Quotes by Poets - Page 169

Time means a lot to me, paperwork wastes it, and I have always been a firm believer in my right to do anything I cannot be stopped from doing. Which sometimes entails not getting caught at it. This is not quite so bad as it sounds, as I am a decent, civilized, likable guy. So, shading my eyes against the blue and fiery afternoon, I began searching for ways to convince the authorities of this. Lying, I decided, was probably best.
Roger Zelazny
Legislators and revolutionaries who promise equality and liberty at the same time, are either psychopaths or mountebanks.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Salvation lies not in the faithfulness to forms, but in the liberation from them.
Boris Pasternak
The champions of liberty have the medal for any necklace. (Les champions de la liberte - Ont la médaille pour tout collier)
Charles de Leusse
THE THREE BEES by Suzy KassemA young boy once askedA wealthy beekeeper:“What is the secret ofYour success?”The beekeeper simply smiledAnd replied:“To be successful,One has to be one of three bees:The queen bee,The hardest working bee,Or the bee that does not fit in.One success is inherited,And the next one is earned.While the last one isSelf-sought,Self-served,And happens on its ownTerms.”“And which bee are you?”Asked the boy.The beekeeper then wipedThe sweat from his headAnd said:“The last may seem the riskiest,But the glory of achievementIs the most rewarding.Freedom always comes at a high cost,But only when you areYour own boss,Can you trulyAfford it.” (Suzy Kassem Poetry)
Suzy Kassem
The shallow consider liberty a release from all law, from every constraint. The wise man sees in it, on the contrary, the potent Law of Laws.
Walt Whitman
The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it.
William Blake
There are temptations more attractive than angels. Liberty, Patriotism, the good of humanity – words like that are the silver scales of the Tempter’s flaming wings
Alfred de Musset
The cry has been that when war is declared, all opposition should be hushed. A sentiment more unworthy of a free country could hardly be propagated.
William Ellery Channing
But what more oft in Nations grown corrupt,And by thir vices brought to servitude,Than to love Bondage more than Liberty,Bondage with ease than strenuous liberty;
John Milton
One of the qualities of liberty is that, as long as it is being striven after, it goes on expanding. Therefore, the man who stands in the midst of the struggle and says, "I have it," merely shows by doing so that he has just lost it.
Henrik Ibsen
Be nice to your children. They may grow up to be writers.
Katerina Stoykova-Klemer
I looked out the window and saw the street and railroad tracks, the woods beyond. Beyond the woods, the county of which they were a part. And so on, until it all dissolved into the larger thing: my mother's house becoming every other house as I once had seen it, sitting atop the southern end of a broad river valley, close enough to the the mountains that every few years a scared black bear would wander down into the remaining forest, and close enough to the ocean that those early English settlers took it as the farthest point they'd go upstream, the geology of the place preventing them from having any choice other than the one wherein they said, "We are lost; therefore we will call this home." And close enough that as a child I had been teased by older kids who said if I only tried hard enough I would smell salt water, and I, believing, stood among the light poles and the gulls in the parking lots of A&Ps and cried when I knew that it was true despite the fact that they had meant to lie, as children sometimes do.
Kevin Powers
Lola writes in her notebook: Leaf-fleas are even worse. Someone said, They don't bite people, because people don't have leaves. Lola writes, When the sun is beating down, they bite everything, even the wind. And we all have leaves. Leaves fall off when you stop growing, because childhood is all gone. And they grow back when you shrivel up, because love is all gone. Leaves spring up at will, writes Lola, just like tall grass. Two or three children in the village don't have any leaves, and those have a big childhood. A child like that is an only child, because it has a father and a mother who have been to school. The leaf-fleas turn older children into younger ones - a four-year-old into a three-year-old, a three-year-old into a one-year-old. Even a six-months-old, writes Lola, and even a newborn. And the more little brothers and sisters the leaf-fleas make, the smaller the childhood becomes.
