Quotes by Poets - Page 187

Almost every truly creative being alienated & expatriated in his own country
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
There's two ways to become a famous Poet, find that one person that knows somebody, that knows somebody, that knows somebody.Or die trying
Stanley Victor Paskavich
Theirs two ways to become a famous Poet, find that one person that knows somebody, that knows somebody, that knows somebody.Or die trying
Stanley Victor Paskavich
Oh dear sunday, I want to sleep in your arms and have fun day.
Santosh Kalwar
Always dip your toe in the past before stepping into the future
Benny Bellamacina
The most procession that ever comes to a man in this world is a women's heart.
Josiah G Holland AKA Timothy Titcomb
I had let it all grow. I had supposed It was all OK. Your lifeWas a liner I voyaged in.Costly education had fitted you out.Financiers and committees and consultantsEffaced themselves in the gleam of your finish.You trembled with the new life of those engines.That first morning,Before your first class at College, you sat thereSipping coffee. Now I know, as I did not,What eyes waited at the back of the classTo check your first professional performanceAgainst their expectations. What assessorsWaited to see you justify the costAnd redeem their gamble. What a furnaceOf eyes waited to prove your metal. I watchedThe strange dummy stiffness, the misery,Of your blue flannel suit, its straitjacket, uglyHalf-approximation to your ideaOf the properties you hoped to ease into,And your horror in it. And the tannedAlmost green undertinge of your faceShrunk to its wick, your scar lumpish, your plaitedHead pathetically tiny.You waited,Knowing yourself helpless in the tweezersOf the life that judges you, and I sawThe flayed nerve, the unhealable face-woundWhich was all you had for courage.I saw that what you gripped, as you sipped,Were terrors that killed you once already.Now I see, I saw, sitting, the lonelyGirl who was going to die.That blue suit.A mad, execution uniform,Survived your sentence. But then I sat, stilled,Unable to fathom what stilled youAs I looked at you, as I am stilledPermanently now, permanentlyBending so briefly at your open coffin.
Ted Hughes
Talk to me in poetry. / It is all I understand.
Linda Stitt
Failures of nerve and energy are not permitted. That's what it means to be an object.
Mary Kinzie
It must have been an endless breathing in: between the wish to know and the wish to praise there was no seam.
Margaret Atwood
I fancied you'd return the way you said,But I grow old and I forget your name. --From the poem "Mad Girl's Love Song
Sylvia Plath
Our age has built itself vast reservoirs of power / formless as the straining energy that it wrests from the earth.
Rainer Maria Rilke
A language is a map of our failures
Adrienne Rich
No one understands now. Those who couldhear a song this deeply vanished long ago.
Li Bai
Please let me know if I am not hereLet me know if I fail to find you thereFor before the dawn I leave the night behind meAnd before my heart I let you leave me behind.
Munia Khan
life is first boredom, then fear.whether or not we use it, it goes,and leaves what something hidden from us chose,and age, and then the only end of age.
Philip Larkin
I have a Gumbie Cat in mind, her name is Jennyanydots;Her coat is one of the tabby kind,with tiger stripes and lepard spots.
T.S Eliot
i was really into communal living and we were all /such free spirits, crossing the country we were /nomads and artists and no one ever stopped / to think about how the one working class housemate / was whoring to support a gang of upper middle class / deadheads with trust fund safety nets and connecticut / childhoods, everyone was too busy processing their isms / to deal with non-issues like class....and it’s just so cool / how none of them have hang-ups about / sex work they’re all real / open-minded real / revolutionary you know / the legal definition of pimp is / one who lives off the earnings of / a prostitute, one or five or / eight and i’d love to stay and / eat some of the stir fry i’ve been cooking / for y’all but i’ve got to go fuck / this guy so we can all get stoned and / go for smoothies tomorrow, save me / some rice, ok?
