Quotes by Poets - Page 203

There is none other like me. There is none other like her. We are unbelievable, impossible. I fly as high as the Heavens which cast me out. I have run out my comet's course: she is the world, I have sought out. Round her I have cast the loop of my orbit, and am held fast and safe; she is my Sea of Tranquility, my Milky Way, bearded with Berenice's Hair. I am a new constellation, pegged out in the sky. I am joy. Complete. For ever.
Rosie Garland
If I breathe you in and you breathe me out, I swear we can breathe forever. I swear I’ll find summer in your winter and spring in your autumn and always, hands at the ends of your fingers, arms at the ends of your shoulders and I swear, when we run out of forever, when we run out of air, your name will be the last word that my lungs make air for.
Iain Thomas
And she forgot the stars, the moon, and sun/ And she forgot the blue above the trees,/ And she forgot the dells where waters run,/ And she forgot the chilly autumn breeze;/ She had no knowledge when the day was done,/ And the new morn she saw not: but in peace/ Hung over her sweet basil evermore,/ And moisten'd it with tears unto the core.
John Keats
Yes," I answered you last night;"No," this morning, sir, I say.Colours seen by candlelightWill not look the same by day.
Elizabeth Barrett-Browning
What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet
William Shakespeare
She stumbled then and Geryon caught her other arm, it was like a handful of autumn. He felt huge and wrong. When is it polite to let go someone’s arm after you grab it?
Anne Carson
I know a womanwho keeps buying puzzleschinesepuzzlesblockswirespieces that finally fitinto some order.she works it outmathmaticallyshe solves all herpuzzleslives down by the seaputs sugar out for the antsand believesultimatelyin a better world.her hair is whiteshe seldom combs ither teeth are snaggledand she wears loose shapelesscoveralls over a body mostwomen would wish they had.for many years she irritated mewith what I considered hereccentricities-like soaking eggshells in water(to feed the plants so thatthey'd get calcium).but finally when I think of herlifeand compare it to other livesmore dazzling, originaland beautifulI realize that she has hurt fewerpeople than anybody I know(and by hurt I simply mean hurt).she has had some terrible times,times when maybe I should havehelped her morefor she is the mother of my onlychildand we were once great lovers,but she has come throughlike I saidshe has hurt fewer people thananybody I know,and if you look at it like that,well,she has created a better world.she has won.Frances, this poem is foryou.
Charles Bukowski
To say that the frozen silence contracted itself into a yet higher globe of ice were to under-rate the exquisite tension and to shroud it in words. The atmosphere had become a physical sensation. As when, before a masterpiece, the acid throat contracts, and words are millstones, so when the supernaturally outlandish happens and a masterpiece is launched through the medium of human gesture, then all human volition is withered at the source and the heart of action stops beating. Such a moment was this. Irma, a stalagmite of crimson stone, knew, for all the riot of her veins that a page had turned over. At chapter forty? O no! At chapter one, for she had never lived before save in a pulseless preface. How long did they remain thus? How many times had the earth moved round the sun? How many times had the great blue whales of the northern waters risen to spurt their fountains at the sky? How many reed-bucks had fallen to the claws of how many leopards, while that sublime unit of two-figure statuary remained motionless? It is fruitless to ask. The clocks of the world stood still or should have done.
Mervyn Peake
Now slides the silent meteor on, and leaves a shining furrow, as thy thoughts in me.Now folds the lily all her sweetness up,and slips into the bosom of the lake:So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip into my bosom and be lost in me.
Alfred Tennyson
I have loved you with all my life, and you've agreed to be my loving wife. Now I'll forever cherish our vows in my heart,"In sickness and in health, till death do us part.
Alon Calinao Dy
Naturalists tell of a noble race of horses that instinctively open a vein with their teeth, when heated and exhausted by a long course, in order to breathe more freely. I am often tempted to open a vein, to procure for myself everlasting liberty. Cento volte ho impugnato una lama per conficcarmela nel cuore. Si dice di una nobile razza i cavalli,che quando si sentono accaldati e affaticati, si aprono istintivamente una vena, per respirare più liberamente. Spesso anche io vorrei aprirmi una vena che mi desse libertà eterna.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Beshrew me but I love her heartily, For she is wise, if I can judge of her, And fair she is, if that mine eyes be true, And true she is, as she hath proved herself: And therefore like herself, wise, fair, and true, Shall she be placed in my constant soul.
William Shakespeare
A white cloth falls on your heart; How beautiful you are - The winter loves us, because only lovers have a pure heart.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
I wither slowly in thine arms; here at the quiet limit of the world, a white hair'd shadow roaming like a dream.
