Quotes by Poets - Page 191

It is a great mystery to me how the problems of others seem like simple arithmetic while my own appear as complicated as a calculus equation.
Richelle E. Goodrich
You understand, we just don't fuck with truth.
Charles Bukowski
There is a sky full of stars aplenty, and all you can babble about is a cold, little rock we call the moon. This is how it is with petty problems that exist too close to us.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Becoming a lake has put a lot of things in perspective for me.
Heather Christle
The needs of a society determine its ethics, and in the Black American ghettos the hero is that man who is offered only the crumbs from his country's table but by ingenuity and courage is able to take for himself a Lucullan feast. Hence the janitor who lives in one room but sports a robin's-egg-blue Cadillac is not laughed at but admired, and the domestic who buys forty-dollar shoes is not criticized but is appreciated. We know that they have put to use their full mental and physical powers. Each single gain feeds into the gains of the body collective.
Maya Angelou
The forest stretched on seemingly forever with the most monotonous predictability, each tree just like the next - trunk, branches, leaves; trunk, branches, leaves. Of course a tree would have taken a different view of the matter. We all tend to see the way others are alike and how we differ, and it's probably just as well we do, since that prevents a great deal of confusion. But perhaps we should remind ourselves from time to time that ours is a very partial view, and that the world is full of a great deal more variety than we ever manage to take in.
Thomas M. Disch
He would get up and go out into a world which seemed very unfamiliar, but with a tantalizing unfamiliarity like the world of boyhood to which an old man returns.
Robert Penn Warren
Things that are falling apart encourage me: whatever else, I’m in better shape than they are.
Margaret Atwood
Liberalism, contrary to popular belief, is facing backward in considering the injustice of its ancestors. Conservatism, contrary to popular belief, is facing forward in considering the psychology of its descendants. Definitively, it seems in the modern world that neither side really knows which direction it's facing, and men of the sharpest judgment are simply turned off from picking either of the poisons.
Criss Jami
Well-timed silence hath more eloquence than speech.
Martin Farquhar Tupper
For the Earth itself is a blossom, she says,on the star tree,pale with luminousocean leaves.
Rolf Jacobsen
What I need is perspective. The illusion of depth, created by a frame, the arrangement of shapes on a flat surface. Perspective is necessary. Otherwise there are only two dimensions. Otherwise you live with your face squashed up against a wall, everything a huge foreground, of details, close-ups, hairs, the weave of the bedsheet, the molecules of the face. Your own skin like a map, a diagram of futility, criscrossed with tiny roads that lead nowhere. Otherwise you live in the moment. Which is not where I want to be.
Margaret Atwood
Optimism: That effervescent, blindingly- bright, perky, chipper, twittering quality you want to squash out of annoying people.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Look back, and smile on perils past!
Walter Scott
Laugh as if it's funny, embrace as if it's love, and smile anyway.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Behold, we know not anything;I can but trust that good shall fallAt last -- far off -- at last, to all,And every winter change to spring.
Alfred Tennyson
Men crawl in slime and wallow in the mud;The Realist groans: "All life is mud ans slime!"Men lie and steal and shed each other's blood;And Realism sees but blood and crime.Yet Right is just as real as Wrong,The mountain peak is real as the ooze,A curse is no more real than a song;Among realities we need but choose.The cynic sees the failure of To-day,The Prophet cries the triumph of To-morrow,Knowing the spirit in our clogging clayThat masters doubt, disaster, loss and sorrow.Failure is but a passing weariness,There is no final answer but Success.
Berton Braley
To be extremely happy but extremely intelligent is a task of being optimistic without being cheesy.
Criss Jami
To a pessimist, losing bobby pins is as hopeless as losing hair. To an optimist, losing hair gives hope to get the lost bobby pins back.
Munia Khan
If we have any role at all, I think it’s the role of optimism, not blind or stupid optimism, but the kind which is meaningful, one that is rather close to that notion of the world which is not perfect, but which can be improved. In other words, we don’t just sit and hope that things will work out; we have a role to play to make that come about.
