Quotes by Poets - Page 134

All this, I suspect, has been little more than the operation known as the pilgrimage from the cradle to the grave, but I have had a comfortable feeling that, however ordinary my enterprises may have been, they had at any rate the advantage of containing, for me, an element of sustained unfamiliarity. I am one of those persons who begin life by exclaiming they've "never seen anything like this before" and die in the hope that they may say the same of heaven.
Siegfried Sassoon
Lawford had soundlessly stolen a pace or two nearer, and by stopping forward he could, each in turn, scrutinize the little intent company sitting over his story around the lamp at the further end of the table; squatting like little children with their twigs and pins, fishing for wonders on the brink of the unknown.
Walter de la Mare
...the great floodgates of the wonder-world swung open...
Herman Melville
As a small child, I felt in my heart two contradictory feelings, the horror of life and the ecstasy of life.
Charles Baudelaire
I wonder if you know yet that you’ll leave me. That you are a child playing with matches and I have a paper body. You will meet a girl with a softer voice and stronger arms and she will not have violent secrets or an affection for red wine or eyes that never stay dry. You will fall into her bed and I’ll go back to spending Friday nights with boys who never learn my last name.
Clementine von Radics
And you have been forever, and will be forever, and all the worrisome smashings of your foot on innocent cupboard doors it was only the Void pretending to be a man pretending not to know the Void.
Jack Kerouac
So spake the Seraph Abdiel faithful found,Among the faithless, faithful only hee;Among innumerable false, unmov'd,Unshak'n, unseduc'd, unterrifi'dHis Loyaltie he kept, his Love, his Zeale;Nor number, nor example with him wroughtTo swerve from truth, or change his constant mindThough single. From amidst them forth he passd,Long way through hostile scorn, which he susteindSuperior, nor of violence fear'd aught;And with retorted scorn his back he turn'dOn those proud Towrs to swift destruction doom'd.
John Milton
We must not be too prodigal with our angels; they are the last divinities we harbor, and they might fly away.
Jorge Luis Borges
My angels are jellyfish,electric, nearly invisible,armed with poisoned harpoons.My archangels are yellow tang.They feed on sunlight.They speak through color.Anything in their paths turns blind.
Eric Gamalinda
In this busy modernized age, it's easy to be blind to the light all around us. You see, there truly are real angels living among us that look just like you and I. If you pay attention, you can spot one because they're quite easy to find. They're the souls with the eternally deep eyes that always act like something is broken inside, but fail to realize it's just their wings.
Suzy Kassem
Blot out his name, then, record one lost soul more,One task more declin'd, one more foot-path ontrod,One more devil's triumph and sorrow for angels,One wrong more to man, one more insult to God!
Robert Browning
So dear to heaven is saintly chastity, That when a soul is found sincerely so, A thousand liveried angels lackey her, Driving far off each thing of sin and guilt, And in clear dream, and solemn vision Tell her of things that no gross ear can hear, Till oft converse with heavenly habitants Begin to cast a beam on the outward shape, The unpolluted temple of the mind, And turns it by degrees to the soul's essence, Till all be made immortal
John Milton
perhaps the answer is simply one:one female angel dancing alone in her stocking feet,a small jazz combo working in the background.She sways like a branch in the wind, her beautifuleyes closed, and the tall thin bassist leans overto glance at his watch because she has been dancingforever, and now it is very late, even for musicians.
Billy Collins
We are angels just like the rest of our brothers and sisters.
Jay Woodman
Poets are Damned... but See with the Eyes of Angels.
Allen Ginsberg
O smile, going where? O upturned look:new, warm, receding surge of the heart--;alas, we are that surge. Does then the cosmic spacewe dissolve in taste of us? Do the angelsreclaim only what is theirs, their own outstreamed existence,or sometimes, by accident, does a bit of usget mixed in? Are we blended in their featureslike the slight vagueness that complicates the looksof pregnant women? Unnoticed by them in theirwhirling back into themselves? (How could they notice?)
Rainer Maria Rilke
The angels that dry our eyes bear the form and the features of all we have said and thought—above all, of what we have done, prior to the hour of misfortune.
Maurice Maeterlinck
Angels are bright still, though the brightest fell.