Alfred Tennyson
I know my breasts, smallas plums, would win no blue ribbons.But in your hands they tremble and fillwith song like plump, white birds.
Cecilia Llompart
In the world of lovers, there is no fear.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
It was a black and hooded head; and hanging there in the midst of so intense a calm, it seemed the Sphynx’s in the desert. “Speak, thou vast and venerable head,” muttered Ahab, “which, though ungarnished with a beard, yet here and there lookest hoary with mosses; speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in thee. Of all divers, thou hast dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid this world’s foundations. Where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there, in that awful water-land, there was thy most familiar home. Thou hast been where bell or diver never went; hast slept by many a sailor’s side, where sleepless mothers would give their lives to lay them down. Thou saw’st the locked lovers when leaping from their flaming ship; heart to heart they sank beneath the exulting wave; true to each other, when heaven seemed false to them. Thou saw’st the murdered mate when tossed by pirates from the midnight deck; for hours he fell into the deeper midnight of the insatiate maw; and his murderers still sailed on unharmed—while swift lightnings shivered the neighboring ship that would have borne a righteous husband to outstretched, longing arms. O head! thou hast seen enough to split the planets and make an infidel of Abraham, and not one syllable is thine!
Herman Melville
It was only when we were in that bed, high above the world - then I thought the birds could have been circling around our bodies circled around each other - that we made our world totally separated from everything else. It was the only way we could be together.
Kathy Acker
In the depths of the ocean; Dipped in love without expectations, We have stripped off our masks.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
I love to hear the story of how stars sacrifice their life to receive only one memorable kiss from the Earth.
Harshada Pathare
Love ceases to be a pleasure when it ceases to be a secret.
Aphra Behn
Each moment of the happy lover's hour is worth an age of dull and common life.
Aphra Behn
I love you because you loved me first. Yet you love me, saying I loved you first. Funny, our love thrives believing the other person started it.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Consider, O Lover, my throatwhite as cigarette paper.The crushed lavender of my knuckles.tMy heart, a dulled needle threaded throughtoo many patterns.
Cecilia Llompart
Consider my Lover; the yellow churchof his skin, the clean wells of his ears;How the notes of a song come to himlike birds descending on a power line;How in his absence I am of twothroats--each of them cramped.
Cecilia Llompart
Never had we ever kissed as lovers; if we touched lips it was as brother and sister. In one moment of emotion, our lips fell together by accident, but we quickly removed ourselves as though we were children touching glass with dirty hands.
Roman Payne
I knelt and locked the door. I locked the door locking the world and time outside. I stretched my body across the mattress and Saskia drew in close to me and placed her open hand on my chest, her mouth near my shoulder; her breath, my breath blew out the candle, and I held my lost Wanderess with tenderness until sweet sleep overcame us.
Roman Payne
Your love is not really love until you waste it, a kiss is never a kiss until you taste it..
Munia Khan
O Hero, what a Hero hadst thou been.
William Shakespeare
They tell me you're the best and the worst thing to have happened to me, but I do not see how it can be both. For if my death resulted from your presence, an everlasting sleep would have me dreaming happily of us together. I see no bad in that. Therefore, you must be the best thing to have ever happened to me because you make the worst seem wonderful.
Richelle E. Goodrich
And besides, we lovers fear everything
Ovid
A crowd of drunken lovers. Newspaper hats, new couples falling from couches and love- seats—the pleasure remembered, never the regret.
Kelli Russell Agodon
It was love, the real thing, nothing less or different.
Anuradha Bhattacharyya
It’s scary. This love thing. The sweet vulnerability of extension. The naked of ‘here I am’. The tentative reaching of outstretched arms. The wide open of hope…Teach me how to be loved. Let me show you how to love me well. School me in the workings of your heart, in the language of your bones. Let my open palm memorize the shape of your face. Tell me the stories of your scars so I can trace them with the honor of understanding. I have been loved by those who didn’t care to discover all that I am. Will you be the one to see me whole?
Jeanette LeBlanc
We worshipped a great white body that was an avalanche of good news, and we slit it open in every part. “That can’t go through the mail,” the postman gasped, “because that is a super-stabbed body!” The super-stabbed body rose up, with many butterknives sticking out of it, and said, “I AM the mail.” It had so many lovers.
Patricia Lockwood
Lovers, forget your love,And list the love of these,She a window flower,And he a winter breeze.
