Quotes by Poets - Page 186

Everything I am seems to be inside my awareness, rather than my awareness being inside of me.
Jay Woodman
Most people have the blindness of new-born things - a not-incurable blindness, the sight being there but its use not known.
Josephine Winslow Johnson
...the presence of each other and a lusty love of being, of living and knowing there was tomorrow and God knows how many more tomorrows and each a life and sufficient in itself...
Josephine Winslow Johnson
It occurred to me that when I begin to write, I open myself and wait. And when I turn toward an inner spiritual awareness, I open myself and wait.
Pat Schneider
Each one's no longer consciousOf the high wall, or the rest:Since the one enduring fortress,Is the soldier's iron breast.If you’d live unconquered,Quickly arm, and fight the real foe:Every wife an Amazon bred,And every child a hero.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
True hospitality is marked by an open response to the dignity of each and every person. Henri Nouwen has described it as receiving the stranger on his own terms, and asserts that it can be offered only by those who 'have found the center of their lives in their own hearts'.
Kathleen Norris
Awakened at midnightby the sound of the water jarcracking from the ice
Bashō Matsuo
Be present in all things and thankful for all things.
Maya Angelou
Home is where we tie one end of the thread of life.
Martin Buxbaum
At Bramasole, the first secret spot that draws me outside is a stump and board bench on a high terrace overlooking the lake and valley. Before I sit down, I must bang the board against a tree to knock off all the ants. Then I'm happy. With a stunted oak tree for shelter and a never-ending view, I am hidden. No one knows where I am. The nine-year-old's thrill of the hideout under the hydrangea comes back: My mother is calling me and I am not answering.
Frances Mayes
HereYou always belonged here.You were theirs, certain as a rock.I’m the one who worriesif I fit in with the furniture and the landscape.tBut I “follow too muchthe devices and desires of my own heart.”Already the curves in the roadare familiar to me, and the mountainin all kinds of light, treating all people the same.and when I come over the hill, I see the house, with its generous and firm proportions, smokerising gaily from the chimney.I feel my life start up again, like a cutting when it growsthe first pale and tentativeroot hair in a glass of water.
Jane Kenyon
All the while she wondered if any strange good thing might come of her being in her ancestral land; and some spirit within her rose automatically as the sap in the twigs. It was unexpected youth, surging up anew after its temporary check, and bringing with it hope, and the invincible instinct towards self-delight.
Thomas Hardy
Your body and spirit, subconscious and conscious—every portion of you recognizes home.  That is why on the moment of arrival, your entire being relaxes into a contented puddle of joy.
Richelle E. Goodrich
The thing I miss most from home, is having a home.
Anthony Liccione
The place where you continually return for love and acceptance—that's home.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Nothing else has the power to calm, comfort, and care for you better than home.
Richelle E. Goodrich
I mean, by such flightiness, something that feels unsatisfied at the center of my life — that makes me shaky, fickle, inquisitive, and hungry. I could call it a longing for home and not be far wrong. Or I could call it a longing for whatever supersedes, if it cannot pass through, understanding. Other words that come to mind: faith, grace, rest. In my outward appearance and life habits I hardly change — there’s never been a day that my friends haven’t been able to say, and at a distance, “There’s Oliver, still standing around in the weeds. There she is, still scribbling in her notebook.” But, at the center: I am shaking; I am flashing like tinsel. Restless. I read about ideas. Yet I let them remain ideas. I read about the poet who threw his books away, the better to come to a spiritual completion. Yet I keep my books. I flutter; I am attentive, maybe I even rise a little, balancing; then I fall back.
Mary Oliver
The sea is calm tonight.The tide is full, the moon lies fairUpon the straits;- on the French coast the lightGleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Matthew Arnold
If home isn't a place, what is it?''A feeling.
Julianna Baggott
Listen, whatever you see and love—that’s where you are.
Mary Oliver
Put the coffee on, bubbles, I'm coming home
Richard Brautigan
The Tejo runs down from SpainAnd the Tejo goes into the sea in Portugal.Everybody knows that.But not many people know the river of my villageAnd where it comes fromAnd where it’s going.And so, because it belongs to less people,The river of my village is freer and greater.
Alberto Caeiro
In the space, the pause between this breath and the one that follows, you have made a home inside me.
Tyler Knott Gregson
940Home is not where you live but where they understand you.
Christian Morgenstern
The world turns gray, the air grows cool, the fog blows in. Only at evening can you really value home.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, the longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home.
Hermann Hesse
Madness is like an alternative residence. When sanity chases you out of home, take shelter in madness.
Munia Khan
Having been ripped open and drained by the crowd When I enter my home, Many homes seem to be waiting for me to give a shape to this life which is about to perish.
Suman Pokhrel
Last night I walked for hours. It was as if I wanted to get lost down some unknown street. To get absolutely and happily lost. But there are moments when we can’t, when we don’t know how to lose our way. Even if we always go in the wrong direction. Even if we lose all our points of reference. Even if it begins to grow late and we feel the weight of morning as we advance. There are times when no matter how we try to find out what we don’t know, we can’t lose our way. And perhaps we long for the time when we could be lost. The time when all the streets were new.
Alejandro Zambra
The house, and all the objects in it, crackled with static electricity; undertows washed through it, the air was heavy with things that were known but not spoken. Like a hollow log, a drum, a church, it was amplified, so that conversations whispered in it sixty years ago can be half-heard today.
