Quotes by Poets - Page 139

When your diary is full and your life is empty, get a date
Benny Bellamacina
It’s important to look at the big picture of life, as long as it’s not through a small screen
Benny Bellamacina
There's 7 billion 46 million people on the planet and most of us have the audacity to think we matter.
George Watsky
When it has finished saying it, it no longer is. The longer it is in saying it, the more it can say it at length, the more slowly it melts, the better quality it is.
Francis Ponge
Sometimes dreams are wiser than waking.
John G. Neihardt
If you want to know what's going on, keep your mind in the fridge or it might go off.
Benny Bellamacina
Better to have too much time to manage, than too much money that manages all your time
Benny Bellamacina
Life is like a one rung ladder, some days you can be on the top and bottom of the world at the same time
Benny Bellamacina
All our lives we postpone everything that can be postponed; perhaps we all have the certainty, deep inside, that we are immortal and sooner or later every man will do everything, know all there is to know.
Jorge Luis Borges
Best that all mischief be undertaken behind a squeaky door
Benny Bellamacina
When you reach the middle of your career ladder, turn it the other way around and slide down to the top
Benny Bellamacina
The moon shines in my body, but my blind eyes cannot see it:The moon is within me, and so is the sun.The unstruck drum of Eternity is sounded within me; but my deaf ears cannot hear it.So long as man clamors for the I and the Mine, his works are as naught:When all love of the I and the Mine is dead, then the work of the Lord is done.For work has no other aim than the getting of knowledge:When that comes, then work is put away.The flower blooms for the fruit: when the fruit comes, the flower withers.The musk is in the deer, but is seeks it not within itself: it wanders in quest of grass.
Kabir
So oft it chances in particular menThat for some vicious mole of nature inthem—As in their birth (wherein they are not guilty,Since nature cannot choose his origin),By the o'ergrowth of some complexion,Oft breaking down the pales and forts ofreason,Or by some habit that too much o'erleavensThe form of plausive manners—that thesemen,Carrying, I say, the stamp of one defect,Being nature’s livery or fortune’s star,Their virtues else (be they as pure as grace,As infinite as man may undergo)Shall in the general censure take corruptionFrom that particular fault. The dram of evilDoth all the noble substance of a doubtTo his own scandal.
William Shakespeare
Time is a tease
André Breton
I’ve always been driven, unfortunately not always in the right direction.
Benny Bellamacina
I had everything summed up in a nutshell unfortunately I lost the nut.
Benny Bellamacina
Every day the world subtracts from itself and nothingis immune.
Luanne Castle
I existed from all eternity and, behold, I am here; and I shall exist till the end of time, for my being has no end.
Kahlil Gibran
Even a cockroach can be legendary by being killed by a legend.
Munia Khan
The sky was almost black and then it started hailing. It was so beautiful and scary, I wondered about the science of storms and how sometimes it seemed that a storm wanted to break the world and how the world refused to break.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
If you're going to buy a castle, make sure you get on the property extension ladder.
Benny Bellamacina
At the railroad station he noted that he still had thirty minutes. He quickly recalled that in a cafe on the Calle Brazil (a few dozen feet from Yrigoyen's house) there was an enormous cat which allowed itself to be caressed as if it were a disdainful divinity. He entered the cafe. There was the cat, asleep. He ordered a cup of coffee, slowly stirred the sugar, sipped it (this pleasure had been denied him in the clinic), and thought, as he smoothed the cat's black coat, that this contact was an illusion and that the two beings, man and cat, were as good as separated by a glass, for man lives in time, in succession, while the magical animal lives in the present, in the eternity of the instant.
Jorge Luis Borges
If you can see only what light reveals and hear only what sound announces, then in truth you do not see nor do you hear.
Kahlil Gibran
Deep down inside we always seek for our departed loved ones
Munia Khan
Better to be a successful failure, than to fail at success.
Benny Bellamacina
Foul cankering rust the hidden treasure frets, but gold that's put to use more gold begets.