Chinua Achebe
Obstacles without optimism can overturn opportunities for growth, hope and success.
Kym Gordon Moore
I cried to think of how lucky we both were to have found each other, since it was clear that we were the only ones in the world who could understand what we understood in the instantaneous manner in which we understood it.
Audre Lorde
A pessimist is a person who has had to listen to too many optimist.
Don Marquis
Every nation can harness the energy of its citizens, either towards constructive work to generate optimism and hope, or towards tensions, unrest and war.
Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum
Who underestimates is buried in the optimism of the deads. (Qui sous-estime s'enterre - Dans l'optimisme des morts.)
Charles de Leusse
Facing the backside of the future is the only way to move forward
Benny Bellamacina
When you suspect old age is catching up with you, live faster!
Benny Bellamacina
We must lay to, if you please, and keep a bright lookout. It's trying on a man, I know. It would be pleasanter to come to blows. But there's no help for it till we know our men. Lay to, and whistle for a wind, that's my view.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Endure, my heart; yea, a baser thing thou once didst bear
Homer
During the course of your temporary hurdles, keep searching for a tad of optimism
Charmaine J.Forde
Seeing the glass as half empty is more positive than seeing it as half full. Through such a lens the only choice is to pour more. That is righteous pessimism.
Criss Jami
In these times you have to be an optimist to open your eyes when you awake in the morning
Carl Sandburg
...if you live feeling likeYour glass is half empty, well,It may as well be empty all the way.
Mattie J.T. Stepanek
The only good thing about being frightened half to death, she thought, is that it makes me forget all about being seasick.
Alison Croggon
London is satisfied, Paris is resigned, but New York is always hopeful. Always it believes that something good is about to come off, and it must hurry to meet it.
Dorothy Parker
Thou hast seen nothing yet.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
The spirit of the gospel is optimistic; it trusts in God and looks on the bright side of things. The opposite or pessimistic spirit drags men down and away from God, looks on the dark side, murmurs, complains, and is slow to yield obedience.
Orson F. Whitney
So everything lets us down, including curiosity and honesty and what we love best. Yes, said the voice, but cheer up, it's fun in the end.
Roberto Bolaño
This earth that we live on is full of stories in the same way that, for a fish, the ocean is full of ocean. Some people say when we are born we’re born into stories. I say we’re also born from stories.
Ben Okri
[A]nd the wizened youth trembles more and more violently, wrinkles his nose and then pounces on the story. But only I know the story, the real story. And it is simple and cruel and true and it should make us laugh, it should make us die laughing. But we only know how to cry, the only thing we do wholeheartedly is cry.
Roberto Bolaño
The only thing worth thinking about, when I write a story, is whether I like it, whether I want to write it, whether it excites me.
Theodora Goss
Here’s something I bet you don’t know: every time someone writes a story about a dragon a real dragon dies. Something about seeing and being seen something about mirrors that old tune about how a photograph can take your whole soul. At the end of this poem I’m going to go out like electricity in an ice storm. I’ve made peace with it.
Catherynne M. Valente
I love snowflakes simply for the reason that each one is unique—nonidentical to zillions of crystalized counterparts.  It's a difficult notion to wrap your brain around, and yet it reminds me that amidst the innumerable stories told throughout the ages, a distinctly new one rests on the tip of an author's pen.
Richelle E. Goodrich
That's the kind of stories I know. Sad ones. Anyway, taken to it's logical conclusion, every story is sad, because at the end everyone dies.
Margaret Atwood
Reading, therefore, is a co-production between writer and reader. The simplicity of this tool is tastounding. So little, yet out of it whole worlds, eras, characters, continents, people never encountered tbefore, people you wouldn’t care to sit next to in a ttrain, people that don’t exist, places you’ve never visited, enigmatic fates, all come to life in the mind, tpainted into existence by the reader’s creative powers. In this way the creativity of the writer calls tup the creativity of the reader. Reading is never passive.