Margaret Atwood
Even heaven would become hell if you were alone in it, or away from a loved one. And even if you were with your loved one, but in hell, eventually you would cry to have you and your loved one together in heaven. So to create your own heaven on earth, make sure you and your loved one are in a place you both love, because what could be heaven for one, could be hell for the other.
Suzy Kassem
Every creature on earth returns to home. It is ironic that we have made wildlife refuges for ibis, pelican, egret, wolf, crane, deer, mouse, moose, and bear, but not for ourselves in the places we live day after day. We understand that the loss of habitat is the most disastrous event that can occur to a free creauture. We fervently point out how other creatures' natural territories have become surrounded by cities, ranches, highways, noise, and other dissonance, as though we are not affected also. We know that for creatures to live on, they must at least from time to time have a home place, a place where they feel both protected and free
Clarissa Pinkola Estés
When something extraordinary shows up in your life in the middle of the night, you give it a name and make it the best home you can.
Barbara Kingsolver
It’s well known that he who returns never left
Pablo Neruda
As far back as I can remember, there has always been a place to which I belonged with a certainty that nothing has been able to take from me. When I say place, that means less a geographical locality and more a group of people with whom I am connected and to whom I belong.
Sindiwe Magona
(...) everything I'd been longing to get away from, true, but not through destruction. I'd wanted to leave home, but have it stay in place, waiting for me, unchanged, so I could step back into it at will.
Margaret Atwood
A man goes away from his home and it is in him to do it. He lies in strange beds in the dark, and the wind is different in the trees. He walks in the street and there are the faces in front of his eyes, but there are no names for the faces. the voices he hears are not the voices he carried away in his ears a long time back when he went away. The voices he hears are loud. they are so loud he does not hear for a long time at a stretch those voices he carried away in his ears. but there comes a minute when it is quiet and he can hear those voices he carried away in his ears a long time back. He can make out what they say, and they say: Come back. They say: Come back, boy. So he comes back.
Robert Penn Warren
So maybe home is something that changes as we do, something that expands and contracts with time and loss.
Lily Myers
This feeling of being "home at last" corresponds to my idea about the city, and idea shaped by books, movies, and plays, an idea of infinite possibility.
Siri Hustvedt
...one can never leave home...one carries the shadows, the dreams, the dragons of home under one's skin, at the extreme corners of one's eyes...
Maya Angelou
Home, I think. But it's nowhere I can go back to.
Margaret Atwood
It is so beautiful but home is home, and home is best.
Michael Morpurgo
When you are on the air, there is no land you need to call home.
Grigoris Deoudis
Thomas Wolfe warned in the title of America’s great novel that ‘You Can’t Go Home Again.’ I enjoyed the book but I never agreed with the title. I believe that one can never leave home. I believe that one carries the shadows, the dreams, the fears and dragons of home under one’s skin, at the extreme corners of one’s eyes and possibly in the gristle of the earlobe.Home is that youthful region where a child is the only real living inhabitant. Parents, siblings, and neighbors, are mysterious apparitions, who come, go, and do strange unfathomable things in and around the child, the region’s only enfranchised citizen.[…]We may act sophisticated and worldly but I believe we feel safest when we go inside ourselves and find home, a place where we belong and maybe the only place we really do.
Maya Angelou
Whoever has no house now, will never have one. Whoever is alone will stay alone, will sit, read, write long letters through the evening, and wander on the boulevards, up and down, restlessly, while dry leaves are blowing.
Rainer Maria Rilke
For a knowledge of intimacy, localization in the spaces of our intimacy is more urgent than determination of dates.
Gaston Bachelard
Where we love is home, home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
I know this world is far from perfect.I am not the type to mistake a streetlight for the moon.I know our wounds are deep as the Atlantic.But every ocean has a shorelineand every shoreline has a tidethat is constantly returningto wake the songbirds in our hands,to wake the music in our bones,to place one fearless kiss on the mouth of that new born riverthat has to run through the center of our heartsto find its way home.
Andrea Gibson
No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark.
Warsan Shire
You will fall in love with train rides, and sooner or later you willrealize that nowhere seems like home anymore.
Shinji Moon
At the end of the day, it isn’t where I came from. Maybe home is somewhere I’m going and never have been before.
Warsan Shire
Winter is the time for comfort, for good food and warmth, for the touch of a friendly hand and for a talk beside the fire: it is the time for home.
Edith Sitwell
I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little, they become its visible soul.
Jean Cocteau
The ache for home lives in all of us. The safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.
Maya Angelou
I believe that one can never leave home. I believe that one carries the shadows, the dreams, the fears and the dragons of home under one's skin, at the extreme corners of one's eyes and possibly in the gristle of the earlobe.
Maya Angelou
One never reaches home,' she said. 'But where paths that have an affinity for each other intersect, the whole world looks like home, for a time.
Hermann Hesse
Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out. Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.
A.E. Housman
once ruffle-skirted vanity table where I primped at thirteen, opening drawers to a private chaos of eyeshadows lavender teal sky-blue, swarms of hair pins pony tail fasteners, stashes of powders, colonies of tiny lipsticks (p.39)
Barbara Blatner
(1)BEING A POETis like opening a car door& exposing yourself.(2)BEING A GOOD POETis like opening the door& exposing the passengeras well.
Chocolate Waters
The days of the future stand in fornt of usLike a line of candles all alightGolden and warm and lively little candlesThe days that are past are left behind
Constantinos P. Cavafis