William Shakespeare
September 11, 2001: Citizens of the U.S., besieged by terror’s sting,rose up, weeping glory, as if on eagles’ wings.--from the poem Angel of Remembrance: Candles for September 11, 2001
Aberjhani
Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
Alexander Pope
Are you a lucky little lady in the City of Light? Or just another lost angel... City of Night?
Jim Morrison
Call the world, if you please, "the Vale of Soul Making". Then you will find out the use of the world....There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions -- but they are not Souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself.Intelligences are atoms of perception -- they know and they see and they are pure, in short they are God. How then are Souls to be made? How then are these sparks which are God to have identity given them -- so as ever to possess a bliss peculiar to each one's individual existence. How, but in the medium of a world like this?This point I sincerely wish to consider, because I think it a grander system of salvation than the Christian religion -- or rather it is a system of Spirit Creation...I can scarcely express what I but dimly perceive -- and yet I think I perceive it -- that you may judge the more clearly I will put it in the most homely form possible. I will call the world a school instituted for the purpose of teaching little children to read. I will call the human heart the hornbook used in that school. And I will call the child able to read, the soul made from that school and its hornbook.Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul? A place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways....As various as the lives of men are -- so various become their souls, and thus does God make individual beings, souls, identical souls of the sparks of his own essence.This appears to me a faint sketch of a system of salvation which does not affront our reason and humanity...
John Keats
LEAR: ...yet you see how this world goes.GLOS.: I see it feelingly.
William Shakespeare
So that made me happy but the part that really made me happy was that you wanted me to be happy. That's what Thank you means.
Margaret Atwood
If I had an ear 2 confide inI would cry among my treasured friendsBut who do u know that stops that longto help another carry onThe world moves fast and it would rather pass u bythan 2 stop and c what makes u cry
Tupac Shakur
The stories and pictures I make for the lives of the people closest to me are the forms of my empathy.
Siri Hustvedt
Imagine if suffering were real.Imagine if those old people were afraid of death.What if the midget or the girl with one armreally felt pain? Imagine how impossible it would beto live if some people werealone and afraid all their lives.
Jack Gilbert
I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person.
Walt Whitman
I know its totally senseless to attempt to write something 'great' in a time where people seem mostly concerned with bashing each other heads in, there's only 1 bestseller a year that a 12 year old would find tedious, and the entire Human Race will probably be nonexistant a 100 years later, but - you know - i have no idea what else to do. I like creating. What else can i do?
Martijn Benders
Don’t have the veins bulging in your biro.
Seamus Heaney
People who want to write books do so because they feel it to be the easiest thing they can do. They can read and write, they can afford any of the instruments of book writing such as pens, paper, computers, tape recorders, and generally by the time they have reached this decision, they have had a simple education.
Muriel Spark
Writing is like bungee jumping for the soul...you take a deep breath, plunge into the abyss and hope the rope tethering you to the real world doesn't snap.
Judy Croome
You don't teach a person how to write as much as you teach that person how to survive the writing process.
Rowan Ricardo Phillips
Rather than feeling that every moment you’ve got to exert this enormous control, you can take the attitude that your job as a writer is not to control everything, but to set things in motion.
Stuart Dybek
There should be more or less of a jumble in your head or on your note paper after the first time and even after the second. Much that you will think of in connection will come to nothing and be wasted. But some of it ought to go together under one idea. That idea is the thing to write on and write into the title at the head of your paper… One idea and a few subordinate ideas — [the trick is] to have those happen to you as you read and catch them — not let them escape you… The sidelong glance is what you depend on. You look at your author but you keep the tail of your eye on what is happening over and above your author in your own mind and nature.
Robert Frost
Writing to impress others is the surest path to pretentious mediocrity.
Katerina Stoykova-Klemer
Keep your whole being on the thing you are turning into words. The minute you flinch, and take your mind off this thing, and begin to look at the words and worry about them... Then your worry goes into them and they set about killing each other. So you keep going as long as you can, then look back and see what you have written. After a bit of practice and after telling yourself you are going to use any old word that comes into your head so long as it seems right, you will surprise yourself. You will read back through what you have written and you will get a shock. You will have captured a spirit, a creature.
