Quotes by Poets - Page 128

I feel very privileged to hear how somebody used to run around stickin' people up and stealing cars, and now they're gettin' their life back together... I just love the stories. The stories of the fallen world, they excite us. That's the interesting stuff.
Denis Johnson
If I learned anything in this life, I've learned that you can't cling on.
Michael Morpurgo
Weakness, like not being able to bury the past. Weakness, like not giving up hope when you know you should.
Julianna Baggott
…it was not whim or wildness which made me go, but a sudden clear realization that tho you were the first man of importance to me, you could not be the last. — Gwendolyn MacEwen to Milton Acorn, 1963 (age 21)
Jeanette Lynes
you've got to know when to let a woman go if you want to keep her,and if you don't want to keep her you let her go anyhow so it's always a process of letting go, one way or the other.
Charles Bukowski
I realise there's something incredibly honest about trees in winter, how they're experts at letting things go.
Jeffrey McDaniel
Out, damned spot! out, I say!
William Shakespeare
What troubled me most is that although I was an unwilling observer, I felt guilty myself as if something in what I witnessed touched a shameful and repressed desire.
John Mole
He is talking to people in Toronto, trying to find out if I am guilty; but he won't find it out that way. He doesn't understand yet that guilt comes to you not from the things you've done, but from the things that other have done for you.
Margaret Atwood
I would forget it fain,But oh, it presses to my memory,Like damnèd guilty deeds to sinners' minds.
William Shakespeare
So full of artless jealousy is guilt,It spills itself in fearing to be spilt.
William Shakespeare
This advance (at first very much against the will of the outdistanced men) will transform the love experience, which is now filled with error, will change it from the ground up, and reshape it into a relationship that is meant to be between one human being and another, no longer one that flows from man to woman. And this more human love (which will fulfill itself with infinite consideration and gentleness, and kindness and clarity in binding and releasing) will resemble what we are now preparing painfully and with great struggle: the love that consists in this: that two solitudes protect and border and greet each other.
Rainer Maria Rilke
We hear the saints saying: Our brother the world. We hear the revolutionaries: Dare we win?
Muriel Rukeyser
If the beloved is everywhere,the lover is a veil,but when living itself becomesthe Friend, lovers disappear.
Jalaluddin Rumi
You were sent to unite peopleYou were not been sent to divide people.
Jalaluddin Rumi
You were sent to unite peopleYou were not sent to divide people.
Jalaluddin Rumi
To become a true global citizen, one must abandon all notions of otherness and instead embrace togetherness.
Suzy Kassem
Say I Am YouI am dust particles in sunlight.I am the round sun.To the bits of dust I say, Stay.To the sun, Keep moving.I am morning mist, and the breathing of evening.I am wind in the top of a grove, and surf on the cliff.Mast, rudder, helmsman, and keel,I am also the coral reef they founder on.I am a tree with a trained parrot in its branches.Silence, thought, and voice.The musical air coming through a flute,a spark of a stone, a flickering in metal.Both candle and the moth crazy around it.Rose, and the nightingale lost in the fragrance.I am all orders of being, the circling galaxy,the evolutionary intelligence, the lift,and the falling away. What is, and what isn't.You who know Jelaluddin, You the one in all,say who I am. Say I am You.
Jalaluddin Rumi
They both listened silently to the water, which to them was not just water, but the voice of life, the voice of Being, the voice of perpetual Becoming.
Hermann Hesse
Whether it is good or evil, whether life in itself is pain or pleasure, whether it is uncertain-that it may perhaps be this is not important-but the unity of the world, the coherence of all events, the embracing of the big and the small from the same stream, from the same law of cause, of becoming and dying.
Hermann Hesse
Images are not quite ideas, they are stiller than that, with less implication outside themselves. And they are not myth, they do not have the explanatory power; they are nearer to pure story. Nor are they always metaphors; they do not say this is that, they say this is.
Robert Hass
Every writer on this planet THINKS he is a great writer (why waste your entire life writing when you believe you are mediocre?) but its deemed socially unacceptable to actually speak out such thoughts. So, modesty is always a public concept and not an inner one. For that reason alone 'modesty' can actually be said to be the product of a large ego, for the ego is primarily concerned with survival and society rewards this dishonesty and tends to punish honesty (see Camus)
Martijn Benders
There is no moral to my song,I praise no right, I blame no wrong;I tell of things that I have seen,I show the man that I have beenAs simply as a poet canWho knows himself poet and man.
Thomas MacDonagh
Tell it fast before you get scared and silence yourself. You’ll never wish you’d held back a little more.
Catherynne M. Valente
Most writers who are beginners, if they are honest with themselves, will admit that they are praying for a readership as they begin to write. But it should be the quality of the craft not the audience, that should be the greatest motivating factor. For me, at least, I can declare that when I wrote THINGS FALL APART I couldn't have told anyone the day before it was accepted for publication that anybody was going to read it. There was no guarantee; nobody ever said to me, Go and write this, we will publish it and we will read it; it was just there. But my brother-in-law who was not a particularly voracious reader, told me that he read the novel through the night and it gave him a terrible headache the next morning. And I took that as an encouraging endorsement!The triumph of the written word is often attained when the writer achieves union and trust with the reader, who then becomes ready to be drawn deep into unfamiliar territory, walking in borrowed literary shoes so to speak, toward a deeper understanding of self or society, or of foreign peoples, cultures and situations.
Chinua Achebe
As a writer, you can’t get to where you want to be, coming from the place you started, unless you have something extremely important you want to say to someone who really doesn’t want to know.
Billy Marshall-Stoneking
If one were to include one-tenth of the remarkable people one knows, in one's fiction, no one would accept it. Real life remains one's private menagerie.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
Isolation is a gift. Everything else is just a test of your endurance. You will be alone with the Gods. Your nights will flame with fire.