Michelle Tea
Healthy ChoicesHold stillKeep quiet.Get a degree to learn how to talksaying nothing.Catch a good manby being demure.the one your mother chooses.Let him climb youwhenever his urge,amidst headachesand menstrual achesand screaming infants.And when he bidsquick, turn over.Hold still.Make your tonguea slab of cementa white stone etchedwith your name.Kill your stories with knivesand knitting needlesand Clorox bleach.Hide in your mysteriousnessby saying nothing.Starch your thoughtswith ironed shirts.Tie your angerwith a knot inyour throatand when he comeswithout concernswallow it.Hold still.Keep desirehopeless as iceand sleepless nightsand painful as pinched eyelid.Keep your fingersfrom the razor,keep your longingto severhis condescensionsafely in your douchbag.Turn the bladeagainst yourself.Don't twitchas your slashed wristsstain your bathroom tiles.Disinfect with Pine Sol.Hold still. Keep quiet.Keep tight your lips,keep dead your dreams,keep cold your heart.Keep quiet.And he will shoutpraisesto yourperfection.
Janice Mirikitani
I want to ripoff your logic and make passionate sense to you.
Jeffery McDaniel
We arrived and the miracle happened.It was the sea and the wind in the bells.We came from far, from years Thirsty as dust, from humble fishermen’s nets on barren shore."~ José Manuel Cardona, from Poems to Circe, The Birnam Wood (El Bosque de Birnam, Consell Insular D'Eivissa, 2007).Translated from the Spanish by Helene Cardona.
José Manuel Cardona
Forgive me,joy,if I blasphemed youbefore I learned to love.
Milan Rúfus
There always comes the day when children swallowthe key to the door of secrecy. They’ll not return it.
Milan Rúfus
Wisdomis in the insane asylums.The endis in the everyday-pale smiles
Saif Alsaegh
Early mapmakers kept their backs to the sea
Sarah Hymas
Hope is the thing with feathers, that perches in the soul...
Emily Dickinson
and everybody was happy that uncle lee was able to get that scholarship even though you wondered when you could do quadratic equations in your head why you had a basketball scholarship but you always knew that you had to take what they were giving since that was all you were going to get but you never fooled yourself about either the taking or the giving or the needing or the having you just sort of said to yourself I'll have to see what is being offered
Nikki Giovanni
The trip to Mars can only be understood through Black Americans. I say, the trip to Mars can only be understood through Black Americans.
Nikki Giovanni
You did anything to bury me, but you forgot that I was a seed.
Dinos Christianopoulos
To walk quietly until the miracle in everything speaks is poetry, whether we write it down or not.
Mark Nepo
But you must know that only he who fights the darkness within will the day after tomorrow have his own share in the sun.
Odysseus Elytis
Touch Me, but not with your hands.
Orville Lloyd Douglas
I am telling himwhat he wants to hear: antsdying of love underthe constellation of the dandelion.I swear that a white rose,sprinkled with wine, sings.I am laughing, tiltingmy head carefullyas if checking an invention.I am dancing, dancingin astonished skin, inan embrace that creates me.
Wisława Szymborska
If there is no God,Not everything is permitted to man.He is still his brother's keeperAnd he is not permitted to sadden his brother,By saying there is no God.
Czesław Miłosz
nothing is more opaque than absolute transparency. Look--my feet don't hit the marble! Like breath or a balloon, I'm rising, I hover six inches in the air in my blazing swan-egg of light. You think I'm not a goddess? Try me. This is a torch song. Touch me and you'll burn.
Margaret Atwood
In vogue and cosmopolitan they clutch their Pomeranians and walk among the millionaires or watch from swayback steamer chairs
Allan Wolf
Come quickly with me.Inhale the divine that swoopsfrom nostril to blunted throatthen sneaks past guarded doorsinto the hallway of your heartwhere the lamplight grows.
Merle Nudelman
I’m looking for youinto that silverspoon where I taste my reflection to feel the touch of your untouchables- from the poem "Looking For You
Munia Khan
Hands burn for a stone, a bomb, to shiver down the glass. Nothing's changed.
