Quotes by Poets - Page 114

The tasteof rain-- Why kneel?
Jack Kerouac
You ask why I make my home in the mountain forest,and I smile, and am silent,and even my soul remains quiet:it lives in the other worldwhich no one owns.The peach trees blossom,The water flows.
Li Bai
That’s why we become witches: to show our scorn of pretending life’s a safe business, to satisfy our passion for adventure. It’s not malice, or wickedness - well, perhaps it is wickedness, for most women love that - but certainly not malice, not wanting to plague cattle and make horrid children spout up pins and - what is it? - “blight the genial bed.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
The Weird Sisters, hand in hand,Posters of the sea and land,Thus do go, about, about,Thrice to thine, thrice to mine,And thrice again to make up nine.Peace, the charm's wound up.
William Shakespeare
Towns can be cruel and vicious -- and sorry. In the wood, in the clearing, in the sun, we will one day find and crown her and keep her: our own witch, the witch of Wiscasset, the Blueberry Queen of Maine.
Catherynne M. Valente
Woman! Come out! I have—" She looked down at the bloodless grass, embarrassed. "I have come to rescue you," she finally said, as if admitting that she were covered in boils.
Catherynne M. Valente
Yes, yes, mistress, I shall go and accomplish your task. Only—I was not only sent to kill the Leucrotta. There is a maiden in a tower—" At this the Witch spat, again rolling her marvelous eyes. "Those revolting creatures are always getting themselves locked up. If only they would stay that way.
Catherynne M. Valente
I myself have seen this woman draw the stars from the sky; she diverts the course of a fast-flowing river with her incantations; her voice makes the earth gape, it lures the spirits from the tombs, send the bones tumbling from the dying pyre. At her behest, the sad clouds scatter; at her behest, snow falls from a summer's sky.
Tibullus
Eye of newt, and toe of frog, Wool of bat, and tongue of dog, Adder's fork, and blind-worm's sting, Lizard's leg, and owlet's wing,— For a charm of powerful trouble, Like a hell-broth boil and bubble. Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and caldron bubble.
William Shakespeare
Never put your faith in a Prince. When you require a miracle, trust in a Witch.
Catherynne M. Valente
One doesn’t become a witch to run around being harmful, or to run around being helpful either, a district visitor on a broomstick. It’s to escape all that - to have a life of one’s own, not an existence doled out to by others.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
A fool always finds a greater fool to admire him.
Nicolas Boileau
Noi siam venuti al loco ov'i' t'ho dettoche tu vedrai le genti dolorosec'hanno perduto il ben de l'intelletto.We to the place have come, where I have told theeThou shalt behold the people dolorousWho have foregone the good of intellect.
Dante Alighieri
It never ceases to amaze me that in times of amazing human suffering somebody says something that can be so utterly stupid.
Robert Gibbs
Come on, gentleman; let us drink to our stupidity.
Santosh Kalwar
Sometimes I wonder if the semi-conscious agenda of the media is to get between people and their souls. It is the the soul with its myriad tiny nerve endings that notices the neglected pathos, poignancy and practicality that lies at the heart of life. It’s as if the media are somehow irritated and envious that anonymous people should have the quiet brilliance of their rich and sustainable inner lives...
Michael Leunig
Gain fame, and the paparazzi or media waits and watches for them to slip, just to shame their name.
Anthony Liccione
...when the public nerve is aroused, the most impressive capacity of man is his skill for lying.
Barbara Kingsolver
A journalist's job is to collect information," Ovid said to Pete. "Nope," Pete said. "That's what we do. It's not what they do." Dellarobia was unready to be pushed out of the conversation just like that. "Then what do you think the news people drive their Jeeps all the way out here for?" "To shore up the prevailing view of their audience and sponsors." "Pete takes a dim view of his fellow humans," Ovid said. "He prefers insects. Dellarobia turned her chair halfway around to face Pete, scraping noisily against the cement floor. "You're saying people only tune in to news they know they're going to agree with?" "Bingo," said Pete.
Barbara Kingsolver
I swear it only hit me then, with full conscious force, who the real villains of this piece had been from start to finish…those lying, cancerous dogs of the mainstream media!
