Quotes by Poets - Page 107

The shadow-past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the present like rain through karst. A biography of longing. It steers us like magnetism, a spirit torque. This is how one becomes undone by a smell, a word, a place, the photo of a mountain of shoes. By love that closes its mouth before calling a name.
Anne Michaels
You speak an infinite deal of nothing.
William Shakespeare
These violent delights have violent endsAnd in their triump die, like fire and powderWhich, as they kiss, consume
William Shakespeare
It isnt for wantof something to say--something to tell you--something you should know--but to detain you--keep you from going--feeling myself hereas long as you are--as long as you are
Cid Corman
She didn’t know that my heart was a sandstorm waiting to open her skin in a desert of cuts. She didn’t know the animal that waited in my stomach, silently shredding the walls. For her, my heart wore small white shoes and carried a purse, went to bed early. I wanted to shoot myself into her arms so she understood the need to crash cars with me, to tear up pavement because we were beautiful.
Michelle Tea
I thought once how Theocritus had sungOf the sweet years, the dear and wished-for years,Who each one in a gracious hand appearsTo bear a gift for mortals, old or young;And, as I mused it in his antique tongue,I saw, in gradual vision through my tears,The sweet, sad years, the melancholy years,Those of my own life, who by turns had flungA shadow across me. Straightaway I was 'ware,So weeping, how a mystic Shape did moveBehind me, and drew me backward by the hair;And a voice said in mastery, while I strove,--Guess now who holds thee?--Death, I said, But, there,The silver answer rang,--Not Death, but Love.
Elizabeth Barrett-Browning
In the distance,far over there, only the eyes can travel when the body is weary.
Yvette Christiansë
Surely some revelation is at hand.
W.B. Yeats
Methinks I lied all winter, when I sworeMy love was infinite, if spring makes it more.
John Donne
...and when he dies, cut him out in little stars, and the face of heaven will be so fine that all the world will be in love with night and pay no heed to the garish sun.
William Shakespeare
It's not that I wait for you.It's that my arms are doors I cannot close.
Derrick Brown
I've lived to see my longings dieI've lived to see my longings die:My dreams and I have grown apart;Now only sorrow haunts my eye,The wages of a bitter heart.Beneath the storms of hostile fate,My flowery wreath has faded fast;I live alone and sadly waitTo see when death will come at last.Just so, when the winds in winter moanAnd snow descends in frigid flakes,Upon a naked branch, alone,The final leaf of summer shakes!...
Alexander Pushkin
privation is the cause of appetite
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
We look before and after, And pine for what is not:Our sincerest laughterWith some pain is fraught;Our sweetest songs are those that tell Of saddest thought.Yet if we could scornHate, and pride, and fear;If we were things bornNot to shed a tear,I know not how thy joy we everShould come near.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
30 cents, two transfers, loveThinking hard about you I got on the bus and paid 30 cents car fare and asked the driver for two transfers before discovering that I was alone.
Richard Brautigan
He is on his way to her. In a moment he will leave the wooden sidewalks and vacant lots for the paved streets. The small suburban houses flash by like the pages of a book, not as when you turn them over one by one with your forefinger but as when you hold your thumb on the edge of the book and let them all swish past at once. The speed is breathtaking. And over there is her house at the far end of the street, under the white gap in the rain clouds where the sky is clearing, toward the evening. How he loves the little houses in the street that lead to her! He could pick them up and kiss them! Those one-eyed attics with their roofs pulled down like caps. And the lamps and icon lights reflected in the puddles and shining like berries! And her house under the white rift of the sky! There he will again receive the dazzling, God-made gift of beauty from the hands of its Creator. A dark muffled figure will open the door, and the promise of her nearness, unowned by anyone in the world and guarded and cold as a white northern night, will reach him like the first wave of the sea as you run down over the sandy beach in the dark.
Boris Pasternak
you’re gone andyour unfinished poemlies alone on my desk—empty of tears,I only hope it rains today
John J. Geddes
The RemoteI often think about youwhen I’m lying alone inmy room with my mouthopen and the remotelost somewhere in the bed.
Leonard Cohen
In the Village IIIWho has removed the typewriter from my desk,so that I am a musician without his pianowith emptiness ahead as clear and grotesqueas another spring? My veins bud, and I am sofull of poems, a wastebasket of black wire.The notes outside are visible; sparrows willline antennae like staves, the way springs were,but the roofs are cold and the great grey riverwhere a liner glides, huge as a winter hill,moves imperceptibly like the accumulatingyears. I have no reason to forgive herfor what I brought on myself. I am past hating,past the longing for Italy where blowing snowabsolves and whitens a kneeling mountain rangeoutside Milan. Through glass, I am waitingfor the sound of a bird to unhinge the beginningof spring, but my hands, my work, feel strangewithout the rusty music of my machine. No wordsfor the Arctic liner moving down the Hudson, for the mangeof old snow moulting from the roofs. No poems. No birds.
Derek Walcott
…The love of his youthAppeared as in a dreamAnd this ageing loverWent mad with love.The youth robbed him ofReason and his chastity.In pursuit of his Beloved, mad, deranged,He was from kith and kin estranged.The fire of the rose’s cheekBurnt the nightingale’s heart;The laughing flameTormented the devoted moth…
Hafiz Shirazi
Never let the meaning of your love light escape to the dark nothingness of oblivion.
Sorin Cerin
I know she is coming I know she will look And that is the longing And this is the book.
Leonard Cohen
Benvolio: What sadness lengthens Romeo's hours?Romeo: Not having that, which, having, makes them short.
William Shakespeare
There is a space between man's imagination and man's attainment that may only be traversed by his longing.
Kahlil Gibran
Give me the waters of Lethe that numb the heart, if they exist, I will still not have the power to forget you.