Herta Müller
What is needed is this, and this alone: solitude, great inner loneliness. Going into oneself and not meeting anyone for hours – that is what one must arrive at. Loneliness of the kind one knew as a child, when the grown-ups went back and forth bound up in things which seemed grave and weighty because they looked so busy, and because one had no idea what they were up to.And when one day you realise that their preoccupations are meagre, their professions barren and no longer connected to life, why not continue to look on them like a child, as if on something alien, drawing on the depths of your own world, on the expanse of your own solitude, which itself is work and achievement and a vocation? Why wish to exchange a child’s wise incomprehension for rejection and contempt, when incomprehension is solitude, whereas rejection and contempt are ways of participating in what, by precisely these means, you want to sever yourself from?
Rainer Maria Rilke
I felt somehow happy to be so high above the world - a childish feeling, I grant, but we can't help becoming children as we leave social conventions behind and come nearer to nature. All life's experience is shed from us and the soul becomes anew what it once was and will surely be again
Mikhail Lermontov
...even a poisoned, desolate childhood can be missed.
Julianna Baggott
To My MotherYou too, my mother, read my rhymesFor love of unforgotten times,And you may chance to hear once moreThe little feet along the floor.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Now he slept soundly through the nights, and often he dreamed of trains, and often of one particular train: He was on it; he could smell the coal smoke; a world went by. And then he was standing in that world as the sound of the train died away. A frail familiarity in these scenes hinted to him that they came from his childhood. Sometimes he woke to hear the sound of the Spokane International fading up the valley and realized he’d been hearing the locomotive as he dreamed.
Denis Johnson
I'm not going to have a husband anyway," said Laura. "I'm going to live by myself in the garage.
Margaret Atwood
If he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a man.
Thomas Hardy
Art is childhood.
Rainer Maria Rilke
To be moved confuses the soul. One cannot convey these kinds of memories any more than the events of a dream......if I have complained too long, it is because my memory, no longer having any fixed abode, has to carry its luggage with it.
Jean Cocteau
Childhood is a slum and they love it.
Helen Dunmore
And my seven-year-old world humpty-dumptied, never to be put back together again.
Maya Angelou
I have such a hopeless dream of walking or being there at night, nothing happens, I just pass, everything is unbearably over with.
Jack Kerouac
I never had a childhood. Not like the rest of them anyway. I had a starting point from which I have never stopped running.
Dave Matthes
The door is crackedWe used to meetlike water does landnonot thatmore like when skin touches skinkissing fingertipsor when air escapes a lung and is felt across the worldI've leapt over cracks in sidewalksand swallowed away troublesome back painsthat could only be fixed with someone else's pillsWe met by your house one stray dayand you drove me to the baywhere we sat and kissed like it was yesterdayAnd here you told me that you loved meand that you always loved meand that you would always love methe wind blew and I held youYou rested your head on my shoulderand the wind blew warmLater, in your big red truck, we smoked some greenand I kissed you harderand held your breasts, and felt between your legsand with a gaspyou told me you were in love with meAnd then you drove me backand we promised it wouldn't be the endnot this timeThe quill and inkwell on your footI'm a writer and you are my greatest artI returned to my hell and dreamt of you once more
Dave Matthes
People will drive by their high school ten years down the road, just so they can pretend that thinking "not much has changed" is actually true. When really, everything has changed. The air smells the same, but the roads have cracked more. The roads have cracked so much they now look like the skin on a crocodile's back. And all the fields, green in the summers, golden in the autumns, have all been paved over with new reasons to never come back.
Dave Matthes
Are there many little boys who think they are a Monster? But in my case I am right said Geryon to the Dog they were sitting on the bluffs The dog regarded himJoyfully
Anne Carson
...ya can't get to Nevada on five bucks and a bad heart...
Dave Matthes
To all the boys, for when you become men: you'll leave women all throughout your life because they're holding you back, and even after she's gone she'll still weigh you down. To all the women: stay away from us men. We don't know anything about you, despite what we try to convince you of.
