feels unnatural, still strains the muscles,holds firm the arms and spine. Only some men will want to learnwhat it feels like to curl themselves into a question mark around you,admit they do not have the answersthey thought they would have by now;some men will want to hold you like The Answer.You are not The Answer.You are not the problem. You are not the poemor the punchline or the riddle or the joke.Woman. If you grow up the type men want to love,You can let them love you.Being loved is not the same thing as loving.When you fall in love, it is discovering the oceanafter years of puddle jumping. It is realizing you have hands.It is reaching for the tightrope when the crowds have all gone home.Do not spend time wondering if you are the type of womanmen will hurt. If he leaves you with a car alarm heart, you learn to sing along.It is hard to stop loving the ocean. Even after it has left you gasping, salty.Forgive yourself for the decisions you have made, the ones you still callmistakes when you tuck them in at night. And know this:Know you are the type of woman who is searching for a place to call yours.Let the statues crumble.You have always been the place.You are a woman who can build it yourself.You were born to build.
Sarah Kay
Voodoo GirlHer skin is white cloth,and she's all sewn apartand she has many colored pinssticking out of her heart.She has many different zombieswho are deeply in her trance.She even has a zombiewho was originally from France.But she knows she has a curse on her,a curse she cannot win.For if someone getstoo close to her,the pins stick farther in.
Tim Burton
My battered heart will always be where the ocean meets the sand, I will break over and overEvery day. That is the best andworst part of me.
Clementine von Radics
After the first glass of vodkayou can accept just about anythingof life even your own mysteriousnessyou think it is nice that a boxof matches is purple and brown and is called La Petite and comes from Swedenfor they are words that you know and that is all you know words not their feelings or what they mean and you write because you know them not because you understand them because you don't you are stupid and lazy and will never be great but you do what you know because what else is there?
Frank O'Hara
To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the music the words make.
Truman Capote
when man determined to destroy himself he picked the was of shall and finding only why smashed it into because
E.E. Cummings
since the thing perhaps isto eat flowers and not to be afraid
E.E. Cummings
My mouth is a fire escape.The words coming outdon’t care that they are naked.There is something burning in there.
Andrea Gibson
i found god in myselfand i loved heri loved her fiercely
Ntozake Shange
If you want me again look for me under your boot soles.
Walt Whitman
The way a crowShook down on meThe dust of snowFrom a hemlock treeHas given my heartA change of moodAnd saved some partOf a day I had rued.
Robert Frost
From childhood's hour I have not beenAs others were; I have not seenAs others saw; I could not bringMy passions from a common spring.From the same source I have not takenMy sorrow; I could not awakenMy heart to joy at the same tone;And all I loved, I loved alone.Then- in my childhood, in the dawnOf a most stormy life- was drawnFrom every depth of good and illThe mystery which binds me still:From the torrent, or the fountain,From the red cliff of the mountain,From the sun that round me rolledIn its autumn tint of gold,From the lightning in the skyAs it passed me flying by,From the thunder and the storm,And the cloud that took the form(When the rest of Heaven was blue)Of a demon in my view.
Edgar Allan Poe
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotion know what it means to want to escape from these.
T.S Eliot
For darkness restores what light cannot repair.
Joseph Brodsky
Looks like what drives me crazyDon't have no effect on you--But I'm gonna keep on at itTill it drives you crazy, too.
Langston Hughes
Listen, real poetry doesn't say anything; it just ticks off the possibilities. Opens all doors. You can walk through anyone that suits you.
Jim Morrison
Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.
Mary Oliver
It’s the fire in my eyes, And the flash of my teeth, The swing in my waist, And the joy in my feet. I’m a woman Phenomenally.
Maya Angelou
I Am VerticalBut I would rather be horizontal.I am not a tree with my root in the soilSucking up minerals and motherly loveSo that each March I may gleam into leaf,Nor am I the beauty of a garden bedAttracting my share of Ahs and spectacularly painted,Unknowing I must soon unpetal.Compared with me, a tree is immortalAnd a flower-head not tall, but more startling,And I want the one's longevity and the other's daring.Tonight, in the infinitesimal light of the stars,The trees and flowers have been strewing their cool odors.I walk among them, but none of them are noticing.Sometimes I think that when I am sleepingI must most perfectly resemble them--Thoughts gone dim.It is more natural to me, lying down.Then the sky and I are in open conversation,And I shall be useful when I lie down finally:The the trees may touch me for once, and the flowers have time for me."I Am Vertical", 28 March 1961
Sylvia Plath
One need not be a chamber to be haunted.
Emily Dickinson
We ran as if to meet the moon.
Robert Frost
You have been told that, even like a chain, you are as weak as your weakest link.This is but half the truth.You are also as strong as your strongest link.To measure you by your smallest deed is to reckon the power of the oceanby the frailty of its foam.To judge you by your failures is to cast blame upon the seasons for their inconstancy.
