Quotes by Poets - Page 148

Human bodies are such garbage bags.
Dennis Cooper
Were it not for frustration and humiliationI suppose the human race would get ideas above its station.
Ogden Nash
We all start out the same in our mothers' wombs. We, all of us, when floating in the amniotic sea of our earliest oblivion, have gonads. If the Y chromosome didn't swoop in to act on the gonads of some of us and make testes, we would all become women. In biology, the Genesis story is reversed: Adam becomes Adam out of Eve, not the other way around.
Siri Hustvedt
Last night I watched the weather channel, as is my habit. Elsewhere in the world there are floods: roiling brown water, bloated cows floating by, survivors huddled on rooftops. Thousands have drowned. Global warming is held accountable: People must stop burning things up, it is said. Gasoline, oil, whole forests. But they won't stop. Greed and hunger lash them on, as usual.
Margaret Atwood
Vanity dies hard, in some obstinate cases it outlives the man.
Robert Louis Stevenson
The vastest things are those we may not learn.We are not taught to die, nor to be born,Nor how to burnWith love.How pitiful is our enforced returnTo those small things we are the masters of.
Mervyn Peake
I wish I loved the Human Race;I wish I loved its silly face;I wish I liked the way it walks;I wish I liked the way it talks;And when I’m introduced to one,I wish I thought “What Jolly Fun!
Walter Alexander Raleigh
I have always swung back and forth between alienation and relatedness. As a child, I would run away from the beatings, from the obscene words, and always knew that if I could run far enough, then any leaf, any insect, any bird, any breeze could bring me to my true home. I knew I did not belong among people. Whatever they hated about me was a human thing; the nonhuman world has always loved me. I can't remember when it was otherwise. But I have been emotionally crippled by this. There is nothing romantic about being young and angry, or even about turning that anger into art. I go through the motions of living in society, but never feel a part of it. When my family threw me away, every human on earth did likewise.
Wendy Rose
A falcon hovers at the edge of the sky.Two gulls drift slowly up the river.Vulnerable while they ride the wind,they coast and glide with ease.Dew is heavy on the grass below,the spider's web is ready.Heaven's ways include the human:among a thousand sorrows, I stand alone.
Du Fu
Of the good in you I can speak, but not of the evil.For what is evil but good tortured by its own hunger and thirst?Verily when good is hungry it seeks food even in dark caves, and when it thirsts it drinks even of dead waters.
Kahlil Gibran
The free animalhas its dying always behind itand God in front of it, and its wayis the eternal way, as the spring flowing.Never, not for a moment, do we havepure space before us, where the flowersendlessly open.
Rainer Maria Rilke
...animals behaved with purpose, it seemed. Unlike people.
Barbara Kingsolver
EVERY DOG’S STORYI have a bed, my very own.It’s just my size.And sometimes I like to sleep alonewith dreams inside my eyes.But sometimes dreams are dark and wild and creepyand I wake and am afraid, though I don’t know why.But I’m no longer sleepyand too slowly the hours go by.So I climb on the bed where the light of the moonis shining on your faceand I know it will be morning soon.Everybody needs a safe place.
Mary Oliver
There was a time—until very recently in the scheme of things—when there were no wild animals, because every animal was wild; and humans were few. Animals, and animal presence over us and around us. Over every horizon, animals. Their skins clothing our skins, their fats in our lamps, their bladders to carry water, meat when we could get it.
Kathleen Jamie
Animals had returned to what was left of the forest...clusters of orange butterflies exploded off the blackish purple piles of bear sign and winked and fluttered magically like leaves without trees. More bears than people traveled the muddy road, leaving tracks straight up and down the middle of it...
Denis Johnson
Be prepared. A dog is adorable and noble.A dog is a true and loving friend. A dogis also a hedonist.