Dave Matthes
You know one day, you're going to look back on these days. And everyone you went to high school with will either be getting married to each other, shitting out kids, or dropping dead like flies," when she spoke, Miss Jenson sighed at the end of every few words; she must have been narrating her own thoughts she might have otherwise kept to herself, "and everything you never did, you'll never be able to even try.
Dave Matthes
...people who don't live at least a little bit in fear, have nothing left to live for.
Dave Matthes
She came towards me with a juicy gash between her legs that smelled like my best friend's sister" Just when I thought I'd escaped them allShe comes reeling herself inpulling at my stringsher hand quick to find my zipperShe moaned the way a drunk old lady doesAnd I wasn't even inside her yet"You don't have anywhere else to be," she managed to say..."My wounds have been reopened tonight already," I mutteredI caught wind of the gully ...the part of her she once kept sacred as a ChristianI smelled the informationI lifted my hand into the air and hailed a cabHe rolled down his window and saw her"Find another cab," he said, and sped off into the nightI took her homebecause she said she was lonelyreally she was drunk off somethingsome memory or some choiceshe walked funny... -one of her heels had brokenOn the couch I left her,Before I could go, she grabbed my cockI slapped her across the face and she pulled harderHer eyes stayed closedHer lips dripped Her grip clenched I wasn't getting out of this one unscathed"If I take my pants off, will you let me go?" I asked"If you take your pants off, I'll be suckin' that cock till you pass out from all the screamin'..."I slapped her again, because she needed itShe laughedSaying her cousin beat her harderSaying her father knew how to really... ...make things happenI asked her what her father's number wasLet's get his motherfucking self up here to take you away, that's what I saidShe said he died, or killed himself"What's the difference really," she said, chewing on her hairShe let go of my cock on her own accordAnd she opened her eyes for a momentShe closed them againAnd I could tell she was sleepingHer eyes opened once moreHer face red where I'd hit herShe tasted the blood on her lip"Do you think if we remind ourselves enough, we can make up for all the pain we've caused others?"I said to her, "We can't. All we can do is keep ourselves from all those who don't deserve it.
Dave Matthes
I knew that the tears of adults were wetter, saltier, and much, much sadder than those of a child
Thomas Burnett Swann
That is surely childhood's end, when you look at a thing like a rabbit needing skinned and have to say: "Nobody else is going to do this.
Barbara Kingsolver
This tiny, white-washed Infants' room was a brief but cosy anarchy. In that short time allowed us we played and wept, broke things, fell asleep, cheeked the teacher, discovered things we could do to each other, and exhaled our last guiltless days.My desk companions were those two blonde girls, already puppyishly pretty, whose names and bodies were to distract and haunt me for the next fifteen years of my life. Poppy and Jo were limper chums; they sat holding hands all day; and there was a female self-possession about their pink sticky faces that made me shout angrily at them.Vera was another I studied and liked; she was lonely, fuzzy and short. I felt a curious compassion for stumpy Vera; and it was through her, and no beauty, that I got into trouble and received the first public shock of my life. How it happened was simple, and I was innocent, so it seemed. She came up to me in the playground one morning and held her face close to mine. I had a stick in my hand, so I hit her on the head with it. Her hair was springy, so I hit her again and watched her mouth open up with a yell. To my surprise a commotion broke out around me, cries of scandal from the older girls, exclamations of horror and heavy censure mixed with Vera's sobbing wails. I was intrigued, not alarmed, that by wielding a beech stick I was able to cause such a stir. So I hit her again, without spite or passion, then walked off to try something else.
Laurie Lee
Why is it that places thousands of miles from my childhood village home send me back, opening the sluice-gates of the past? Well, we are all emigrants from the homeland of our childhoods. It may be, then, that the natural place to meet ourselves as children is 'abroad', and that includes the foreign country of our growing up and aging. So it is that the personal, physical feeling of departure from the time of childhood may merge in a special symbiosis with geographical departure, biography and geography resonating now on a single wavelength.
