Quotes by Poets - Page 151

Good folk, I have no coin,To take were to purloin:I have no copper in my purse,I have no silver either,And all my gold is on the furzeThat shakes in windy weatherAbove the rusy heather.
Christina Rossetti
Evening by eveningAmong the Brookside rushes,Laura bow'd her head to hear,Lizzie veil'd her blushes:Crouching close togetherIn the cooling weather,With clasping arms and cautioning lips,With tingling cheeks and fingertips."lie close," Laura said,Pricking up her golden head:"We must not look at Goblin men,We must not buy their fruits:who knows upon the soil they fedTheir hungry thirsty roots?""Come buy," call the GoblinsHobbling down the glen
Christina Rossetti
I have a rendezvous with death... I will not fail that rendezvous
Alan Seeger
I rushed through the door.You had bitten a way for me.
Hannah Weiner
Is stuffed, de world, wif feeding girls.
John Berryman
Most Like an Arch This MarriageMost like an arch—an entrance which upholds and shores the stone-crush up the air like lace. Mass made idea, and idea held in place. A lock in time. Inside half-heaven unfolds.Most like an arch—two weaknesses that lean into a strength. Two fallings become firm. Two joined abeyances become a term naming the fact that teaches fact to mean.Not quite that? Not much less. World as it is, what’s strong and separate falters. All I do at piling stone on stone apart from you is roofless around nothing. Till we kissI am no more than upright and unset. It is by falling in and in we makethe all-bearing point, for one another’s sake, in faultless failing, raised by our own weight.
John Ciardi
only kindness that raises its headfrom the crowd of the world to sayit is I you have been looking for,and then goes with you everywherelike a shadow or a friend.
Naomi Shihab Nye
...in that rich earth a richer dust concealed.(I'm flogging a dead horse w/ this one but this is the 1st time I've even seen this quotes feature! I just wanted to post something.)
Rupert Brooke
Oh captain my captain
Walt Whitman
There are anonymous poems and poets without poems.
Dejan Stojanovic
But who are we, where do we come fromWhen all those yearsNothing but idle talk is leftAnd we are nowhere in the world?"= MEETING =
Boris Pasternak
After the fierce midsummer all ablaze Has burned itself to ashes, and expires In the intensity of its own fires,There come the mellow, mild, St. Martin daysCrowned with the calm of peace, but sad with haze. So after Love has led us, till he tires Of his own throes, and torments, and desires,Comes large-eyed friendship: with a restful gaze,He beckons us to follow, and across Cool verdant vales we wander free from care. Is it a touch of frost lies in the air?Why are we haunted with a sense of loss?We do not wish the pain back, or the heat;And yet, and yet, these days are incomplete.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
We may know who we are or we may not. We may be Muslims, Jews or Christians but until our hearts become the mould for every heart we will see only our differences.
Jalaluddin Rumi
I hate and love. And why, perhaps you’ll ask.I don’t know: but I feel, and I’m tormented.
Catullus
Said the Sun to the Moon-'When you are but a lonely white crone,And I, a dead King in my golden armour somewhere in a dark wood,Remember only this of our hopeless loveThat never till Time is doneWill the fire of the heart and the fire of the mind be one
Edith Sitwell
I love not man the less, but nature more
George Gordon Byron
I have you fast in my fortress,And will not let you depart,But put you down into the dungeon,In the round-tower of my heart,And there will I keep you forever,Yes, forever and a day,Till the walls shall crumble to ruin,And moulder in the dust away!
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Every moment of the nightForever changing placesAnd they put out the star-lightWith the breath from their pale faces
Edgar Allan Poe
nothing's news.it's the same old thing indisguise.only one thing comes without adisguise and you only see itonce, ormaybe never.like getting hit by a freighttrain.makes us realize that all ourmoaning about long lost girlsin gingham dressesis not so importantafterall.
Charles Bukowski
Ourchestra:So you haven't got a drum, just beat your belly.So I haven't got a horn-I'll play my nose.So we haven't any cymbals-We'll just slap our hands together,And though there may be orchestrasThat sound a little betterWith their fancy shiny instrumentsThat cost an awful lot-Hey, we're making music twice as goodBy playing what we've got!
Shel Silverstein
Some people like me, some don't. I don't understand, Where the difference comes from. My heart like them all. For a simple childish reason. We all are created equal, we all are humans.
