Quotes by Poets - Page 147

Never chase people in your life. No one is worthier than you to be chased.
Avijeet Das
Last night I weaved dreams from the cobwebs of time!
Avijeet Das
What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural loving and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare?
Herman Melville
I question the more or less psychoanalytic perspective that the male need to control women sexually results from some primal male "fear of women" and of women's sexual insatiability. It seems more probable that men really fear, not that they will have women's sexual appetites forced on them, or that women want to smother and devour them, but that women could be indifferent to them altogether, that men could be allowed sexual and emotional-therefore economic-access to women only on women's terms, otherwise being left on the periphery of the matrix.
Adrienne Rich
Let every man be master of his time.
William Shakespeare
So nobody must be allowed to think at all. Down with the public schools! Children must be drilled mentally by quarter-educated herdsmen, whose wages would stop at the first sign of disagreement with the bosses. For the rest, deafen the whole world with senseless clamour. Mechanize everything! Give nobody a chance to think. Standardize "amusement." The louder and more cacophonous, the better! Brief intervals between one din and the next can be filled with appeals, repeated 'till hypnotic power gives them the force of orders, to buy this or that product of the "Business men" who are the real power in the State. Men who betray their country as obvious routine.The history of the past thirty years is eloquent enough, one would think. What these sodden imbeciles never realize is that a living organism must adapt itself intelligently to its environment, or go under at the first serious change of circumstance.
Aleister Crowley
to Vaneigem and the Situationists who by shrewd use of collage and juxtaposition exposed both the poverty and richness of slogans, and the thinly veiled hypocrisy of a "spectacular" society which by not respecting words abuses people, and by insulting the intelligence creates a state of political cretinisation in which the many and various forms of authoritarian control dominate.
Alexis Lykiard
Take charge of your life! The tides do not command the ship. The sailor does.
Ogwo David Emenike
Do you know we are being led toSlaughters by placid admirals& that fat slow generals are gettingObscene on young bloodDo you know we are ruled by t.v.
Jim Morrison
We've become a nation of wolves, ruled by sheep.Owned by swine, overfed, and put to sleep.While the media elite declare what to think,I'll be wide awake, on the edge, and on the brink.
Otep Shamaya
My mother showed her gratitude for her life in exile by alluding to India’s modernity: the expansive railway network; the Bollywood movies she came to love for their tumultuous stories which ultimately conceded to the cardinal guidelines she held in her own life- love, family and duty. Still, it was Tibet’s antiquity that anchored her in exile. It was phayul she longed for when her skin was scorched by the summer heat of India’s plains. When she drank milk she compared it to the milk of her childhood for such sweetness and creaminess was not easily forgotten, and when she felt nauseous riding the buses that weaved their way around curvaceous mountain roads she spoke of the horses she had loved to ride.
Tsering Wangmo Dhompa
remember this: When you cross my doorstep, you have already been raised. With what you have learned...you know the difference between right and wrong. Do right. Don't anybody raise you from the way you have been raised. Know you will have to make adaptations, in love, in relationships, in friends, in society, in work, but don't let anybody change your mind.
Maya Angelou
His mother stood before him like a monument. He saw her great outline through the blur of his weakness and his passion. She made no movement at all.
Mervyn Peake
Did I come into this world thru the womb of my mother the earth just so I could talk and write like everybody else?
Jack Kerouac
They never tell you about that either. How the hardest thing a mother has to do is give her child up, let them go, watch them run.