Ovid
To congratulate oneself on one's warm commitment to the environment, or to peace, or to the oppressed, and think no more is a profound moral fault.
Robert Conquest
As is now generally admitted, a Soviet bomb would not have been achieved for several years more but for the success of Soviet espionage in obtaining secret information from Western scientists associated with the Manhattan Project. That is to say, political ideas in the minds of certain capable physicists and others took the form of believing that to provide Stalin with the bomb was acontribution to world progress. They were wrong. And their decisions show, once again, that minds of high quality in other respects are not immune to political or ideological delirium....In the Soviet case, those involved thought they knew better than mere politicians like Churchill. They didn't.
Robert Conquest
The rulers of your minds indulge in proverbs, but they've forgotten the main one, that love cannot be forced, and they have a deeply rooted habit of liberating people and making them happy, especially those who haven't asked for it. You probably fancy that there's no better place in the world for me than your camp and your company. I probably should even bless you and thank you for my captivity, for your having liberated me from my family, my son, my home, my work, from everything that's dear to me and that I live by.
Boris Pasternak
Or again, take your red banner. You think it's a flag, isn't that what you think? Well, it isn't a flag. It's the purple kerchief of the death woman, she uses it for luring. And why for luring? She waves it and she nods and winks and lures young men to come and be killed, then she sends famine and plague. That's what it is. And you went and believed her. You thought it was a flag. You thought it was: "Come to me, all ye poor and proletarians of the world.
Boris Pasternak
If the world is divided between Fascism and Communism, obviously Fascism must lose since it is the last, desperate refuge of the bourgeoisie
Czesław Miłosz
Sceptical Ketman is widely disseminated throughout intellectual circles. One argues that humanity does not know how to handle its knowledge or how to resolve the problems of production and division of goods.
Czesław Miłosz
We ate away, reminiscing about our victories over the enemies from different streets and villages and competing with each other in casting curses. A few golden butterflies and dragonflies were fluttering around us. The afternoon air was warm and clean, and the town below us seemed like a green harbor full of white sails.
Ha Jin
Most of them don't know what communism is, could not pick it out of a lineup. They only know what anticommunism is. The two are practically unrelated.
Barbara Kingsolver
The control of the production of wealth is the control of human life itself.
Hilaire Belloc
A heart anchored in money will only drift away.
Anthony Liccione
It is hard to fight with one's heart's desires; whatever it wishes to get, it purchases at the cost of the soul.
Lawrence Durrell
We live in our desires rather than in our achievements
George Moore
A martyrdom is always the design of God, for His love of men, to warn them and to lead them, to bring them back to His ways. It is never the design of man; for the true martyr is he who has become the instrument of God, who has lost his will in the will of God, and who no longer desires anything for himself, not even the glory of being a martyr.
T.S Eliot
I like desires like childrenand their playsthat tease me now and then intoknowing life.
Suman Pokhrel
To want is to have a weakness.
Margaret Atwood
Those who remarked in the countenance of this young hero a dissolute audacity mingled with extreme haughtiness ... could not yet deny to his countenance that sort of comeliness which belongs to an open set of features, well formed by nature, modeled by art to the usual rules of courtesy, yet so far frank and honest, that they seemed as if they disclaimed to conceal the natural working of the soul.
Walter Scott
The medals of the dead heroes are the coins for the future. (Les médailles des héros morts - Sont les pièces pour l'avenir.)
Charles de Leusse
We can't let the next generation grow up without heroes. Some of us have to fight on!
Avijeet Das
I didn’t yet know that romantic heroes—famous and not—are usually aimless nomads in disguise.
Sherman Alexie
The mirror will only lie, when you look at it through a mask.
Anthony Liccione
It is better to tell the truth and face the punishment, than to lie and face the consequences.
Anthony Liccione
Generally, the lie is a denatured truth.Drama occurs when this truth is still nonexistent, and it must become existent for the human being.
Marieta Maglas
Generally, the lie is a denatured truth.Drama occurs when this truth is still nonexistent, and it must become exitent for the human being.
Marieta Maglas
Generally, the lie is a denatured truth. Drama occurs when this truth is still non- existent for the majority of human beings, and it is denatured before becoming existent as an important element of the evolution.
Marieta Maglas
Romeo: I dreamt a dream tonight.Mercutio: And so did I.Romeo: Well, what was yours?Mercutio: That dreamers often lie.
William Shakespeare
When the lie and the truth are two trenchant weapons, they are at the risk of becoming downright uncertainties.
Marieta Maglas
Tell the truth, but tell it slant.
Emily Dickinson
It sounded so proper to lie for the sake of a beloved.
Anuradha Bhattacharyya
While I think of it, Mr. Werle, junior — don't use that foreign word: ideals. We have the excellent native word: lies.
Henrik Ibsen
Money, is just paper that will burn with the judgement, but a mindset for the truth, is like a fountain of waters that will carry them through.
Anthony Liccione
A half knowledge of another's life mostly does injustice to the life unknown.
Thomas Hardy
Judgement is so often a thwarted, frustrated expression of envy.
Elizabeth Winder
Where exactly does it come from, I’d like to know, this ineradicable attitude of superiority toward the past? This stubbornly dumb, can’t-kill-it-with-an-ax conviction that we, the now, critically and categorically know better than they, the past. Is it from the mere fact that their future is known to us, that we know what happens? (Nothing good.) It’s much the way we treat small children— pedantic and permissive at the same time. And we always think of the people of the past — just as we do of children — as being naïve in everything from their clothes and hairstyles to their thoughts and feelings.
Oksana Zabuzhko
You cannot judge any man beyond your knowledge of him, and how small is your knowledge.
Kahlil Gibran
After a long period of reflection, he decided that he was in fact right yet again.
Don Paterson