Santosh Kalwar
EnnuiTea leaves thwart those who court catastrophe,designing futures where nothing will occur:cross the gypsy’s palm and yawning shewill still predict no perils left to conquer.Jeopardy is jejune now: naïve knightfinds ogres out-of-date and dragons unheardof, while blasé princesses indicttilts at terror as downright absurd.The beast in Jamesian grove will never jump,compelling hero’s dull career to crisis;and when insouciant angels play God’s trump,while bored arena crowds for once look eager,hoping toward havoc, neither pleas nor prizesshall coax from doom’s blank door lady or tiger.
Sylvia Plath
There occurs the beautiful feeling that only humanity together is the true human being, and that the individual can be cheerful and happy only if he has the courage to feel himself in the Whole.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I loved the idea that looking at a painting or listening to a concerto could make you somehow "transcend" the day-in, day-out bullshit that grinds you down: how in one instant of pure attention you could draw something inside that made you forever larger
Mary Karr
The Grim Reaper isn't grim at all; he's a life-saver. He isn't grim because he isn't anything. . . . he is nothing. And nothing is a hell of a lot better than anything. So long, boys.
Jack Kerouac
Standing in the shower, I feel something on the back of my leg that turns out to be my ass.
Mary Karr
BARRY GIFFORD, Author of "Wild at Heart" on DANGEROUS ODDS by Marisa Lankester:"Marisa Lankester's unique chronicle of high crimes and low company is as wild a ride as any reader is likely to be taken on. She was the lone woman in the eye of a predatory hurricane that blew across continents and devastated countless lives. That she survived is testament to her brains and bravery. The old-timers who invented violence as a second language contended that nothing is deadlier than the female, to cross her was to buck dangerous odds, and this book tells you why." Film "Wild at Heart" won Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, Film by David Lynch
Barry Gifford
Fortunately the Omanis are generally very friendly and in no time at all, I had a knight in shining white dishdasha offering to help me.
Charlotte Smith
First memory: a man at the back door is saying, I have real bad news, sweat is dripping off his face, Garbert's been shot, noise from my mother, I run to her room behind her, I'm jumping on the canopied bed while she cries, she's pulling out drawers looking for a handkerchief, Now, he's all right, the man say, they think, patting her shoulder, I'm jumping higher, I'm not allowed, they think he saved old man Mayes, the bed slats dislodge and the mattress collapses. My mother lunges for me.Many traveled to Reidsville for the event, but my family did not witness Willis Barnes's electrocution, From kindergarten through high school, Donette, the murderer's daughter, was in my class. We played together at recess. Sometimes she'd spit on me.
Frances Mayes
And I was cooking for three, and teaching, and taking care of a man who’d just collapsed in my house; learning to cook like June Cleaver didn’t exactly seem an option.
Mark Doty
In late 1949, at two and a half years old, I arrived in Jamaica for the first time. I had crossed the Atlantic by air from England. My Jamaican father was studying in London, my European mother was sick, and so in true Jamaican style I was sent home to my grandparents.
Rachel Manley
Sometimes you have to travel back in time, skirting the obstacles, in order to love someone.
Frances Mayes
They departed in the form of white smoke, rose easily upward, waved their hands in parting, and viewed with pity all those who remained behind. Then they danced gaily in celebration of their new freedom, before disintegrating into the air.
Joseph Bau
I hope to offer the personal as a way to connect to the universal, not a claim for one universal experience of having breasts, but a universal hope for kindness—to each other and our selves and our bodies.
Ruth Daniell
You cannot go poking skeletons in the closet without making maggots wriggle." - Springfield Road
Salena Godden
Pain engraves a deeper memory.
Anne Sexton
The head can travel a far piece while the body sits in one spot. It can traverse many decades, and many conversations can be had, even with the dead.
Mary Karr
Joy, it is, which I’ve never known before, only pleasure or excitement. Joy is a different thing, because its focus exists outside the self – delight in something external, not satisfaction of some inner craving.
Mary Karr
Tomorrow! How sweet its prospects for a drunkard the night before. There is no better word. Before the earth hurls itself into sunshine, nothing is not possible.
Mary Karr
But it's a neurological fact that the scared self holds on while the reasoned one lets go.
Mary Karr
It's hard to be an articulate ghost.