William Shakespeare
What kind of man will feel depressed at being idle? There is nothing finer than to be alone with nothing to distract him.If you follow the ways of the world, your heart will be drawn to its sensual defilements and easily led astray; if you go among people, your words will be guided by others' responses rather than come from your heart. There is nothing firm or stable in a life spent between larking about together and quarreling exuberant one moment, aggrieved and resentful the next. You are forever pondering pros and cons, endlessly absorbed in questions of gain and loss. And on top of delusion comes drunkenness, and in that drunkenness you dream.
Yoshida Kenkō
Nor do we merely feel these essences for one short hour no, even as these trees that whisper round a temple become soon dear as the temples self, so does the moon, the passion posey, glories infinite, Haunt us till they become a cheering light unto our souls and bound to us so fast, that wheather there be shine, or gloom o'er cast, They always must be with us, or we die.
John Keats
Man is Nature's most wonderful creature. Torturing him, crushing him, murdering him for his beliefs and ideas is more than a violation of human rights-it is a crime against all humanity.
Armando Valladares
Must this with farce and folly rack myhead unpunish'd ? that with sing-song,Whine me dead?
Juvenal
There is much that is strange, but nothing that surpasses man in strangeness
Sophocles
Hunger is a wayOf standing outside windowsThe entering takes away.
Emily Dickinson
Dualism::In Ralph Ellison's Invisible ManI am outside of history. i wish i had some peanuts, it looks hungry there in the cage.i am outside of history. its hungrier than i thot.
Ishmael Reed
...in the absence of will power, the most complete collection of virtues and talents is wholly worthless.
Aleister Crowley
No single man makes history. History cannot be seen, just as one cannot see grass growing. Wars and revolutions, kings and Robespierres, are history's organic agents, its yeast. But revolutions are made by fanatical men of action with one-track mind, geniuses in their ability to confine themselves to a limited field. They overturn the old order in a few hours or days, the whole upheaval takes a few weeks or at most years, but the fanatical spirit that inspired the upheavals is worshiped for decades thereafter, for centuries.
Boris Pasternak
Intelligence is being intelligent enough to know you're not so intelligent as you intelligently once thought.
Carroll Bryant
Ah, does my princess now want what I offer?
Sai Marie Johnson
A fiery little cat you are, Caecelia. Like a lioness in heat, oh how you bloom.
Sai Marie Johnson
Keep the guests company, and mind your asses! Stay out of the hall before my chamber!
Sai Marie Johnson
It seems only easier when money is involved.
Anthony Liccione
Not only are you what you eat, but you also can be what's eating you. Don't become your problems or let them overtake you.
Anthony Liccione
ON PROBLEMSOur choicest planshave fallen through,our airiest castlestumbled over,because of lineswe neatly drewand later neatlystumbled over.
Piet Hein
We need an infinite wisdom so that we do not continue tackling problems that were solved centuries ago.
Gugu Mona
Every problem comes with a baggage of solutions.
Santosh Kalwar
There were some problems only coffee and ice cream could fix.
Amal El-Mohtar
Problems worthy of attack prove their worth by fighting back.
Piet Hein
Shall I tell you something I've been noticing? The mistrust this society has for women. All kinds of experts and officials are terrified because so many women are working. They really think that women have to be coerced into having babies and raising kids.
Marge Piercy
Fanfare for the MakersA cloud of witnesses. To whom? To what?To the small fire that never leaves the sky.To the great fire that boils the daily pot.To all the things we are not remembered by,Which we remember and bless. To all the thingsThat will not notice when we die,Yet lend the passing moment words and wings.So fanfare for the Makers: who composeA book of words or deeds who runs may writeAs many who do run, as a family growsAt times like sunflowers turning towards the light.As sometimes in the blackout and the raidsOne joke composed an island in the night.As sometimes one man’s kindness pervadesA room or house or village, as sometimesMerely to tighten screws or sharpen bladesCan catch a meaning, as to hear the chimesAt midnight means to share them, as one manIn old age plants an avenue of limesAnd before they bloom can smell them, before they spanThe road can walk beneath the perfected arch,The merest greenprint when the lives beganOf those who walk there with him, as in defaultOf coffee men grind acorns, as in despiteOf all assaults conscripts counter assault,As mothers sit up late night after nightMoulding a life, as miners day by dayDescend blind shafts, as a boy may flaunt his kiteIn an empty nonchalant sky, as anglers playTheir fish, as workers work and can take prideIn spending sweat before they draw their pay.As horsemen fashion horses while they ride,As climbers climb a peak because it is there,As life can be confirmed even in suicide:To make is such. Let us make. And set the weather fair.Louis Macneice
Louis MacNeice
As all mothers know, children travel faster than kisses. The speed of kisses is, in fact, what Doctor Fallow would call a cosmic constant. The speed of children has no limits.