Jackie Kay
WHAT DOES AN OLD MAN GAIN BY EXERCISINGwhat will he gain by talking on the phonewhat will he gain by going after fame, tell mewhat does he gain by looking in the mirrorNothingeach time he just sinks deeper in the mudIt’s already three or four in the morningwhy doesn’t he try to go to sleepbut no--he won’t stop doing exercisewon’t stop with his famous long-distance callswon’t stop with Bachtt with Beethoventttt with Tchaikovskywon’t stop with the long looks in the mirrorwon’t stop with the ridiculous obsession about continuing to breathepitiful--it would be better if he turned out the lightRidiculous old man his mother says to himyou and your father are exactly alikehe didn’t want to die eithermay God grant you the strength to drive a carmay God grant you the strength to talk on the phonemay God grant you the strength to breathe may God grant you the strength to bury your motherYou fell asleep, you ridiculous old man!but the poor wretch does not intend to sleepLet’s not confuse crying with sleeping
Nicanor Parra
LIKE MOTHER, LIKE LOVERThere is the motherWho cooks too muchTo feed her children,And there is the motherWho cooks too little,Or not at all.There is the birdThat returns to its nestWith just a frail wormAnd feeds it to her babies,And there is the birdThat kills its frail babiesJust to eat the worm.There is the loverWho argues thatThere is neverEnough love,And there is the other loverWho argues that love isAll there everWas.
Suzy Kassem
A child cannot pay for its mother's milk
Chinua Achebe
Thank you, Mom, for the way you managed yourself during the childish, mean, selfish, insensitive, irresponsible, unreasonable, hateful moments I put you through. From your example I learned to be patient, positive, kind, selfless, sympathetic, reliable, sensible, and loving. You have my endless appreciation.
Richelle E. Goodrich
We aim to bemen who’ll makeour mothers proud,but we end upmaking them cry,and are onlyslightly betterthan our fathers,at best
Phil Volatile
A mother's lap is the strongest hub and school of each religion. In other words, the mother breezes and waves the religion since the mother is a religion.
Ehsan Sehgal
A mother's lap is the strongest hub and school of each religion. In other words, the mother breezes and waves the religion since she is the religion.
Ehsan Sehgal
Old is the tree and the fruit good,Very old and thick the wood.Woodman, is your courage stout?Beware! the root is wrapped aboutYour mother's heart, your father's bones;And like the mandrake comes with groans.
Robert Louis Stevenson
In my experience nursing is waiting. The mother becomes the background against which the baby lives, becomes time. I used to exist against the continuity of time. Then I became the baby's continuity, a background of ongoing time for him to live against. I was the warmth and milk that was always there for him, the agent of comfort that was always there for him. My body, my life, became the landscape of my son's life. I am no longer merely a thing living in the world; I am a world.
Sarah Manguso
Once, she fell off of a ladder when I was three. She says all she was worried about was my face as I watched her fall.
Sarah Kay
a storm that walked on legs of lightning,dragging its shaggy belly over the fields.
Ted Kooser
We can think a healed thought and speak a healed word, speak of and to the two who are One, our MotherGoddessFatherGod. The hopeful but misty thought that "I've a Mother there" will give way to the experience that "I've a Mother here." We will know Him, Her, Them, Us, the Divine Family unbroken, bringing part to whole and whole to part, singing the indispensable She who had been forgotten but it now found, singing the wholeness, singing the holiness.
Carol Lynn Pearson
... mommahelp meturn the face of historyto your face.- Getting Down To Get Over - Dedicated To My Mother
June Jordan
A mother's hardest to forgive.Life is the fruit she longs to hand youRipe on a plate. And while you live,Relentlessly she understands you.
Phyllis McGinley
You see mother, you had no life of your own. They have no idea. One has only a life of one's own.
Barbara Kingsolver
God know that a mother need fortitude and courage and tolerance and flexibility and patience and firmness and nearly every other brave aspect of the human soul.
Phyllis McGinley
A mother's body remembers her babies-the folds of soft flesh, the softly furred scalp against her nose. Each child has it's own entreaties to body and soul.
Barbara Kingsolver
Between the desireAnd the spasm,Between the potencyAnd the existence,Between the essenceAnd the descent,Falls the Shadow.