Mary Oliver
But I want to extol not the sweetness nor the placidity of the dog, but the wilderness out of which he cannot step entirely, and from which we benefit. For wilderness is our first home too, and in our wild ride into modernity with all its concerns and problems we need also all the good attachments to that origin that we can keep or restore. Dog is one of the messengers of that rich and still magical first world. The dog would remind us of the pleasures of the body with its graceful physicality, and the acuity and rapture of the senses, and the beauty of forest and ocean and rain and our own breath. There is not a dog that romps and runs but we learn from him.The other dog—the one that all its life walks leashed and obedient down the sidewalk—is what a chair is to a tree. It is a possession only, the ornament of a human life. Such dogs can remind us of nothing large or noble or mysterious or lost. They cannot make us sweeter or more kind.Only unleashed dogs can do that. They are a kind of poetry themselves when they are devoted not only to us but to the wet night, to the moon and the rabbit-smell in the grass and their own bodies leaping forward.
Mary Oliver
Big Brown MooseI'm a big brown moose,I'm a rascally moose,I'm a moose with a tough, shaggy hide;and I kick and I prancein a long-legged dancewith my moose-mama close by my side.I shrug off the coldand I sneeze at the windand I swivel my ears in the snow;and I tramp and I trompover forest and swamp,'cause there's nowhere a moose cannot go.I'm a big brown moose, I'm a ravenous mooseas I hunt for the willow and yew;with a snort and a crunch,I rip off each bunch,and I chew and I chew and I chew.When together we slumpin a comfortable clump --my mountainous mama and I --I give her a nuzzleof velvety muzzle.Our frosty breath drifts to the sky.I'm a big brown moose,I'm a slumberous moose,I'm a moose with a warm, snuggly hide;and I bask in the moonas the coyotes croon,with my moose-mama close by my side.
Joyce Sidman
...I would not engage the wombatIn any form of mortal combat.
Ogden Nash
Having shot down a number, some of which were anly wounded, the whole flock swept repeatedly around their prostrate companions, and again settled on a low tree, within twenty yards of the spot where I stood. At each successive discharge, though showers of them fell, yet the affection of the survivors seemed rather to increase; for after a few circuits around the place, they again alighted near me.
Ron Rash
Right from the start he is dressed in his best - his blacks and his whitesLittle Fauntleroy - quiffed and glossy,A Sunday suit, a wedding natty get-up,Standing in dunged strawUnder cobwebby beams, near the mud wall,Half of him legs, Shining-eyed, requiring nothing moreBut that mother's milk come back often.Everything else is in order, just as it is.Let the summer skies hold off, for the moment.This is just as he wants it.A little at a time, of each new thing, is best.Too much and too sudden is too frightening -When I block the light, a bulk from space,To let him in to his mother for a suck,He bolts a yard or two, then freezes,Staring from every hair in all directions,Ready for the worst, shut up in his hopeful religion,A little syllogismWith a wet blue-reddish muzzle, for God's thumb.You see all his hopes bustlingAs he reaches between the worn rails towardsThe topheavy oven of his mother.He trembles to grow, stretching his curl-tip tongue -What did cattle ever find hereTo make this dear little fellowSo eager to prepare himself?He is already in the race, and quivering to win -His new purpled eyeball swivel-jerksIn the elbowing push of his plans.Hungry people are getting hungrier,Butchers developing expertise and markets,But he just wobbles his tail - and glistensWithin his dapper profileUnaware of how his whole lineage Has been tied up.He shivers for feel of the world licking his side.He is like an ember - one glowOf lighting himself upWith the fuel of himself, breathing and brightening.Soon he'll plunge out, to scatter his seething joy,To be present at the grass,To be free on the surface of such a wideness,To find himself. To stand. T
Ted Hughes
When Mother had told me that animals found quiet, unexposed places to die, I had always imagined they knew they were dying, and accepted it, almost gracefully. Now I saw that this wasn't so at all: they crept into corners in the hope of surviving, they only knew they were weakened and exposed, easy prey, and their instinct was to find a hidden place and try to outlive whatever it was they were suffering. It had been a mistake to imagine they wanted to be alone, to die in peace. Animals have no knowledge of death; for them, death is the unexpected end of life, something they resist by instinct, for no good reason. In that sense, their existence has an almost mechanical quality.
