Quotes by Poets - Page 124

It's not good to dig in the past, raise the ghost up from the grave, and have it walk with the flesh.
Anthony Liccione
Words are dead, until action brings them life.
Anthony Liccione
Nothing is more difficult than to understand the dead, I've found; but nothing is more dangerous than to ignore them.
Margaret Atwood
I think the best shaped box ever on earth is a coffin which can be handmade to escort the forever numb-hands.
Munia Khan
War limits the deads. It limits them to the cimetery ... (La guerre limite les morts. - Les limite au cimetière...)
Charles de Leusse
But there are times to talk to the dead, times when the dead want to talk.
Jill Alexander Essbaum
Better beware of the newly deadOf the white-handed ghostAnd the brightness of these lamps . . .
Luc Berimont
The dead” we say   as if speakingof “the people” whogave up on making historysimply to get throughSomething dense and null   groanwithout echo   undergroundand owl-voiced I cry Whoare these dead people theselovers who if ever didlisten no longer answer: We :
Adrienne Rich
Tonight the thoughts of the dead are turning back to the earth.
Joë Bousquet
Erm…I don’t know maybe for kissing me and tasting so damn delicious, maybe for holding my hand in public, maybe for looking far too hot in that sexy, snug tee when you should just be looking like Jo’s little brother. The words were on the tip of my tongue, but I chose the much more sophisticated reaction of scowling, hard. I would have kicked him again, but I was convinced he’d moved his legs out of the way. Coward.” ~ Ella, A Perfect Moment
Becca Lee
Today, a couple with 'just married' tags collided head-on with a hearse carrying two coffins in the back, both of a married couple that had previouslydied in a car accident.
Anthony Liccione
Men walk through tragedy, quietly, calm and precise on the outside, tearing themselves to shreds inside.
Steven Herrick
CHORUS:You that live in my ancestral Thebes, behold this Oedipus,- him who knew the famous riddles and was a man most masterful; not a citizen who did not look with envy on his lot- see him now and see the breakers of misfortune swallow him!Look upon that last day always. Count no mortal happy till he has passed the final limit of his life secure from pain.
Sophocles
TEIRESIAS:I tell you, king, this man, this murderer(whom you have long declared you are in search of,indicting him in threatening proclamationas murderer of Laius)- he is here.In name he is a stranger among citizensbut soon he will be shown to be a citizentrue native Theban, and he'll have no joyof the discovery: blindness for sightand beggary for riches his exchange,he shall go journeying to a foreign countrytapping his way before him with a stick.He shall be proved father and brother bothto his own children in his house; to herthat gave him birth, a son and husband both;a fellow sower in his father's bedwith that same father that he murdered.Go within, reckon that out, and if you find memistaken, say I have no skill in prophecy.
Sophocles
OEDIPUS: Upon the murderer I invoke this curse-whether he is one man and all unknown, or one of many- may he wear out his life in misery to miserable doom! If with my knowledge he lives at my hearthI pray that I myself may feel my curse. On you I lay my charge to fulfill all this for me, for the God, and for this land of ours destroyed and blighted, by the God forsaken.
Sophocles
It’s just that I coulda swore you had sung me a love song back there and that you meant it but I guess sometimes people just chew with their mouth open
Buddy Wakefield
But in life, a tragedy is not one long scream. It includes everything that led up to it. Hour after trivial hour, day after day, year after year, and then the sudden moment: the knife stab, the shell burst, the plummet of the car from a bridge.
Margaret Atwood
In the presence of real tragedy you feel neither pain nor joy nor hatred, only a sense of enormous space and time suspended, the great doors open to black eternity, the rising across the terrible field of that last enormous, unanswerable question.
Mervyn Peake
Blessed be they whose lives do not taste of evilbut if some god shakes your houseruin arrivesruin does not leaveit comes tolling over the generationsit comes rolling the black night salt up from the ocean floorand all your thrashed coasts groan
Anne Carson
She thought men were saviors......And she looked for more in them than what they were...Only to rescue herself from those she wished would rescue her...And isn't that the most tragic lie...The lie where we tell what we wished were true and believe it...?She had an artificial memory, a prosthesis to a past that never was...She was like a party that no one ever went to...Like a cure...without a disease...And isn't that the greatest fear of all...to be ready with the answersto questions that no one asks anymore?