Paul Christensen
They were really willing to pay to avoid any trouble. No doubt they had overestimated the ability of academics to make a nuisance of themselves. It had been years since an academic title gained you access to major media.... Even if all the university professors in France had risen up in protest, almost nobody would have noticed, but apparently they hadn't found that out in Saudi Arabia. They still believed, deep down, in the power of the intellectual elite. It was almost touching.
Michel Houellebecq
Always have there been great numbers of individuals who were very much eager to fight for good causes. Always there were these, but then there were even greater numbers of trendies who would then become wholly and completely misguided in the efforts.
Criss Jami
The captains of England and Australia can barely exchange pleasantries these days without a body-language expert immediately declaiming on the angle of their handshakes.
Lawrence Booth
The ordinary public is a puppet of worthless news and media.
Santosh Kalwar
The newspaper journalists like to believe the worst; they can sell more papers that way, as one of them told me himself; for even upstanding and respectable people dearly love to read ill of others.
Margaret Atwood
For rigorous teachers seized my youth, And purged its faith, and trimm'd its fire, Show'd me the high, white star of Truth, There bade me gaze, and there aspire. Even now their whispers pierce the gloom: What dost thou in this living tomb?
Matthew Arnold
The Poet makes himself a seer through a long, vast and painstaking derangement of all the senses
Arthur Rimbaud
There is also a fable told by Phaedrus, about how Simonides was once a victim of shipwreck. As the other passengers scurried about the sinking ship trying to save their possessions, the poet stood idle. When questioned, he declared, mecum mea sunt cuncta: everything that is me is with me.
Anne Carson
I have wished you something None of the others would....
Philip Larkin
Sometimes it’s great, and sometimes it’s shit.These are the things all the great philosophersjust won’t tell you flat out about life. You keep moving, keep living, keep breathingAnd you keep writing-creating because that’s what you doAnd that’s who you are. There are no magical voices to guideYou except your own. Make it count.~ R.M. ENGELHARDT
R.M. Engelhardt (TALON)
Words are powerful. Words make a difference. They can create and destroy. They can open doors and close doors. Words can create illusion or magic, love or destruction. … All those things.
R.M. Engelhardt (TALON)
He was, as every truly great poet has ever been, a good man; but finding it impossible to realize his own aspirations, either in religion or politics, or society, he gave up his heart to the living spirit and light within him, and avenged himself on the world by enriching it with this record of his own transcendental ideal.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
One's-Self I Sing One's-self I sing, a simple separate person, Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse. Of physiology from top to toe I sing, Not physiognomy alone nor brain alone is worthy for the Muse, I say the Form complete is worthier far, The Female equally with the Male I sing. Of Life immense in passion, pulse, and power, Cheerful, for freest action form'd under the laws divine, The Modern Man I sing.
Walt Whitman
Being in prison for seven years was like being in an army that never drilled, never deployed, and only fought itself.
Raegan Butcher
At one time I was weary of verse writing, and wanted to give it up. At another time I was determined to be a poet until I could establish a proud name over others. The alternatives battled in my mind and made my life restless.
Bashō Matsuo
As a poet I hold the most archaic values on earth. They go back to the Neolithic: the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe.
Gary Snyder
That odd infallible sliding-like-crystal air on water that means day's left dawn for morning.
H.D.
I thought, 'There are a lot of poets who have the courage to look into the abyss, but there are very few who have the courage to look happiness in the face and write about it,' which is what I wanted to be able to do.
Kenneth Koch
And while he compared all these things which he was seeing with his eyes to the mental pictures he had painted of them in his homesickness, it became clear to him that he was, after all, destined to be a poet, and he saw that in poets' dreams reside a beauty and enchantment that one seeks in vain in the things of the real world.
Hermann Hesse
...Cody is furiously explaining to his little son Tim 'Never let the right hand know what your left hand is doing'...Page 100.
Jack Kerouac
A poet is a pillar of light in the darkness. Sir Kristian Goldmund Aumann
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
If you think your world isn’t poetic enough, or exciting enough to tell a story about, that’s not because it’s a dull world, that’s because you’re not poet enough to wake its soul up.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Question not, but live and labourTill yon goal be won,Helping every feeble neighbour,Seeking help from none;Life is mostly froth and bubble,Two things stand like stone,Kindness in another's trouble,Courage in your own.
Adam Lindsay Gordon
Irish improves a poet.