T.S Eliot
Poetry has its uses for despair. It can carve a shape in which a pain can seem to be; it can give one’s loss a form and dimension so that it might be loss and not simply a hopeless haunting. It can do these things for one person, or it can do them for an entire culture. But poetry is for psychological, spiritual, or emotional pain. For physical pain it is, like everything but drugs, useless.
Christian Wiman
How nice it would be to be dead if only we could know we were dead. That is what I hate, the not being able to turn round in the grave and to say It is over.
Edward Thomas
Some people are attracted to sickness, to the kind of madness where sparks fly off the head, to the incoherence of despair, masked by nervous energy, which winds up looking like bewildered joy.
Luke Davies
How poor you are, September. You make my heart groan. I know about Homesickness. It begins with H. What will you do?
Catherynne M. Valente
And leaning on the windowsill to enjoy the day, gazing at the variegated mass of the whole city, just one thought fills my soul: that I profoundly wish to die, to cease, to see no more light shining on this city or any city, to think no more, to feel no more, to leave behind the march of time and the sun like a piece of wrapping paper, to remove like a heavy suit – next to the big bed – the involuntary effort of being.
Fernando Pessoa
So, cutting the lashing of the waterproof match keg, after many failures Starbuck contrived to ignite the lamp in the lantern; then stretching it on a waif pole, handed it to Queequeg as the standard-bearer of this forlorn hope. There, then, he sat, holding up that imbecile candle in the heart of that almighty forlornness. There, then, he sat, the sign and symbol of a man without faith, hopelessly holding up hope in the midst of despair.
Herman Melville
We are so small; and what must one hold on to when one no longer recognizes one's own hands, nor one's step, nor even the small dose of everyday despair.
Danielle Collobert
The Wind Will Carry UsIn my night, so brief, alasThe wind is about to meet the leaves.My night so brief is filled with devastating anguishHark! Do you hear the whisper of the shadows?This happiness feels foreign to me.I am accustomed to despair.Hark! Do you hear the whisper of the shadows?There, in the night, something is happeningThe moon is red and anxious.And, clinging to this roofThat could collapse at any moment,The clouds, like a crowd of mourning women,Await the birth of the rain.One second, and then nothing.Behind this window,The night tremblesAnd the earth stops spinning.Behind this window, a strangerWorries about me and you.You in your greenery,Lay your hands – those burning memories –On my loving hands.And entrust your lips, replete with life's warmth,To the touch of my loving lipsThe wind will carry us!The wind will carry us!
Forough Farrokhzad
It is not in the storm or in the strifeWe feel benumbed and wish to be nor more,But in the after-silence on the shoreWhen all is lost except a little life.
George Gordon Byron
...only more keenly aware of how her soul starved within her, its wings wasting with the despair of disuse.
Alison Croggon
no concept of danger, reality, flow or compassion. you can feel the despair escaping from their machines, their lives as hopeless and as numbed as yours.
Charles Bukowski
Trudging on foot, loaded with sacks, bundles, and babies, young mothers who had lost their milk, driven out of their minds by the horrors of the journey, abandoned their children, shook the corn out of their sacks onto the ground, and turned back. A quick death, they had decided, was preferable to a slow death by starvation. Better to fall into the clutches of the enemy than to be torn to pieces by some beast in the forest.
Boris Pasternak
Hundreds of ladybugs had taken shelter from the winter in the crevices of the decayed windows. From there, they broke into the apartment in commando squads. My joy at that first sighting of the ladybug spreading its lower winglets on the rim of the jam glass, flashing three spots of fortune, soon turned into something tragic and Greek, a bloodied slaughter. Like in Ajax, I had to pluck ladybugs from my toothbrush every evening and in the morning shake out my shirt that, overnight, was infested with too much luck, and at lunch, I'd fish kamikazee-ladybugs out of my soup bowl, their Etna's crater in the middle of the round kitchen table. When I shut my eyes and held the hose to my ear and heard the little crackle of tiny bodies sucked into the eye of the tornado, I couldn't remain neutral. Putting away the vacuum, I consoled myself with sentences of friends who, after a beer or three, like to repeat to me the axiom that sooner or later, living in the city, each person discovers himself to be the murder of his own happiness. They were genuine Berlin ladybugs, they'd occupied the windows illegally like my friends in apartments from which they were later evicted.