Ted Hughes
I have been sometimes way too attracted by my own villains because in a way they seem to hold the secret to the heart of the narrative.
Peter Straub
I don’t shy from writing about incredibly unpleasant, distressing things. And I get a kick out of it I confess. I like doing that.
Peter Straub
As you write your novel, you gradually start thinking like some of your characters in it. And at times the writer may lose himself completely in some character.
Avijeet Das
At times you have to fight really hard to remember it. Fight within your mind’s dungeons and bring it out alive before it could have been killed and buried forever by the demons living deep down inside your mind’s dungeons.
Avijeet Das
When entering a library, I never forget to bow down!
Avijeet Das
Don't over edit. Don't second-guess yourself, or your ideas. Just write. Write every day, and keep at it. Don't get discouraged with the rejections. Tape them up on your office wall, to remind you of all the hard work you put in when you finally start getting published! It's all about persistence and passion. And have fun with it. Don't forget to have fun.
Heather Grace Stewart
No one decides where I go, least of all myself, though each step is where it must be.
Tomas Tranströmer
Our politicians always show lame excuse to defend their cripple decisions.
Munia Khan
A PSYCHOLOGICAL TIPWhenever you're called on to make up your mind,and you're hampered by not having any,the best way to solve the dilemma, you'll find,is simply by spinning a penny.No -- not so that chance shall decide the affairwhile you're passively standing there moping;but the moment the penny is up in the air,you suddenly know what you're hoping.
Piet Hein
Junior based all of his decisions on his dreams and visions, which created a lot of problems.
Sherman Alexie
The decisions you make today, could affect the rest of your life, be wise.
Charmaine J.Forde
The native hue of resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought; and enterprises of great pitch and moment, With this regard, their currents turn awry, and lose the name of action.
William Shakespeare
I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.
Sylvia Plath
Or he’d watch the news: more plagues, more famines, more floods, more insect or microbe or small-mammal outbreaks, more droughts, more chickenshit boy-soldier wars in distant countries. Why was everything so much like itself?
Margaret Atwood
Enough," he said; "the cough is a mere nothing; it will not kill me. I shall not die of a cough." "True - true," I replied;
Edgar Allan Poe
So that’s what art is, for the artist,” said Crake. “An empty drainpipe. An amplifier. A stab at getting laid.
Margaret Atwood
Here come the lovers, full of joy and mirth.— Joy, gentle friends! joy and fresh days of love Accompany your hearts!
William Shakespeare
Ah, Death, the spectre which sate at all feasts! How often, Monos, did we lose ourselves in speculations upon its nature! How mysteriously did it act as a check to human bliss - saying unto it "thus far, and no farther!
Edgar Allan Poe
yes, Wagner and the storm intermix with the wine as nights like this run up my wrists and up into my head and back down into the gut
Charles Bukowski
now look, she said, stretched out on the bed, I don’t want anything personal, let’s just do it, I don’t want to get involved, got it? she kicked off her high-heeled shoes… sure, he said, standing there, let’s just pretend that we’ve already done it, there’s nothing less involved than that, is there? what the hell do you mean? she asked. I mean, he said, I’d rather drink anyhow. and he poured himself one. it was a lousy night in Vegas and he walked to the window and looked out at the dumb lights. you a fag? she asked, you a god damned fag? no, he said. you don’t have to get shitty,...
Charles Bukowski
The single and peculiar mind is boundWith all the strength and armor of the mindTo keep itself from noyance, but much moreThat spirit upon whose weal depends and restsThe lives of many. The cess of majestyDies not alone, but like a gulf doth drawWhat's near it with it; or it is a massy wheelFixed on the summit of the highest mount,To whose huge spokes ten thousand lesser thingsAre mortised and adjoined, which, when it falls,Each small annexment, petty consequence,Attends the boist'rous ruin. Never aloneDid the king sigh, but with a general groan.
William Shakespeare
I never blindly roamed with a team just for the sake of social labeling or fitting in. I was never part of a particular group, scene or tribe. I was friends with everybody. My best friend in high school was prom queen, yet I was voted the biggest nonconformist of my senior class.
Suzy Kassem
If the afternoon had been blue,there might have been less desire.
Carlos Drummond de Andrade