Georgi Gospodinov
you’ll find the buildings taller, thatthe halls are full of ghostsbut everything still here iswhat you remember most
Savannah Brown
The bottle of red brush on a white table gleamed throughout the remaining years of my childhood as the sign of what was possible there.
Siri Hustvedt
Children are still the way you were as a child, sad and happy in just the same way--and if you think of your childhood, you once again live among them, among the solitary children.
Rainer Maria Rilke
If somewhere deep within me arises some essenceof having been a child, one I never experienced,perhaps the purest childness of my childhood,I don’t want to know it. Without even looking,I want to form an angel out of itand hurl him into the foremost rankof screaming angels, to remind God.
Rainer Maria Rilke
You'd be surprised how many childhoods each of us has.
David Rivard
Childhood is the barrel they give you/to go over the falls in.
Linda McCarriston
The blessedness of being little!!!
William Shakespeare
Because the golden egg gleamedin my basket once, though my childhoodbecame an immense sheet of darkening waterI was Noah, and I was his ark,and there were two of every animal inside me
Mark Doty
Who is that blond child laughing as he runs after his colored marbles? [my marbles]It's meAnd who is the poet writing this poem?That blond child who laughed as he ran after his colored marbles
Pierre Albert-Birot
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.And so I dream of going back to be.
Robert Frost
At all costs the true world of childhood must prevail, must be restored; that world whose momentous, heroic, mysterious quality is fed on airy nothings, whose substance is so ill-fitted to withstand the brutal touch of adult inquisition.
Jean Cocteau
The mind, placed before any kind of difficulty, can find an ideal outlet in the absurd. Accommodation to the absurd readmits adults to the mysterious realm inhabited by children.
André Breton
We plan our lives according to a dream that came to us in our childhood, and we find that life alters our plans. And yet, at the end, from a rare height, we also see that our dream was our fate. It's just that providence had other ideas as to how we would get there. Destiny plans a different route, or turns the dream around, as if it were a riddle, and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn't have expected.
Ben Okri
Everything is ceremony in the wild garden of childhood.
Pablo Neruda
Childhood is not from birth to a certain age and at a certain age. The child is grown, and puts away childish things. Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was nine years old.
Sylvia Plath
I,' she began in her thoughts, as we all do when thinking of ourselves. But this I was her, something, someone whose life she really lived. She was this I, in body and soul, one with its very flesh, its memories, its past, present and future, all of which we seal into a single destiny each time we face ourselves and utter that tiny, unalterable word: 'I.
Dezső Kosztolányi
To create, I destroyed myself; I made myself external to such a degree within myself that within myself I do not exist except in an external fashion. I am the living setting in which several actors make entrances, putting on several different plays.
Fernando Pessoa
Madness is only an amplification of what you already are.
Margaret Atwood
For if we think of this existence of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it becomes clear that most people get to know only one corner of their room, a window seat, a strip of floor which they pace up and down.
Rainer Maria Rilke
You would measure time the measureless and the immeasurable.You would adjust your conduct and even direct the course of your spirit according to hours and seasons.Of time you would make a stream upon whose bank you would sit and watch its flowing.Yet the timeless in you is aware of life's timelessness,And knows that yesterday is but today's memory and tomorrow is today's dream.And that that which sings and contemplates in you is still dwelling within the bounds of that first moment which scattered the stars into space.Who among you does not feel that his power to love is boundless?And yet who does not feel that very love, though boundless, encompassed within the centre of his being, and moving not from love thought to love thought, nor from love deeds to other love deeds?And is not time even as love is, undivided and spaceless?But if in your thought you must measure time into seasons, let each season encircle all the other seasons,And let today embrace the past with remembrance and the future with longing.
Kahlil Gibran