Robert Frost
the toilet is an intimacyonly shared with parents when you are youngand once again when they are olderand with lovers when say on a Sundaymorning stretching into the bathroomyou wake to the sound of stream into bowland go to hug the naked bodystood with its back to you and kiss the neckand taste the whole of the night on thereand smell the morning’s pale yellow lossand take the whole of him in your handand feel the water moving through himand knowing that this is love the prone fleshwhat we expel from the body and what we let inside
Andrew McMillan
The tales lovers tell each other about how they met are hushed and secret things. They change year by year, for we all meet many times as we grow up and become different and new and exciting people--and this never stops, even for a minute, even when we are ninety.
Catherynne M. Valente
The lovers don't hide them from their beloved. If anyone of them, doesn't respond; it is a clear and visible that, he or she is fake or silly or idiot one.
Ehsan Sehgal
The Glasshobs built it to keep an eye on the stars, who have a tendency to run off on adventures and forget about how much we down-below folks need to navigate and cast horoscopes and meet lovers on balconies.
Catherynne M. Valente
I know the devices of a demon. I was taught as a child about the demon lover. I was told about a beautiful temptress who came to a young man's room. And he, if he were wise, would demand that she turn around, because demons and witches have no back, only what they wish to present to you.
Michael Ondaatje
It smelled of oily flowers, like the worn pillowcases of long-ago lovers.
Michelle Tea
How many lovers did a person need, anyway?
Michelle Tea
Our eyes will know the heavens if our lips stay for each other.
Roman Payne
Far from the maddening crowds,Love leaves a trail;If you take my name, I shall comeLeaving behind all my veils!
Neelam Saxena Chandra
A servant wants to be rewarded for what he does. A lover wants only to be in love's presence, that ocean whose depth will never be known.
Jalaluddin Rumi
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life,Whose misadventured piteous overthrows Doth with their death bury their parents’ strife. . . . O, I am fortune’s fool! . . . Then I defy you, stars.
William Shakespeare
and rain will fall on our eaves.
Jack Kerouac
Though lovers be lost love shall not.
Dylan Thomas
All knots that lovers tieAre tied to sever.Here shall your sweetheart lie,Untrue for ever.
A.E. Housman
When the love of your life dies, the problem is not that some part of you dies too, which it does, but that some part of you is still alive.
Jackie Kay
The Knowing Afterwards, when we have slept, paradise- comaed and woken, we lie a long time looking at each other.I do not know what he sees, but I see eyes of surpassing tenderness and calm, a calm like the dignity of matter. I love the open ocean blue-grey-green of his iris, I love the curve of it against the white, that curve the sight of what has caused me to come, when he’s quite still, deep inside me. I have never seen a curve like that, except the earth from outer space. I don’t know where he got his kindness without self-regard, almost without self, and yet he chose one woman, instead of the others.By knowing him, I get to know the purity of the animal which mates for life. Sometimes he is slightly smiling, but mostly he just gazes at me gazing, his entire face lit. I love to see it change if I cry–there is no worry, no pity, no graver radiance. If we are on our backs, side by side, with our faces turned fully to face each other, I can hear a tear from my lower eye hit the sheet, as if it is an early day on earth, and then the upper eye’s tears braid and sluice down through the lower eyebrow like the invention of farmimg, irrigation, a non-nomadic people.I am so lucky that I can know him. This is the only way to know him. I am the only one who knows him.When I wake again, he is still looking at me, as if he is eternal. For an hour we wake and doze, and slowly I know that though we are sated, though we are hardly touching, this is the coming the other coming brought us to the edge of–we are entering, deeper and deeper, gaze by gaze, this place beyond the other places, beyond the body itself, we are making love.
Sharon Olds
my 6 foot goddessmakes me laughthe laughter of the mutilatedwho still needlove...she has saved mefrom everything that isnot here
Charles Bukowski
They slept profoundly, desperately, greedily, as though for the last time, as though they had been condemned to stay awake forever and had to drink in all the sleep in the world during these last hours.
Hermann Hesse
You are the one star I wish upon nightly, praying your glory will fall from the heavens and land in my undeserving arms.
Richelle E. Goodrich
The last word of love is ... goodbye.
Carroll Bryant
And may my bronze name / touch always her thousand fingers / grow brighter with her weeping / until I am fixed like a galaxy / and memorized / in her secret and fragile skies.
Leonard Cohen
The minute I heard my first love story,I started looking for you, not knowinghow blind that was.Lovers don't finally meet somewhere.They're in each other all along.
Jalaluddin Rumi
Lovers don't finally meet somewhere. They're in each other all along.
Jalaluddin Rumi
I Think it is lost.....but nothing is ever lost nor can be lost .The body sluggish, aged, cold, the ember left from earlier fires shall duly flame again.
Walt Whitman