Mary Karr
Slurping these spirits is soul preparation, a warped communion, myself serving as god, priest, and congregation.
Mary Karr
Change is still resented on the Plains, so much so much so that many small-town people cling to the dangerous notion that while the world outside may change drastically, their town does not...... when myth dictates that the town has not really changed, ways of adapting to new social and economic conditions are rejected: not vigorously, but with a strangely resolute inertia...Combatting inertia in a town such as Lemmon can seem like raising the dead. It is painful to watch intelligent business people who are dedicated to the welfare of the town spend most of their energy combatting those more set in their ways. Community spirit can still work wonders here - people raised over $500,000 in the hard times of the late 1980s to keep the Lemmon nursing home open...By the time a town is 75 or 100 years old, it may be filled with those who have come to idealize their isolation. Often these are people who never left at all, or fled back to the safety of the town after a try at college a few hundred miles from home, or returned after college regarding the values of the broader, more pluralistic world they had encountered as something to protect themselves and their families from...More than ever, I've come to see conspiracy theories as the refuge of those who have lost their natural curiosity to cope with change.
Kathleen Norris
By the time a town is 75 or 100 years old, it may be filled with those who have come to idealize their isolation. Often these are people who never left at all, or fled back to the safety of the town after a try at college a few hundred miles from home, or returned after college regarding the values of the broader, more pluralistic world they had encountered as something to protect themselves and their families from...
Kathleen Norris
More than ever, I've come to see conspiracy theories as the refuge of those who have lost their natural curiosity to cope with change.
Kathleen Norris
He clenched his small fist, bellowed his rage to the heavens, and resolved to never again recognize the authority of any man on earth.
Patricia Lockwood
I could hear my abandoned dreams making a racket in my soul.
Joy Harjo
This is a work of memory -- facts have been altered. Names have been changed.
Lavinia Greenlaw
Ignore the misery. Custom invites you to ignore the misery."SHOW YOUR TONGUE
Günter Grass
One last characteristic of the memoir that is important to recognize is one which also applies to essays, and which Georg Lukacs described as "the process of judging." This may seem problematic to some, since...we connect it with 'judgmental,' often used nowadays as a derogatory word. But the kind of judgment necessary to the good personal essay, or to the memoir, is not that nasty tendency to oversimplify and dismiss other people out of hand but rather the willingness to form and express complex opinions, both positive and negative.If the charm of memoir is that we, the readers, see the author struggling to understand her past, then we must also see the author trying out opinions she may later shoot down, only to try out others as she takes a position about the meaning of her story. The memoirist need not necessarily know what she thinks about her subject but she must be trying to find out; she may never arrive at a definitive verdict, but she must be willing to share her intellectual and emotional quest for answers. Without this attempt to make a judgment, the voice lacks interest, the stories, becalmed in the doldrums of neutrality, become neither fiction nor memoir, and the reader loses respect for the writer who claims the privilege of being the hero in her own story without meeting her responsibility to pursue meaning. Self revelation without analysis or understanding becomes merely an embarrassment to both reader and writer.
Judith Barrington
Listen: I don't have anything against autobiographies, so long as the writer has a penis that's twelve inches long when erect. So long as the writer is a woman who was once a whore and is moderately wealthy in her old age.
Roberto Bolaño
We're not made to wallow in pleasure. Pleasure is joy's assassin.
Mary Karr
For the first time I realized adults could back themselves into corners so remote that love, or its memory, could no longer reach them.
Kirby Wright
Everyone who got where he is has had to begin where he was.
Robert Louis Stevenson
He has half the deed done who has made a beginning.
Horace
Every single achievement you make, every single life you change and every single skill you acquire brings you one step closer to becoming a better leader. Every day you can improve the leader in you to become a better person and a greater leader.
Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum
Age was respected among his people, but achievement was revered. As the elders said, if a child washed his hands he could eat with kings.
Chinua Achebe
To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.
Robert Louis Stevenson
And sometimes both of them forgot that what they were undergoing amid the clink of cutlery and crockery was a mutual interview that might decide whether or not they would own a common set of those items some time in the whimsical future.
Vikram Seth
Facebook is that successful guy you’re supposed to want to date, but you can’t keep your mind off the beautiful freak in the corner. Twitter is my freak.
Jennifer Harrison