Catherynne M. Valente
The Mother Of GodThe threefold terror of love; a fallen flareThrough the hollow of an ear;Wings beating about the room;The terror of all terrors that I boreThe Heavens in my womb.Had I not found content among the showsEvery common woman knows,Chimney corner, garden walk,Or rocky cistern where we tread the clothesAnd gather all the talk?What is this flesh I purchased with my pains,This fallen star my milk sustains,This love that makes my heart's blood stopOr strikes a sudden chill into my bonesAnd bids my hair stand up?
W.B. Yeats
They lay together like a word and a comma, asleep within an unfinished sentence.
Patricia Storace
I've been melted into somethingtoo easy to spill. I make moreand more of myself in orderto make more and more of the baby. He takes it, this making. And somehowhe's made more of me, too.
Brenda Shaughnessy
At the moment of giving birth to a child, is the mother separate from the child? You should study not only that you become a mother when your child is born, but also that you become a child.
Dogen Zenji
Maybe I stepped into the skin my mother left behind, and became the girl my mother had been, the one she still wanted to be. Maybe I was wearing her youth now like an airy scarf, an accessory, all bright nerves and sticky pearls, and maybe that's why she spent so much time staring at me with that wistful look in her eyes. I was wearing something of hers, something she wanted back. It was written all over her face.
Laura Kasischke
I want to promise you / permanence, my constant orbit, but even continents / are revisions. I am only your diving bell in water / hemmed by shifting plates.
Robin Beth Schaer
She was so wicked. Such a classic case of resentment and ambivalence bumping and brushing up against all that maternal instinct. The love and hate in her was as vast as space- all meteors, no atmosphere.
Laura Kasischke
I used to be twenty. Then I was twenty-one, twenty-two, and so on. And then I became a mother and could no longer even distinguish the difference between twenty-one and twenty-two or the difference between thirty-eight and thirty-nine.
Sarah Manguso
The LanyardThe other day I was ricocheting slowlyoff the blue walls of this room,moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,when I found myself in the L section of the dictionarywhere my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.No cookie nibbled by a French novelistcould send one into the past more suddenly—a past where I sat at a workbench at a campby a deep Adirondack lakelearning how to braid long thin plastic strips into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.I had never seen anyone use a lanyardor wear one, if that's what you did with them,but that did not keep me from crossing strand over strand again and againuntil I had made a boxy red and white lanyard for my mother.She gave me life and milk from her breasts,and I gave her a lanyard.She nursed me in many a sick room,lifted spoons of medicine to my lips, laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,and then led me out into the airy lightand taught me to walk and swim, and I , in turn, presented her with a lanyard.Here are thousands of meals, she said,and here is clothing and a good education.And here is your lanyard, I replied,which I made with a little help from a counselor.Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,strong legs, bones and teeth,and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.And here, I wish to say to her now,is a smaller gift—not the worn truththat you can never repay your mother,but the rueful admission that when she took the two-tone lanyard from my hand, I was as sure as a boy could bethat this useless, worthless thing I wove out of boredom would be enough to make us even.
Billy Collins
The mother of an adult child sees her work completed and undone at the same time.' If this holds true, I may have to withstand not only rage, but also my undoing. Can one prepare for one's undoing? How has my mother withstood mine? Why do I continue to undo her, when what I want to express above all else is that I lover her very much?
Maggie Nelson
I don't ever want to make the mistake of needing him as much as or more than he needs me. But there's no denying that sometimes, when we sleep together in the dark cavern of the bottom bunk, his big brother thrashing around on top, the white noise machine grinding out its fake rain, the green digital clock announcing every hour, Iggy's small body holds mine.
Maggie Nelson