Sina Queyras
I like my writing career and it's progression, I'd rather be that slow moving tide that turns a mountain into a beautiful beach for all to enjoy, rather than a flash in a pan that yields no heat.
Stanley Victor Paskavich
The so-called poet with his vague dreams and ideals is indeed no better than a harmless lunatic; the true poet is the worker, who grips life's throat and wrings out its secret, who selects austerely and composes concisely, whose work is as true and clean as razor-steel, albeit its sweep is vaster and swifter than the sun's!
Aleister Crowley
I think it’s vital. It’s odd to me because many people say we live in these awful times and we need culture and art especially in times like these, in these dire times. Well, first of all, I don’t think these times are more dire than other times. People who say that just need to go back and read Herodotus, read any book of history, read a biography of Attila the Hun. If people are going to wring their hands over these troubled times, I would think that humor should be indispensable. I find it strange that –at least in my take on it—the people who are the most alarmed about the dire times we live in are the ones who seem to be humorless, in their taste for poetry anyway. Humor is just an ingredient.
Billy Collins
People worship god.I worship this separation from you.It is worth Haj to a hundred Meccas,This separation from you.People say I am as brilliant as the sun,They say I am famous.What a fire it has lit in me,This separation from you.Behind me is my shadow,Ahead, is my darkness.I fear that it might leave me,This separation from you.No taint of the body is in it,Nor litter of the mind,All has been winnowed out,By this separation from you.When sorrow comes, bringing with itLoneliness and pain,I pull it close to me,This separation from you.Sometimes it colors my wordsSometimes it weaves through my songs,It has taught me great deal,This separation from you.When sorrow, defeated, fell at my feet,Amazed at my fidelity,The world came out to seeThis separation from you.Love earned me fame.People flocked to praise me.It wept in my embrace,This separation from you.The world turned out to tell me,That I had been unwise.It sat me on a throne todayThis separation from you.
Shiv Kumar Batalvi
I do not say these things for a dollar, or to fill up the time while I wait for a boat;
Walt Whitman
It is one of the maladies of our age to profess a frenzied allegiance to truth in unimportant matters, to refuse consistently to face her where graver issues are at stake.
János Arany
He was to them like the poet of a new school who takes his contemporaries by storm; who is not really new, but is the first to articulate what all his listeners have felt, though but dumbly till then.
Thomas Hardy
The poet gives his whole life such a voluntarily steep incline that it is impossible for it to exist in the vertical line of biography where we expect to meet it. It is not to be found under his own name and must be sought under those of others, in the biographical columns of his followers. The more self-contained the individuality from which the life derives, the more collective, without any figurative speaking, is its story.
Boris Pasternak
And if other old men must be willing, at the end, to push up off their deathbed and adventure out into the unknown, how much more willing must that man be whose whole life has been just such a daily exercise of adventuring, even in the stillness of his own garden? I mean, the poet.
David Malouf
And she tried the high heels but she couldn't bring herself to prance.
Ani DiFranco
Read the lines as if they were unknown to you, and you will feel in your inmost self how very much they are yours.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Aviation in air, in water and in spirit. Its laws are different in all three cases. The spirit soars the more it weighs and sinks into itself. The heavier the spirit, the higher and farther it flies.
César Vallejo
The pure and poorly adapted one who crashed against the world of fakes and cheats.
César Vallejo
Mechanics is a means or discipline for the realization of life, but not life itself. It ought to carry us to life itself.
César Vallejo
The worst Persian voluptuary could never have imagined my most ordinary day.
Lew Welch
The Most Dangerous (Sab Ton Khatarnak - Paash)The most dangerous occurrence is not a robbery of hard work,The most horrifying act is not a torture by the police,A merger of treachery and greed is not the most dangerous.To be trapped while asleep is surely miserable,To be buried under the silence is surely miserable,But it is still not the most dangerous.To remain silent in the noise of corruption is surely miserable,Reading covertly under the light of a firefly is surely miserable,But it is still not the most dangerous.The most dangerous deed is to be filled with a dead silence,Not feeling any agony against the unjust and bearing it all.Getting trapped in the routine of running from home to work and from work to home,The most dangerous accident is a death of our dreams.The most dangerous thing is that watch which runs on your wrist, but stands still for your eyes**A Translation of Paash's poem Sab ton Khatarnak by Jasz Gill
Paash