John Burnside
Animals are inspirational. They don’t know how to lie. They are natural forces.
Charles Bukowski
The buffalo that in nature looks healthy and silken, in a zoo is a mangy creature with matted mane and dirty skin. Can those who see buffalo in captivity ever conceive how beautiful they can be? What a pity that most young people instead of seeing on animal in nature - which is worth a hundred in any zoo- must derive their knowledge of God's creatures from their appearances in prison. If we cannot perceive any right proportion of man's moral nature by looking at prisoners in a jail, how do we manage to think that we know all about an animal by gazing at him penned in a cage?
Dhan Gopal Mukerji
My favorite, how did you put it now? Landscapes, animals, plants? Favorite what? Books, music, architecture, painting? I don't have any favorite animals, no favorite mosquitoes, favorite beetles, favorite worms, even with the best will in the world I cannot tell you which birds or fish or predators I prefer, it would also be difficult for me to have to choose much more generally.
Ingeborg Bachmann
I follow suit, said the lion, vacating his coat of arms and movie logos; and the eagle said, Get me off this flag.
Margaret Atwood
The faint pink coating the treetops promised rippling buds, a sure sign of spring hastening in, right on schedule, and the animal world getting ready for its fiesta of courting and mating, dueling and dancing, suckling and grubbing, costume-making and shedding-in short, the fuzzy, fizzy hoopla of life's ramshackle return.
Diane Ackerman
They do not sweat and whine about their condition, they do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, they do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things, not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago.
Walt Whitman
Hi! handsome hunting manFire your little gun.Bang! Now the animalis dead and dumb and done.Nevermore to peep again, creep again, leap again,Eat or sleep or drink again. Oh, what fun!
Walter de la Mare
I could end this with a moral,as if this were a fable about animals,though no fables are really about animals.
Margaret Atwood
I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain’d, I stand and look at them long and long.They do not sweat and whine about their condition, They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things, Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago, Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.
Walt Whitman
Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore.
Edgar Allan Poe
You think those dogs will not be in heaven! I tell you they will be there long before any of us.
Robert Louis Stevenson
There are those laughing their way to hell; and those, crying themselves to heaven.
Anthony Liccione
People enter different paths seeking for happiness and fulfillment. We must respect other people's individuality. Just because they're not on your path doesn't mean they are on the wrong track.
Ogwo David Emenike
We all have different paths in life. As in purpose, so is happiness. As our purposes differ, so do our roads to happiness differ, though we may have common grounds.
Ogwo David Emenike
People want the here and now, rather than the there and after; as most are living in the where and what.
Anthony Liccione
Throw away thy rod, throw away thy wrath; O my God, take the gentle path.
George Herbert
A lost road will remember your footsteps because someday you may want to return, tracing the way.
Munia Khan
Never depend on a road, depend on your strides
Munia Khan
My path is full of petals–I have swept it for no others.My thatch gate has been closed–but opens now for you. It’s a long way to the market, I can offer you little– Yet here in my cottage there is old wine for our cups.
Du Fu
There is nothing revolutionary whatsoever about the control of women's bodies by men. The woman's body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected.
Adrienne Rich
She had shown him by her independence how it was only fear that held people together. The fear of being alone and the fear of being different.
Mervyn Peake
It was partly the war, the revolution did the rest. The war was an artificial break in life-- as if life could be put off for a time-- what nonsense! The revolution broke out willy-nilly like a sigh suppressed too long. Everyone was revived, reborn, changed, transformed. You might say that everyone has been through two revolutions-- his own, personal revolution as well as the general one. It seems to me that socialism is the sea, and all these separate streams, these private, individual revolutions, are flowing into it-- the sea of life, the sea of spontaneity. I said life, but I mean life as you see it in a great picture, transformed by genius, creatively enriched. Only now people have decided to experience it not in books and pictures, but in themselves, not as an abstraction but in practice.