Merrit Malloy
If e'er again I meet him beard to beard, he's mine or I am his.
William Shakespeare
Therefore love moderately. Long love doth so. Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow.
William Shakespeare
So our virtuesLie in the interpretation of the time:And power, unto itself most commendable,Hath not a tomb so evident as a chairTo extol what it hath done.One fire drives out one fire; one nail, one nail;Rights by rights falter, strengths by strengths do fail.
William Shakespeare
Sir, I love you more than words can wield the matter; dearer than eye-sight, space, and liberty, beyond waht can be valued, rich or rare; no less than life, with grace, health, beauty, honor; as much as child e'er loved, or father found; a love that makes breath poor, and speech unable; beyond all manner of so much I love you.
William Shakespeare
I profess myself an enemy to all other joys, which the most precious square of sense possesses, and find I am alone felicitate in your dear highness love.
William Shakespeare
Had he not resembled My father as he slept I had done't!" Macbeth
William Shakespeare
How now! Here's the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand." Lady Macbeth
William Shakespeare
Unsex me here and fill me from crown to toe full of direst cruelty That no compunctious visitings of nature Shake my fell purpose." Macbeth
William Shakespeare
We wear the mask that grins and lies.It shades our cheeks and hides our eyes.This debt we pay to human guileWith torn and bleeding hearts…We smile and mouth the myriad subtleties.Why should the world think otherwiseIn counting all our tears and sighs.Nay let them only see us whileWe wear the mask.
Maya Angelou
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world.
William Shakespeare
I prayed. He was going home, and I wanted to pray. Look out for me, I said; look out each day and listen for me. And we were going together on horses to the hills. We were going to ride out in the first light to the hills. We were going to see how it was, and always was, how the sun came up with a little wind and the light ran out upon the land. We were going to get drunk, I said. We were going to be all alone, and we were going to get drunk and sing. We were going to sing about the way it always was. And it was going to be right and beautiful. It was going to be the last time. And he was going home.
N. Scott Momaday
Carpenter: "Call Shen Te, someone! She's good!"Shui Ta: "Certainly. She's ruined.
Bertolt Brecht
in your dream, you are jealous of tragedies.and the truth is, we all want our own tragedy, because life is pale without it.we want the teeth, the screaming.the survivalthat comes with it.
Salma Deera
Mistrust of good success hath done this deed.O hateful error, Melancholy's child,Why dost thou show to the apt thoughts of menThe things that are not? O Error, soon concieved,Thou never com'st unto a happy birth,But kill'st the mother that engendered thee.
William Shakespeare
The ring which you are holding, my friend, is identical to that one. I had it cut according to the model of the king's ring, and damascened in Spain. The original is still in the Escorial; it would have been pleasant to steal it, for I easily acquire the instincts of a thief when I am in a museum, and I always find objects which have a history - especially a tragic history - uniquely attractive. I am not an Englishman for nothing - but that which is easily enough accomplished in France is not at all practical in Spain: the museums there are very secure.
Jean Lorrain
Finish, good lady; the bright day is done, And we are for the Dark. (Act 5, Scene 2)
William Shakespeare
Receive what cheer you may. The night is long that never finds the day.
William Shakespeare
The love that follows us sometime is our trouble, which still we thank as love.
William Shakespeare
Nothing in his life became him like leaving it.
William Shakespeare
It would cost you a groaning to take off my edge.
William Shakespeare
What art thou Faustus, but a man condemned to die?
Christopher Marlowe
TEIRESIAS: Alas, how terrible is wisdom whenit brings no profit to the man that's wise!This I knew well, but had forgotten it,else I would not have come here.
Sophocles
TEIRESIAS:You have your eyes but see not where you arein sin, nor where you live, nor whom you live with.Do you know who your parents are? Unknowingyou are enemy to kith and kinin death, beneath the earth, and in this life.
Sophocles
JOCASTA:So clear in this case were the oracles,so clear and false. Give them no heed, I say;what God discovers need of, easilyhe shows to us himself.
Sophocles
OEDIPUS:O, O, O, they will all come,all come out clearly! Light of the sun, let melook upon you no more after today!I who first saw the light bred of a matchaccursed, and accursed in my livingwith them I lived with, cursed in my killing.
Sophocles
Come what come may, time and the hour run through the roughest day.
William Shakespeare
Young men's love then lies not truly in their hearts, but in their eyes.
William Shakespeare
She gave me for my pains a world of sighs.
William Shakespeare
Those who write ill, and they who ne'er durst write,Turn critics out of mere revenge and spite.
John Dryden
I went on writing reviews for the newspaper, and critical articles crying out for a different approach to culture, as even the most inattentive reader could hardly fail to notice if he scratched the surface a little, critical articles crying out, indeed begging, for a return to the Greek and Latin greats, to the Troubadours, to the dolce stil nuovo and the classics of Spain, France and England, more culture! more culture! read Whitman and Pound and Eliot, read Neruda and Borges and Vallejo, read Victor Hugo, for God’s sake, and Tolstoy, and proudly I cried myself hoarse in the desert, but my vociferations and on occasions my howling could only be heard by those who were able to scratch the surface of my writings with the nails of their index fingers, and they were not many, but enough for me, and life went on and on and on, like a necklace of rice grains, on each grain of which a landscape had been painted, tiny grains and microscopic landscapes, and I knew that everyone was putting that necklace on and wearing it, but no one had the patience or the strength or the courage to take it off and look at it closely and decipher each landscape grain by grain, partly because to do so required the vision of a lynx or an eagle, and partly because the landscapes usually turned out to contain unpleasant surprises like coffins, makeshift cemeteries, ghost towns, the void and the horror, the smallness of being and its ridiculous will, people watching television, people going to football matches, boredom navigating the Chilean imagination like an enormous aircraft carrier. And that’s the truth. We were bored. We intellectuals. Because you can't read all day and all night. You can't write all day and all night. Splendid isolation has never been our style...
Roberto Bolaño
Some judge of authors' names, not works, and then nor praise nor blame the writings, but the men.
Alexander Pope
There is something essentially ridiculous about critics, anyway: what is good is good without our saying so, and beneath all our majesty we know this.
Randall Jarrell
A man’s mind is hidden in his writings: criticism brings it to light.
Solomon ibn Gabirol
If the world like it not, so much the worse for them.
William Cowper
An insincere critic of a sincere person never wins.
Criss Jami
You're afraid of criticism,' she says. 'But criticism is a sign of life! You know who doesn't get criticized? Nonentities! Only the dead escape criticism.
Erica Jong
For a while, Criticism travels side by side with the Work, then Criticism vanishes and it's the Readers who keep pace. The journey may be long or short.
Roberto Bolaño
Imitation is criticism.
William Blake
Most critics, fond of subservient artstill make the whole depend upon a part.They talk of principles, but notions prizeAnd all to one loved folly sacrifice.
Alexander Pope
And when you are foolish enough to identify yourself as a poet, your interlocutors will often ask: A PUBLISHED Poet? And when you tell them that you are, indeed, a published poet, they seem at least vaguely impressed. Why is that? Its not like they or anybody they know reads poetry journals. And yet there is something deeply right, I think, about this knee-jerk appeal to publicity. It's as if to say: Everybody can write a poem, but has your poetry, the distillation of your innermost being, been found authentic and intelligible by others? Can it circulate among persons, make of its readership, however small, a People in that sense? This accounts for the otherwise bafflingly persistent association of Poetry and fame - baffling since no poets are famous among the general population. To demand proof of fame is to demand proof that your songs made it back intact from the dream in the stable to the social world of the fire, that your song is at once utterly specific to you and exemplary for others.
Ben Lerner