Aleš Šteger
What makes the hero truly greatis never, never to despair.
Robert Burns
Dividing earth and skyis not the right wayto think about this wholeness.It only allows one to liveat a more precise address--were I to be searched forI'd be found much faster.My distinguishing marksare rapture and despair.From 'Sky', in the collection 'Miracle Fair
Wisława Szymborska
ROMEO :'Tis torture and not mercy. Heaven is here,Where Juliet lives, and every cat and dogAnd little mouse, every unworthy thing,Live here in heaven and may look on her,But Romeo may not. More validity,More honorable state, more courtship livesIn carrion flies than Romeo. They may seizeOn the white wonder of dear Juliet’s handAnd steal immortal blessing from her lips,Who even in pure and vestal modesty,Still blush, as thinking their own kisses sin.But Romeo may not. He is banishèd.Flies may do this, but I from this must fly.They are free men, but I am banishèd.And sayst thou yet that exile is not death?Hadst thou no poison mixed, no sharp-ground knife,No sudden mean of death, though ne'er so mean,But “banishèd” to kill me?—“Banishèd”!O Friar, the damnèd use that word in hell.Howling attends it. How hast thou the heart,Being a divine, a ghostly confessor,A sin-absolver, and my friend professed,To mangle me with that word “banishèd”?
William Shakespeare
Well, here I am, just come home; a fellow gone to the bad; though I had the best intentions in the world at one time. Now I am melancholy mad, what with drinking and one thing and another.
Thomas Hardy
In the next world I could not be worse than I am in this.
Patrick Branwell Brontë
The art of our necessities is strangeThat can make vile things precious.
William Shakespeare
And now, my poor old woman, why are you crying so bitterly? It is autumn. The leaves are falling from the trees like burning tears- the wind howls. Why must you mimic them?
Mervyn Peake
my beerdrunk soul is sadder than all the dead christmas trees of the world.
Charles Bukowski
But now that so much is changing, isn't it time for us to change? Couldn't we try to gradually develop and slowly take upon ourselves, little by little, our part in the great task of love? We have been spared all its trouble, and that is why it has slipped in among our distractions, as a piece of real lace will sometimes fall into a child's toy-box and please him and no longer please him, and finally it lies there among the broken and dismembered toys, more wretched than any of them. We have been spoiled by superficial pleasures like dilettantes, and are looked upon as masters. But what if we despised our successes? What if we started from the very outset to learn the task of love, which has always been done for us? What if we went ahead and became beginners, now that much is changing?
Rainer Maria Rilke
In the make-up of human beings, intelligence counts for more than our hands, and that is our true strength.
Ovid
Walking was not fast enough so we ran. Running was not fast enough, so we galloped. Galloping was not fast enough, so we sailed. Sailing was not fast enough, so we rolled merrily along on long metal tracks. Long metal tracks were not fast enough, so we drove. Driving was not fast enough, so we flew.Flying isn't fast enough, not fast enough for us. We want to get there faster. Get where? Wherever we are not. But a human soul can go only as fast as a man can walk, they used to say. In that case, where are all the souls? Left behind. They wander here and there, slowly, dim lights flickering in the marshes at night, looking for us. But they're not nearly fast enough, not for us, we're way ahead of them, they'll never catch up. That's why we can go so fast: our souls don't weigh us down.
Margaret Atwood
You could take the entirety of the common sense of humans and put it in the palm of your hand and still have room for your dick.
Anne Carson
Like many human beings, he took the least sign of conversation as his cue to make noise.
Barbara Kingsolver
Monkeys are superior to men in this: when a monkey looks into a mirror, he sees a monkey.
Malcolm de Chazal