Quotes by Poets - Page 116

Always laugh when you can, it is cheap medicine.
George Gordon Byron
I don't trust anyone who doesn't laugh.
Maya Angelou
He tried not to laugh, but he wasn't good at controlling all the laughter that lived inside of him.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
If we couldn't laugh we would all go insane.
Robert Frost
WHAT PEOPLE MAY THINKSome people cowerand wince and shrink,owing to fear ofwhat people may think.There is one answerto worries like these:people may thinkwhat the devil they please.
Piet Hein
Rules are for those who can't think of a better way.
Catherynne M. Valente
You will have a peace of mind when you tell the truth and people think it's a lie, than we you tell a lie hoping that people will think it's the truth; because no matter how long it takes, either will be revealed.
Gugu Mona
Don't you ever think of giving up!!!
Charmaine J.Forde
Isolation allows me to think more clearly, and I think out loud sometimes.After all, I wouldn't want to accuse anyone of plagiarism.
Charmaine J.Forde
Some want more than they need, and others think they need more than they want. That's why we have so many greedy people who can't share with the poor.
Gift Gugu Mona
I was cautious in what I said before the young lady; for I could not be sure that she was sane; and, in fact, there was a certain restless brilliancy about her eyes that half led me to imagine she was not.
Edgar Allan Poe
And Clifford the same. All that talk! All that writing! All that wild struggling to push himself forwards! It was just insanity. And it was getting worse, really maniacal.Connie felt washed-out with fear. But at least, Clifford was shifting his grip from her on to Mrs Bolton. He did not know it. Like many insane people, his insanity might be measured by the things he was not aware of, the great desert tracts in his consciousness.
D.H. Lawrence
You could string a hundred endless days together,My soul would find no comfort from this pain.You laugh at my tale? You may be educatedBut you haven’t learned to love till you’re insane
Jalaluddin Rumi
In a neurotic society, insane ideas can become 'normal', the current triumph of tribalism is the result of rabid global anti-intellectualism.
Martijn Benders
And I realize the unbearable anguish of insanity: how uninformed people can be thinking insane people are "happy," O God, in fact it was Irwin Garden once warned me not to think the madhouses are full of "happy nuts." (p. 200)
Jack Kerouac
Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are.
Philip Larkin
Eblis said, "No man who thinks ill, will hear the truth despite a hundred signs.When one who fantasises is presented with reason his fantasies increase.When one talks to such a person, their words become the very cause of that person's fantasy. The crusader's sword is a tool for a thief.So the response to him is silence and peace; to talk with an idiot is insa
Jalaluddin Rumi
What a thing it is to have music that plays your terrible thoughts. I imagined that one piece could drive more delicate women than myself to insanity.
Jackie Kay
Religious fanaticism is the most dangerous form of insanity.
Robert Graves
I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad?
Edgar Allan Poe
Insanity is a state of profound self-absorption.
Siri Hustvedt
In her unworldly voice she thanked them for finally understanding her. She reminded me of a female pirate captain alone on the deck of her sinking ship.
Raymond Radiguet
Whoever's calm and sensible is insane!
Jalaluddin Rumi
Belane, are you nuts?"Who knows? Insanity is comparative. Who sets the norm?
Charles Bukowski
When dealing with the insane, the best method is to pretend to be sane.
Hermann Hesse
I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.
Edgar Allan Poe
Now this is the point. You fancy me a mad. Madmen know nothing. But you should have seen me. You should have seen how wisely I proceeded...
Edgar Allan Poe
I never feel so much myself as when I'm in a hot bath.I lay in that tub on the seventeenth floor of this hotel for-women-only, high up over the jazz and push of New York, for near onto an hour, and I felt myself growing pure again. I don't believe in baptism or the waters of Jordan or anything like that, but I guess I feel about a hot bath the way those religious people feel about holy water.
Sylvia Plath
Pour, varlet, pour the waterThe water steaming hot!A spoonful for each man of usAnother for the pot!
Thomas Babington Macaulay
Who says there's just one safe way to walk, one road properly lit, and the rest - all slippery water, unmarked?
Betsy Sholl
Meltwater (from the book Blue Bridge)Up here. A faceLoses its linesI look to seeThe colour of your eyes …They have turnedTo water.I lean forwardTo catchThe scent of your hair –All I smell is heather.I touch your handAnd all I feel is earth and stones.There is nothing leftBut the hillside’s breastYour flesh and bonesHave vanished.
Jay Woodman
Water’s water and that’s why it’s beautiful.
Alberto Caeiro
Never wade through the pretty ripples of perpetually flowing rivers, until you have looked at their lovely waters,and prayed to them,and washed your hands in the pale enchanting water.
Hesiod
People are like water: Many rush pass you, as some will over-flood. Some will drown you, or force you to go their current ways. Some will be cold or hot-tempered, but try to say with the warm ones. Some will come as a raging wave and cause a ripple, or a calm sea, supporting you, quenching your thirst, and flow by your side to where kisses will always stay wet.
Anthony Liccione
It came out sparkling like liquid sky.
Laurie Lee
The water shines only by the sun. And it is you who are my sun. (L'eau ne brille que par le soleil. - Et c’est toi qui es mon soleil.)