Ben Okri
History is a funny little creature. Do you remember visiting your old Aunt that autumn when the trees shone so very yellow, and how she owned a striped and unsocial cat, quite old and fat and wounded about the ears and whiskers, with a crooked, broken tail? That cat would not come to you no matter how you coaxed and called; it had its own business, thank you, and no time for you. But as the evening wore on, it would come and show some affection or favor to your Aunt, or your Father, or the old end-table with the stack of green coasters on it. You couldn’t predict who that cat might decide to love, or who it might decide to bite. You couldn’t tell what it thought or felt, or how old it might really be, or whether it would one day, miraculously, decide to let you put one hand, very briefly, on its dusty head.History is like that.Of course, unlike your Aunt’s cat, history is going on all around you, all the time, and is often quite lively. Sometimes it rests in a sunbeam for a peaceful century or two, but on the whole, history is always plotting, and it bites very hard. It stalks around the world, fickle and dissatisfied and often angry. It demands to be fed just a little earlier each day, until you find yourself carving meat from the bone as fast as you can, faster than you thought possible, just to satisfy it. Some people have a kind of marvelous talent for calming it and enticing it onto their laps. To some it will never even spare a glance.
Catherynne M. Valente
A daydreamer is a writer just waiting for pen and paper.
Richelle E. Goodrich
There are three points about stories: if told, they like to be heard; if heard, they like to be taken in; and if taken in, they like to be told.
Ciaran Carson
A closed book will lie there like a dead horse. But an open book will kick, buck, and bolt through perceived adventures like a wild and free stallion. So hold on.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Be true to the writer within you; tell the story you're dying to tell in exactly the way you wish to tell it, and don't trust anyone who tries to sway you otherwise.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Their story, yours, mine - it's what we all carry with us on this trip we take, and we owe it to each other to respect our stories and learn from them.
William Carlos Williams
The story of a man's soul, however trivial, can be more interesting and instructive than the story of a whole nation
Mikhail Lermontov
As long as I have other ideas and projects noted, I feel confident that they'll be alright until I get to them. And my ideas and tastes may have evolved by the time I get to them so that an idea can be discarded or expanded upon in ways that I wouldn't have thought of had I started on that project right away instead of finishing what I was currently on. It's good to give those ideas time to ripen and blossom.
Nicholas Trandahl
Wishes are sometimes just stories that have nowhere to go.
Yvette Christiansë
How complex, untrustworthy, and important our stories are. We will never tell you the true story of our lives.
Andy Quan
There’s a chasm between writing about yourself and writing about your personal life. A lot of young writers want to turn their lives into stories, into films, books, because they feel their lives are somehow significant. But really, it’s not their personal lives that matter, but their own, hard-fought-for ideas. Not just anybody’s ideas, but the ideas that they have paid for with their suffering and their sacrifices and their love of their fellow humans.
Billy Marshall-Stoneking
Thomas Builds-the-Fire's stories climbed into your clothes like sad, gave you itches that could not be scratched. If you repeated eve a sentence from one of those stories, your throat was never the same again. Those stories hung in your clothes and hair like smoke, and no amount of laundry soap or shampoo washed them out. Victor and Junior often tried to beat those stories out of Thomas, tied him down and taped his mouth shut. They pretended to be friendly and tried to sweet talk Thomas into temporary silences, made promises about beautiful Indian women and cases of Diet Pepsi. But none of that stopped Thomas, who talked and talked.
Sherman Alexie
The three children had hear the story of the Duene lovers, but they interpreted it differently. And it does not matter, ultimately, what they heard or even what they knew. It is how they interpret the story that will make all the difference.
Tiphanie Yanique
But here's a great thing about stories: they can be retold.
Christine Heppermann
I know that I too could try a story out, rebuild mine, make it live again several minutes before the full of the day, the sun, the city. But I haven't the strength, stupidly. I rise and carry on. One more time.
Danielle Collobert