Kahlil Gibran
We wanderers, ever seeking the lonelier way, begin no day where we have ended another day; and no sunrise finds us where sunset left us. Even while the earth sleeps we travel. We are the seeds of the tenacious plant, and it is in our ripeness and our fullness of heart that we are given to the wind and are scattered.
Kahlil Gibran
Note, to-day, an instructive, curious spectacle and conflict. Science, (twin, in its fields, of Democracy in its)—Science, testing absolutely all thoughts, all works, has already burst well upon the world—a sun, mounting, most illuminating, most glorious—surely never again to set. But against it, deeply entrench'd, holding possession, yet remains, (not only through the churches and schools, but by imaginative literature, and unregenerate poetry,) the fossil theology of the mythic-materialistic, superstitious, untaught and credulous, fable-loving, primitive ages of humanity.
Walt Whitman
Poetry = Anger x Imagination
Sherman Alexie
PHOSPHORESCENCE. Now there's a word to lift your hat to... to find that phosphorescence, that light within, that's the genius behind poetry.
Emily Dickinson
There is no Frigate like a Book To take us Lands awayNor any Coursers like a Page Of prancing Poetry – This Traverse may the poorest takeWithout oppress of Toll – How frugal is the Chariot That bears a Human soul.
Emily Dickinson
All this timeI drank you like the cure when maybeyou were the poison.
Clementine von Radics
I give you this to take with you:Nothing remains as it was. If you know this, you canbegin again, with pure joy in the uprooting.
Judith Minty
Time for you and time for me,tAnd time yet for a hundred indecisions,tAnd for a hundred visions and revisions,tBefore the taking of a toast and tea.
T.S Eliot
A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
W.H. Auden
To elevate the soul, poetry is necessary.
Edgar Allan Poe
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals the power of your intense fragility:whose texture compels me with the colour of its countries, rendering death and forever with each breathing (i do not know what it is about you that closes and opens;only something in me understands the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses) nobody,not even the rain, has such small hands-excerpt of #35 from "100 Selected Poems
E.E. Cummings
You shall love your crooked neighbour, with your crooked heart.
W.H. Auden
So dawn goes down today... Nothing gold can stay.-- Robert Frost
John Green
Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.
Edgar Allan Poe
You are never too old to become younger!
Mae West
I wanted all thingsTo seem to make some sense,So we could all be happy, yes,Instead of tense.And I made up liesSo that they all fit nice,And I made this sad worldA par-a-dise.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
When you part from your friend, you grieve not;For that which you love most in him may be clearer in his absence, asthe mountain to the climber is clearer from the plain.
Kahlil Gibran
I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of beauty.
Edgar Allan Poe
How happy is the little stoneThat rambles in the road alone,And doesn't care about careers,And exigencies never fears;Whose coat of elemental brownA passing universe put on;And independent as the sun,Associates or glows alone,Fulfilling absolute decreeIn casual simplicity.
Emily Dickinson
may my heart always be open to littlebirds who are the secrets of livingwhatever they sing is better than to knowand if men should not hear them men are oldmay my mind stroll about hungryand fearless and thirsty and suppleand even if it's sunday may i be wrongfor whenever men are right they are not youngand may myself do nothing usefullyand love yourself so more than trulythere's never been quite such a fool who could failpulling all the sky over him with one smile
E.E. Cummings
I am stuffing your mouth with yourpromises and watching you vomit them out upon my face.
Anne Sexton
The bridge will only take you halfway there, to those mysterious lands you long to see. Through gypsy camps and swirling Arab fair, and moonlit woods where unicorns run free. So come and walk awhile with me and share the twisting trails and wondrous worlds I've known. But this bridge will only take you halfway there. The last few steps you have to take alone.
Shel Silverstein
I?I walk alone;The midnight streetSpins itself from under my feet;My eyes shutThese dreaming houses all snuff out;Through a whim of mineOver gables the moon's celestial onionHangs high.IMake houses shrinkAnd trees diminishBy going far; my look's leashDangles the puppet-peopleWho, unaware how they dwindle,Laugh, kiss, get drunk,Nor guess that if I choose to blinkThey die.IWhen in good humour,Give grass its greenBlazon sky blue, and endow the sunWith gold;Yet, in my wintriest moods, I holdAbsolute powerTo boycott color and forbid any flowerTo be.IKnow you appearVivid at my side,Denying you sprang out of my head,Claiming you feelLove fiery enough to prove flesh real,Though it's quite clearAll your beauty, all your wit, is a gift, my dear,From me."Soliloquy of the Solipsist", 1956
Sylvia Plath
I discover myself on the verge of a usual mistake.
Walt Whitman
Peace is always beautiful.
Walt Whitman
Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.But you are eternity and you are the mirror.
Kahlil Gibran