Charles Bukowski
Poor, harmless paper, that might have gone to print a Shakespeare on, and was instead so clumsily defaced with nonsense.
Robert Louis Stevenson
We will read books together inside the blanket and stay warm. And keep writing poetry in our respective journals. Time will fly but we will still remain inside the blanket forever.
Avijeet Das
Shy people are my favorites. The unmistakable glint of shyness in someone's eyes can mesmerize me for years!
Avijeet Das
But what is life without a passion?
Avijeet Das
Your sensitivity, your tenderness, your eyes make me pick up my pen and write, Mrignayni!
Avijeet Das
Writers don't suffer from insanity, they depend upon it!
Avijeet Das
Now memories have an unusual way of coming back to you in the middle of a day.
Avijeet Das
Capture your reader, let him not depart, from dull beginnings that refuse to start
Horace
Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite:"Fool!" said my muse to me, "look in thy heart, and write.
Philip Sidney
Writing is not a searching about in the daily experience for apt similes and pretty thoughts and images… It is not a conscious recording of the day’s experiences ‘freshly and with the appearance of reality’… The writer of imagination would find himself released from observing things for the purpose of writing them down later. He would be there to enjoy, to taste, to engage the free world, not a world which he carries like a bag of food, always fearful lest he drop something or someone get more than he.
William Carlos Williams
And all the while one spirit uttered this,The other one did weep so, that, for pity,I swooned away as if I had been dying,And fell, even as a dead body falls.
Dante Alighieri
Mortal, what hast thou of such grave concernThat thou indulgest in too sickly plaints?Why this bemoaning and beweeping death?For if thy life aforetime and behindTo thee was grateful, and not all thy goodWas heaped as in sieve to flow awayAnd perish unavailingly, why not,Even like a banqueter, depart the hall,Laden with life?
Titus Lucretius Carus
I have a habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am now leading a posthumous existence.
John Keats
We Let the Boat DriftI set out for the pond, crossing the ravine where seedling pines start up like sparks between the disused rails of the Boston and Maine.The grass in the field would make a second crop if early autumn rains hadn't washed the goodness out. After the night's hard frost it makes a brittle rustling as I walk.The water is utterly still. Here and therea black twig sticks up. It's five years today, and even now I can't accept what cancer did to him -- not death so much as the annihilation of the whole man, sense by sense, thought by thought, hope by hope.Once we talked about the life to come. I took the Bible from the nightstand and offered John 14: "I go to prepare a place for you.""Fine. Good," he said. "But what about Matthew? 'You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.'" And he wept.My neighbor honks and waves driving by. She counsels troubled students; keeps bees; her goats follow her to the mailbox.Last Sunday afternoon we went canoeing on the pond. Something terrible at school had shaken her. We talked quietly far from shore. The paddlesrested across our laps; glittering dropsfell randomly from their tips. The lightaround us seemed alive. A loon-itinerant-let us get quite close before it dove, coming upafter a long time, and well away from humankind
Jane Kenyon
Who worries for dying? If I close my eyes tonight, I will either dream, or not, or my eyes will open and I will be here again. And if none of those happen, and I do not wake? Who worries for dying?
Roman Payne
Rather than you smoking a cigarette, the cigarette is really smoking you.
Anthony Liccione
DEATH COMES SLOWLY LIKE ANTS TO A FALLEN FIG
Charles Bukowski
But dying is for the sweetest ones. And he remembers sweetness, when life was sweet, and sweetly he was given that other lifetime.
Raymond Carver
The friend I can trust is the one who will let me have my death.The rest are actors who want me to stay and further the plot.
Adrienne Rich
What is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?
Kahlil Gibran
Life is death we're lengthy at
Emily Dickinson
If God shall choose I shall love thee but better after death
Elizabeth Browning
The mental pictures I have of my parents and grandparents and my childhood are beginning to break up into small fragments and get blown away from me into empty space, and the same wind is sucking me toward it ever so gently, so gently as not even to raise a hair on my head (though the truth is that there are very few of them to be raised). I'm starting to take the idea of death as the end of life somewhat harder than before. I used to wonder why people seemed to think that life is tragic or sad. Isn't it also comic and funny? And beyond all that, isn't it amazing and marvelous? Yes, but only if you have it. And I am starting not to have it. The pictures are disintegrating, as if their molecules were saying, "I've had enough," ready to go somewhere else and form a new configuration. They betray us, those molecules, we who have loved them. They treat us like dirt.
Ron Padget
To die is to be a counterfeit, for he is but the counterfeit of a man who hath not the life of a man; but to counterfeit dying when a man thereby liveth is to be no counterfeit, but the true and perfect image of life indeed.
William Shakespeare
Oh build your ship of death, oh build it in time and build it lovingly, and put it between the hands of your soul.
D.H. Lawrence
All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life.
Herman Melville
Apart from being dead its going to be necessary to die. And I'm dealing at the moment with the realization that at my age there is absoutely no way in which I can skirt the matter and come out on the other side.
Nathaniel Tarn
And all the winds go sighing, For sweet things dying
Christina Rossetti
Here, when I say I never want to be without you,somewhere else I am sayingI never want to be without you again. And when I touch youin each of the places we meet,in all of the lives we are, it's with hands that are dyingand resurrected.When I don't touch you it's a mistake in any life,in each place and forever
Bob Hicok
If it had been a heart attack, the new
Nick Flynn
He's lost his colour very far from here,Poured it down shell-holes till the veins ran dry
Wilfred Owen
People have their purposes and reasons, I just wish I found mine.
Anthony Liccione