Charles de Leusse
I am not afraid of storms, for I am leaning how to sail my ship.
Lousia May Alcott
The half of her that is underwater would like to beunder a desk, the head of her that is underwaterwould like to be fully immersed.
Patricia Lockwood
When a fat person goes in the water naked, would it still be called skinny-dipping?
Anthony Liccione
I always adhered to the idea that God is time, or at least that His spirit is... In any case, I always thought that if the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the water, the water was bound to reflect it. Hence my sentiment for water, for its folds, wrinkles. and ripples, and - as I am a Northerner - for its grayness. I simply think that water is the image of time, and every New Year's Eve, in somewhat pagan fashion, I try to find myself near water, preferably near a sea or an ocean, to watch the emergence of a new helping, a new cupful of time from it.
Joseph Brodsky
Shall I come to you, a boundless drop to a boundless ocean.
Kahlil Gibran
The sea is a desert of waves,A wilderness of water.
Langston Hughes
My sperm came out into the water, unaccustomed to the light, and instantly it became a misty, stringy kind of thing and swirled out like a falling star, and I saw a dead fish come forward and float into my sperm, bending it in the middle.
Richard Brautigan
Sturdy swimmers afloat on water-couch Beneath the heavy bill their treasured pouchFishes pray for them to fly far away Inland lakes toast to the Pelican’s day
Munia Khan
To take a breath of water: does the thought panic or excite you?
Maggie Nelson
For the most appalling quality of water is its strength. I love its flash and gleam, its music, its pliancy and grace, its slap against my body; but I fear its strength. I fear it as my ancestors must have feared the natural forces that they worshipped. All the mysteries are in its movement. It slips out of holes in the earth like the ancient snake. I have seen its birth; and the more I gaze at that sure and inremitting surge of water at the very top of the mountain, the more I am baffled. We make it all so easy, any child in school can understand it – water rises in the hills, it flows and finds its own level, and man can't live without it. Bud I don't understand it. I cannot fathom its power.
Nan Shepherd
Piddle on me, oh joy.Please, let it flow.Let it slide between your legsLike its rose water.
Maffio Venier
Let's swim to the moonLet's climb through the tideSurrender to the waiting worldsThat lap against our side.
Jim Morrison
In the Bay, whenever I got depressed, I always drove out to the Ocean Beach. Just to sit. And, I don't know, something about looking at water, how it just goes and goes and goes, something about that I found very soothing. As if somehow I were connected to every ripple that was sending itself out and out until it reached another shore.
Cisneros Sandra
It is a hot summer day in Tennessee in the midst of the sixth decade of this century. The girl has climbed the fence to get to the swimming hole she has visited so many summers of her life in the time before this part of the land was enclosed. She stands now at the edge of it. Her body is sticky with heat. The surface of the water moves slightly. Sunlight shimmers and dances in a green reflection that seems as she stares at it to pull her in even before her skin is wet with it. Drops of water on the infant’s head. All the body immersed for baptism. Do these images come to her as she sinks into the coolness? The washing of hands before Sunday’s midday meal. All our sins washed away. Water was once the element for purification. But at the bottom of this pool, There is no telling what is there now. This is what the girl’s father will say to her finally: corroded cans of chemical waste, some radioactive substances. That was why they put the fence there. She is not thinking of that now. The words have not yet been said, and so for her no trouble exists here. The water holds up her body. She is weightless in this fulsome element, the waves her body makes embracing her with their own benediction. Beneath her in the shadowy green, she feels the depth of the pond. In this coolness as the heat mercifully abates, her mind is set free, to dream as the water dreams.
Susan Griffin
Water in the boat is the ruin of the boat, but water under the boat is its support.
Jalaluddin Rumi
Call me Ishmael. Some years ago--never mind how long precisely--having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this.If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs--commerce surrounds it with her surf. Right and left, the streets take you waterward. Its extreme downtown is the battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves, and cooled by breezes, which a few hours previous were out of sight of land. Look at the crowds of water-gazers there.Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What do you see?--Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster--tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are the green fields gone? What do they here?But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and seemingly bound for a dive. Strange! Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the land; loitering under the shady lee of yonder warehouses will not suffice. No. They must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling in. And there they stand--miles of them--leagues. Inlanders all, they come from lanes and alleys, streets and avenues--north, east, south, and west. Yet here they all unite. Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles of the compasses of all those ships attract them thither?Once more. Say you are in the country; in some high land of lakes. Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries--stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region. Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.
Herman Melville
Dip him in the river who loves water.
William Blake
We Pisceans know how to swim without water
Munia Khan
A lake carries you into recesses of feeling otherwise impenetrable.
William Wordsworth
The places where water comes together with other water. Those places stand out in my mind like holy places.
Raymond Carver
Water was something he loved, something he respected. He understood its beauty and its dangers. He talked about swimming as if it were a way of life.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
For whatever we lose (like a you or a me),It's always our self we find in the sea.
E.E. Cummings
But you know me-I'm an information magpie, always interested in shiny bits of intel. I've never gotten in trouble because of knowing too much.
Tim Pratt
Travelers, there is no path, paths are made by walking.
Antonio Machado