Tatamkhulu Afrika
Visitors come and go.Daily I read tea leaves for signsof the approaching century:a raven perched on a crossa sword piercing a cloud--A Victorian Life
Clara Blackwood
Over the water of time I call to youIn a language I do not know.
Ellen S. Jaffe
I speak of new cities and new peopleI tell you the past is a bucket of ashes.I tell you yesterday is a wind gone down,a sun dropped in the west.I tell you there is nothing in the worldonly an ocean of tomorrows.a sky of tomorrows.I am a brother of the cornhuskers who sayat sundown:Tomorrow is a day.”- Carl Sandburg, Cornhuskers
Carl Sandburg
The heart doth recognise thee,Alone, alone! The heart doth smell thee sweet,Doth view thee fair, doth judge thee most complete,—-Though seeing now those changes that disguise thee.
Elizabeth Barrett-Browning
Stars ink your fingerswith a lexicon of flameblazing rare knowledge.
Aberjhani
Break, break, break,On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!And I would that my tongue could utterThe thoughts that arise in me.O, well for the fisherman's boy,That he shouts with his sister at play!O, well for the sailor lad,That he sings in his boat on the bay!And the stately ships go onTo their haven under the hill;But O for the touch of a vanished hand,And the sound of a voice that is still!Break, break, break,At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!But the tender grace of a day that is deadWill never come back to me.
Alfred Tennyson
Thou therefore on these Herbs, and Fruits, and Flow'rsFeed first, on each Beast next, and Fish, and Fowl, No homely morsels, and whatever thingThe Scyth of Time mows down, devour unspar'd, Till I in Man residing through the Race, His thoughts, his looks, words, actions all infect, And season him thy last and sweetest prey.
John Milton
I came to explore the wreck. / The words are purposes. / The words are maps. / I came to see the damage that was done / and the treasures that prevail.
Adrienne Rich
Woman with known intentintending to exploreWoman with her senses on the edgeedging for some more..."From my poem, "Known Intent" - The Poetic Art of Seduction - Volume 1©Clarissa O. Clemens
Clarissa Clemens
But when I think of us,in the quiet when I'm on my own,I think of Beauty and the Beast.I, being the beast, and you being the last beautiful thing in this city.
Danabelle Gutierrez
Decades from now, my grandchild is going to be a poet... And she's going to write about how she's a living testament to how her grandmother made love to hurricane and calmed the storm.
Danabelle Gutierrez
LIFE IS NEVER OVER.
Amy King
ERRORS ARE WHAT MAKE US HUMAN. PLOT TWIST: I'M A HORSE.
Amy King
YOU SAY "POET" LIKE THAT MEANS SOMETHING.
Amy King
I WISH YOU ALL THE REALITY YOU COULD EVER WANT. HANDLE. WANT.
Amy King
Go to the poets, they will speak to theeMore perfectly of purer creatures--
William Wordsworth
2 to 12 hearts 1 beat2 lips will meet2 birds 1 stone2 never b alone2 wills 1 goal2 haves 1 whole2 be in love2 be as One***©Clarissa O. ClemensThe Poetic Diary of Love and Change - Volume 1
Clarissa Clemens
And perhaps, I'm a Tuesday night and you're a Wednesday morning the way we'll never even notice how we blend into each other.
Danabelle Gutierrez
When he asks you whyyou chose alone all these years.Tell him that it’s becauseyou love with all claws and bared teeth.Apologize for the scratchesthat you will leave on his skin;ask forgiveness for the bite marks.Tell him you never ever mean to love so hard, but you do.
Danabelle Gutierrez
He loved me like thick molasses on a summer's day. Pure, sweet, sticky, warm, dark.
Danabelle Gutierrez
Cultivate the distance. Nurture the silence. Let it grow until your fragile heart is as far and inaccessible as his marbled emotions. Don't talk. Don't move. Sit still. If he shows up, lie. Believe your own excuses.And if he tries to charm his way back in, punch him in the face.
Danabelle Gutierrez