Boris Pasternak
They said it was to be a revolutionary house, free of class struggle, no servants’ rooms because they didn’t believe in laundry maids or cooks.Nobody does, really. Why should they? Only in having clean clothes, clean floors, and enchiladas tapatias.
Barbara Kingsolver
Collins and Morales represent a segment of society which, if attacked with the weapons society sanctions, one finds buffered by innumerable layers of law, bureaucracy, lies, evasions. They rest secure within their palaces, confident that they possess defenses against all possible attacks within the rules of the game, yet willing to violate those rules themselves. ... We both know that although it is not listed in the rules, a player can end the game by kicking over the board and throttling his opponent.
Roger Zelazny
God save us from seeing a Russian revolt, senseless and merciless. Those who plot impossible upheavals among us, are either young and do not know our people, or are hard-hearted men who do not care a straw either about their own lives or those of others.
Alexander Pushkin
The revolution is now just a sentiment.
Pier Paolo Pasolini
Freedom without the means to be self-supporting is a one-armed triumph.
Michelle Cliff
His headstone saidFREE AT LAST, FREE AT LASTBut death is a slave's freedomWe seek the freedom of free menAnd the construction of a world Where Martin Luther King could have lived and preached non-violence
Nikki Giovanni
I think that after a revolution a man needs a few years to get used to the new era. I knew from my limited and worthless experience that those who tear down and destroy one era cannot build another. Just as weapons can't suddenly become flowers, a killer can't suddenly turn gardener. Hasan-i Tofan, a killer and an earlier member of "The Finishing-Off Sports Club
Bakhtiyar Ali
The true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations which we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us, and which knows only the oppressors' tactics, the oppressors' relationships.
Audre Lorde
The hour that was for them, for us, for all who had awakened one morning to see their fields covered with blood rather than harvest, who didn't seek to change the world but lived in good faith and prayer offered to an imposing God, for the young women who mended their men's clothing and held their sons' mouths to the purple nipples of sweet breasts, for the man who watched the suns descend behind the mountain every evening and dreamed and when his sons were grown, passed on his dreams, for the black nights when guitars harmonized with the wind's song, to the bottle of regional brew, and a hand-rolled cigarette, to the baptism and a dance of celebration, to the aroma of soups simmering on wood-burning stoves and filled the bellies of those who worked the fields, to a candle that burned in vigil while a hungry mind gulped the printed truth of another's legacy, to the owl that called from between the moon and earth while lovers enwrapped their passion on silver tinted grass, to the history of the world and to its future, to all that had lived and died and had been born again in that moment as i approached am opaque window and pointed my weapon.
Ana Castillo
The creation of conditions by which an entire people who have lived in exploitation and illiteracy gains access to the highest levels of knowledge and creativity is one of the most beautiful achievements of a revolution.
Roberto Fernández Retamar
Let them run ahead. Then I’ll have good reason for shooting them down. Sharpeville? Attempting to escape. Attempting to escape from the prison of their lives. That’s the most dangerous crime. It brings about revolution. So, off we go, lads!
Derek Walcott
If Lenin would have had facebook, there would never have been any Russian Revolution. He would have had five followers, a handful of friends, and he'd type frantically into his own bubble. If Hitler would have had facebook, we'd still be plagued by a constant stream of conspiracy sites. Damn, how lucky are we exactly that none of these geezers had facebook and meddled about with the world instead.
Martijn Benders
Parvus denied that universal suffrage was an end to itself since the middle class would always find ways to manipulate the electoral system. Freedom could not be begged for: it had to be won.
Robert Service
Revolution is not a one time event.
Audre Lorde
The sense of the joy in anything is the sense of Christ.
Caryll Houselander
Whatever liberates our spirit without giving us mastery over ourselves is destructive.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe