Quotes by Poets - Page 184

From castles of bone unknown music comes But now, that toil rewarded; you, your calculations,––you, your fits of impatience––are no more than your dancing and your voice, not fixed and certainly not forced, although an added reason for a double consequence of inventiveness + success, ––in brotherly and discreet humanity throughout the universe devoid of images;––force and justice reflect thedancing and the voices which are only now esteemed. The voices of instruction in exile... The body’s ingenuousness bit- terly put in its place... –– Adagio –– Ah! the infinite egotism of adolescence, the studious optimism: how full of flowers the world was that summer! Tunes and forms fading... ––A choir, to calm down impotence and absence! A choir of glass pieces, of nocturnal melodies... Soon, indeed, the nerves will slip their moorings.
Arthur Rimbaud
I remember my mean mouth, I remember how wise I thought I was. But I was not wise then. Now I am wise.
Margaret Atwood
The gods granted us misery, in jealousy over the thought that we two, always together, should enjoy our youth, and then come to the threshold of old age.
Homer
But there was little heart to our lust,only the confusion of not knowinghow long we'd have in our bodies.
Joseph Bathanti
...how many of us have a moved heart that shies away to a different angle, a millimetre or even less from the place where it first existed, some repositioning unknown to us.
Michael Ondaatje
I won't fatten them in cages, though. I won't ply them with poisoned fruit items. I won't change them into clockwork images or talking shadows. I won't drain out their life's blood. They can do all those things for themselves.
Margaret Atwood
So they all went home afterwards. My sisters and I sat on the veranda and cried until a storm drove us inside. We agreed to meet in the barn loft for crying once a week but after a while we forgot. Once we did but nobody could work up a cry and we started playing wolves and chickens and Little Mary had to be the chicken and Savannah shoved her out of the loft and broke her collarbone. The hearts of children are hard naturally because of their short memories. Everything they play with becomes true and unquestionable such as an acorn cap for a Holy Grail, such is the power of the untrained mind, and all our training of it is both of advantage and not.
Paulette Jiles
But I recall the springtime of the world as though it were yesterday—those days when we rode together to battle, and those nights when we shook the stars loose from the fresh-painted skies!
Roger Zelazny
Until recently each generation found it more expedient to plead guilty to the charge of being young and ignorant, easier to take the punishment meted out by the older generation (which had itself confessed to the same crime short years before). The command to grow up at once was more bearable than the faceless horror of wavering purpose, which was youth.
Maya Angelou
Muoth was right. On growing old, one becomes more contented than in one's youth, which I will not therefore revile, for in all my dreams I hear my youth like a wonderful song which now sounds more harmonious than it did in reality, and even sweeter
Hermann Hesse
The only thing a person of my age can do is fall in love secretly, silently, likeI had done with Mariana. Fall in love knowing that all is lost and there is no hope.
José Emilio Pacheco
CANDLE WISDOM If you knewwhat you will knowwhen your candlehas burnt low,it would greatlyease your plightwhile your candlestill burns bright.
Piet Hein
Few, if any, survive their teens.
Maya Angelou
The great blessing and great cruelty of youth is that there seems to be time enough.
Catherynne M. Valente
Seven Ages: first puking and mewlingThen very pissed-off with your schoolingThen fucks, and then fightsNext judging chaps' rightsThen sitting in slippers: then drooling.
Robert Conquest
He doesn't know it yet, but the infinity of childhood is brief.
Michel Houellebecq
A boy's will is the wind's will, And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
For {she} had adopted the standard of the young: what there was in the moment was everything. And moments followed one another without necessarily belonging to one another.
D.H. Lawrence
How we are almost nothing. We think, in our youth, we are the centre of the universe, but we simply respond, go this way or that by accident, survive or improve by the luck of the draw, with little choice or determination on our part.
Michael Ondaatje
For age is opportunity no less Than youth itself, though in another dress, And as the evening twilight fades away The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Through all of youth I was looking for youwithout knowing what I was looking for
W.S. Merwin
To be left alone on the tightrope of youthful unknowing is to experience the excruciating beauty of full freedom and the threat of eternal indecision.
Maya Angelou
Nothing truly beautiful without its element of strangeness, nothing whole without its own incongruity, these (Jacksonville-area pioneer house) ruins sand up from the earth in sacred conjunction. These ruins conjoin the earth and the manmade, moving from one to the other and back again. The Browards built their house out of shell and limestone, and limestone forms naturally from the shells and skeletons of miniscule sea creatures over great periods of time. The Browards shaped the earth upright toward the sky. THey shaped it with doorframes and windows and chimneys. THey shaped the earth up around them as a shelter. But shaped earth was always the earth. Now the walls fall back down and join once again the ground, taken over by roots of ferns and weeds and small trees. The house was always the ground, only contained in an upward suspension. The house was always the earth, but brought up into architecture, and now the house that was always the earth crumbles back into the earth and nourishes new green things -- dog fennel and morning glories and palmettoes and cabbage palms and cedars. A true symbol of sacredness of the earth is earth's reclaiming of human ingenuity.
Tim Gilmore
Behind a barbed-wire fence, a dirt road disappears into the distance in the pine trees and corners. Lost, dead roads, no ends or remaining purposes, power lines now dead and sagging and forgotten, grown high in weeds and young trees. The trees have entirely encased a speed limit sign, strange sight, nothing so pointless as a speed limit sign in the midst of dense woods, pointless and beautifully so.
Tim Gilmore
As the soil of a garden is richer and as the harvest of the garden bears healthier nourishment from the decay of leaf matter and banana peel and egg shell and human hair and chicken bone and fireplace ash, so the accumulation of death in teh ground of a city implants therein energies and powers.
Tim Gilmore
People spend their entire lives fearing the very thing you apparently crave. They do anything they can to delay the process or fool themselves into believing it’s farther away than it actually is. With every passing year, with every milestone, they only feel more anxiety, more inclination to defeat this inevitability of nature, only to realize that they’ve fostered an entire life of crippling fear, wasted on the fixation of its end. And there you sit, begging for it.
Luna DeMasi
Most human beings come into the world and leave it with nothing to show they ever lived.
Tim Gilmore
First steps are always the hardest but until they are taken the notion of progress remains only a notion and not an achievement.
Aberjhani
Heaven, envious of our joys, is waxen pale; And when we whisper, then the stars fall down To be partakers of our honey talk.(Dido, Queen of Carthage 4.4.52-54)
Christopher Marlowe
If eyes are windows to the soul, then tears are heavens rain.
Anthony Liccione
Infernal world, and thou profoundest HellReceive thy new Possessor: One who bringsA mind not to be chang'd by Place or Time.The mind is its own place, and in it selfCan make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.
John Milton
These are the folk who may pass into the kingdom of heaven: the grief-stricken, lovers, scholars of a certain obsessive disposition. Brute beasts. Women who have become as men and men who have become as women. Writers of books with long titles. Only those knights who have failed to touch the Grail. Industrious women. You, and I, and a boy named Oleg, and a girl with blue hair.
Catherynne M. Valente
Christmas, when observed with the right spirit, still has the power to call miracles from Heaven to Earth.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Gazing around, looking up at the lofty pinnacles above, which seemed to pierce the sky, looking down upon the world,--it seemed the whole world, so limitless it stretched away at her feet,--feeling that infinite unspeakable sense of nearness to Heaven, remoteness from earth which comes only on mountain heights, she drew in a long breath of delight, and cried: "At last! at last, Alessandro! Here we are safe! This is freedom! This is joy!
Helen Hunt Jackson
The Judgement is not a question, it's a sure answer, as to a clump of dough, that will yeast and rise, or go in the oven and burn to crust.
Anthony Liccione
That infinite and indescribable good which is there above races as swiftly to love as a ray of light to a bright body.It gives of itself according to the ardor it finds, so that as charity spreads farther the eternal good increases upon it,and the more souls there are who love, up there, the more there are to love well, and the more love they reflect to each other, as in a mirror.
Dante Alighieri
The HurricaneThe tree lay downon the garage roof and stretched, You have your heaven, it said, go to it.
William Carlos Williams
Dead and still in the world was worse than dead and in the ground. Dead in the ground at least gave you the hope of heaven.
Ron Rash
In Bobby Ogle's version of heaven everyone would wind up in one place, criminals and Muslims included.
Barbara Kingsolver
Earth is crammed with heaven, and every bush is aflame with the glory of God. But only those who see take of their shoes; the rest just pick the berries.
Elizabeth Browning
It was at a concert of lovely old music. After two or three notes of the piano the door was opened of a sudden to the other world. I sped through heaven and saw God at work. I suffered holy pains. I dropped all my defences and was afraid of nothing in the world. I accepted all things and to all things I gave up my heart. It did not last very long, a quarter of an hour perhaps; but it returned to me in a dream at night, and since, through all the barren days, I caught a glimpse of it now and then. Sometimes for a minute or two I saw it clearly, threading my life like a divine and golden track. But nearly always it was blurred in dirt and dust. Then again it gleamed out in golden sparks as though never to be lost again and yet was soon quite lost once more.
Hermann Hesse
Limited in his nature, infinite in his desires, man is a fallen god who remembers the heavens.
Alphonse de Lamartine
We are people-trees. Our roots are hidden in Earth .The branches spread out on Heavens.The fruits are our energy.Two different energies: The positive and negative ones.The balance of both carries the progress.Article by Author Katerina Kostaki :The Tree of Gnosis in the Garden of Eden
Katerina Kostaki
Heaven and stars at the feet of the lovers.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
In Heaven, it is always Autumn".
John Donne
Heaven without love : what a hell. (Paradis sans amour : voilà ce qu'est l'enfer)
Charles de Leusse
Who said death is dead? He's fully alive, traveling around the world, throwing shadows and soaking in the sun. Visiting the young and old; placing bets and dicing regrets, for the worse or a better off place.
Anthony Liccione
Thus in this heaven he took his delight And smothered her with kisses upon kisses Till gradually he came to know where bliss is.
Geoffrey Chaucer
Many might go to heaven with half the labor they go to hell.
Ben Jonson
He who on earth has lived in the conjugal state as he should live, will be placed among the Gods who dwell in heaven
Thiruvalluvar
We have never understood how birds manage to fly,Nor who the genius is who makes up dreams,Now how heaven and earth can appear in a poem.
Robert Bly
Waiting from heaven for the spark to fall.
Matthew Arnold
If one is seeking for Heaven on earth, has slept in geography class.
Stanisław Jerzy Lec
Birds are the eyes of heaven, and flies are the spies of hell.
Suzy Kassem
Heaven has appointed us dwellers on earth a time for all things.
Homer
You bad birds,But God shall not punish you, youShall be with us in heaven, though lessConscious of your happiness, perhaps, than we.Hell is a not quite satisfactory heaven, probably,But you are the fruit and jewelsOf my arrangement . . .
John Ashbery
If honor and wisdom and happiness are not for me, let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my place be in hell.
Jorge Luis Borges
There Peter was, looking straight into the very eyes of God, walking the Sea of Galilee and then all of the sudden up to his neck in water. Some would argue he lacked the true believing, I say he had enough faith to go it a ways, and when he couldn't go farther Christ fetched him up.What am I saying? I'm saying that the walk to God ain't easy for the best of us. Now some would say, Preacher, if Peter had misdoubts there in the very glory of the Lord, what of us left here that ain't seen the dead raised nor the leper folk healed. All we seen is hard trial and sorrows. I'd not deny it.Burdens are plenty in this world and they can pull us down in the lamentation. But the good Lord knows we need to see at least the hem of the robe of glory, and we do. Ponder a pretty sunset or the dogwoods all ablossom. Every time you see such it's the hem of the robe of glory. Brothers and sister, how do you expect to see what you don't seek?Some claim heaven has streets of gold and all such things, but I hold a different notion. When we’re there, we’ll say to the angels, why, a lot of heaven’s glory was in the place we come from. And you know what them angels will say? They’ll say yes, pilgrim, and how often did you notice? What did you seek?
Ron Rash
Parting is all we know of heaven and all we need of hell.
Emily Dickinson
Even though death is the worst thing to go through, Heaven is still the best place to go to.
Gugu Mona