Quotes by Poets - Page 204

Journeys end in lovers meeting.
William Shakespeare
Cucullus non facit monachum; that’s as much to say, as I wear not motley in my brain.
William Shakespeare
Don't say Fili, sister. Say Pili. In Tagalog, pili means to choose. Pino means fine. Pilipino equals 'fine choice.
Jessica Hagedorn The Gangster of Love
For years, copying other people, I tried to know myself.From within, I couldn't decide what to do.Unable to see, I heard my name being called.Then I walked outside.
Jalaluddin Rumi
And I will close my eyes and prepare myself so that they can unscrew my head and allow the map to slip into my lacunae. So that I can be filled and braced from the inside and fortified for the voyage. Because without my world inside me I will contract and congeal, more even than I am now, without speech and without actions and without any purchase upon time.
Marlene Van Niekerk
Be as thou wast wont to be.
William Shakespeare
Be as thou wast wont to be.See as thou wast wont to see.
William Shakespeare
No, my life is not this precipitous hourthrough which you see me passing at a run.
Rainer Maria Rilke
There are varieties of life unknown to you.Their whole identity is: you can't find out.
Dan Chiasson
What we love we are.
Robert Lowell
And this is when I knew I was black for real.This is when I knew black was a citywhose walls were constantly under siege....
Roger Bonair-Agard
My mother said the bizarre name Raccoona had surely been inspired, at least on a subliminal level, by the masks raccoons don't wear but simply have - the ones given them by nature..... [S]he pointed out that Le Guin had suspected all along that Raccoona and Tiptree were two authors that came from the same source, but in a letter to Alice she wrote that she preferred Tiptree to Raccoona: 'Raccoona, I think, has less control, thus less wit and power.'Le Guin, Mother said, had understood something deep. 'When you take on a male persona, something happens.'When I asked her what that was, she sat back in her chair, waved her arm, and smiled. 'You get to be the father.
Siri Hustvedt
The StrangerLooking as I’ve looked before, straight down the heartof the street to the riverwalking the rivers of the avenuesfeeling the shudder of the caves beneath the asphaltwatching the lights turn on in the towerswalking as I’ve walked beforelike a man, like a woman, in the citymy visionary anger cleansing my sightand the detailed perceptions of mercyflowering from that angerif I come into a room out of the sharp misty lightand hear them talking a dead languageif they ask me my identitywhat can I say butI am the androgyneI am the living mind you fail to describein your dead languagethe lost noun, the verb survivingonly in the infinitivethe letters of my name are written under the lidsof the newborn child
Adrienne Rich
What I was trying to say, maybe, is that I don't know what it is I'm capable of transforming into.
Nick Flynn
Animals hold us to what is present: to who we are at the time, not who we’ve been or how are bank accounts describe us. What’s obvious to an animal is not the embellishment that fattens our emotional resumes but what’s bedrock and current in us: aggression, fear, insecurity, happiness, or equanimity. Because they have the ability to read our involuntary ticks and scents, we’re transparent to them and thus exposed—we’re finally ourselves.
Gretel Ehrlich
Put it on record--I am an ArabAnd the number of my card is fifty thousandI have eight childrenAnd the ninth is due after summer.What's there to be angry about?Put it on record.--I am an ArabWorking with comrades of toil in a quarry.I have eight childernFor them I wrest the loaf of bread,The clothes and exercise booksFrom the rocksAnd beg for no alms at your doors,--Lower not myself at your doorstep.--What's there to be angry about?Put it on record.--I am an Arab.I am a name without a tide,Patient in a country where everythingLives in a whirlpool of anger.--My roots--Took hold before the birth of time--Before the burgeoning of the ages,--Before cypess and olive trees,--Before the proliferation of weeds.My father is from the family of the plough--Not from highborn nobles.And my grandfather was a peasant--Without line or genealogy.My house is a watchman's hut--Made of sticks and reeds.Does my status satisfy you?--I am a name without a surname.Put it on Record.--I am an Arab.Color of hair: jet black.Color of eyes: brown.My distinguishing features:--On my head the 'iqal cords over a keffiyeh--Scratching him who touches it.My address:--I'm from a village, remote, forgotten,--Its streets without name--And all its men in the fields and quarry.--What's there to be angry about?Put it on record.--I am an Arab.You stole my forefathers' vineyards--And land I used to till,--I and all my childern,--And you left us and all my grandchildren--Nothing but these rocks.--Will your government be taking them too--As is being said?So!--Put it on record at the top of page one:--I don't hate people,--I trespass on no one's property.And yet, if I were to become starved--I shall eat the flesh of my usurper.--Beware, beware of my starvation.--And of my anger!
Mahmoud Darwish
She was ... unhappy. It was part of her, you could not separate her from it. She was sad the way a horse is strong or a bird flies.
Catherynne M. Valente
By day I am nothing, by night I am I.
Fernando Pessoa
Remember that when you say ‘I will have none of this exile and this stranger for his face is not like my face and his speech is strange,’ you have denied America with that word.
Stephen Vincent Benét
The recognition and the acceptance of the Other's humanity (or humanness) is a maiming of self. You have to wound the self, cut it in strips, in order to -know- that you are as similar and of the same substance of shadows.
Breyten Breytenbach
Does this mean that in some places I'm American and in some places I'm African American and in other places, by logical extension, I'm nobody?
Roberto Bolaño
I'm American. Why didn't I say I was African American? Because I'm in a foreign country? But can I really consider myself to be in a foreign country when I could go walking back to my own country right now if I wanted, and it wouldn't even take very long? Does this mean that in some places I'm American and in some places I'm African American and in other places, by logical extension, I'm nobody?
Roberto Bolaño
the same—on this page, or the end of your fingertips—always the same
John J. Geddes
The child I wasis just one breath away from me.
Sheniz Janmohamed
A tattoo does that, it makes you think about your body like it's this special suit that you can put on or take off whenever you want and a new name if it's cool enough does the same thing. To have both at once is power. It's the kind of power as all those superheroes who have secret identities get from being able to change back and forth from one person into another. No matter who you think he is, man, the dude is always somebody else.
Russell Banks
The fragility of the intellectual is the same as the poet's:It's all about the I and its desperate sense of the we.
Prageeta Sharma
But Krishna was a chameleon.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
But then it came to me that who I really am is a person who doesn't need to know who he really is, in the usual sense. What does it mean, anyway - family background and so forth? People use it mostly as an excuse for their own snobbery, or else their failings. I'm free of the temptation, that's all. I'm free of the strings. Nothing ties me down.
Margaret Atwood
I am the other.
Gérard de Nerval
Transformation of the self are related to where you are, and identity Is dependent on others.
Siri Hustvedt
At any moment when you are you, you are you without the memory of yourself because if you remember yourself while you are you, you are not for the purposes of creating you.
Gertrude Stein
run run run Hermione. You have in your hands a message and a token...run and run and run and run Hermione. You know running and running and running that the messenger will take (lampadephoros) your message in its fervour and you will sink down exhausted...run,run, Hermione. For the message-bearer next in line has turned against you...dead, dead or forgotten. Hecate at crossroads, a destruction...
H.D.
How anyone becomes herself/is a mystery.
Brenda Shaughnessy
Using the voice is a physical act, one that first announces the existence of the body of residence and then trumpets its arrival in a public space.
Elizabeth Alexander
What others think of us would be of little moment did it not, when known, so deeply tinge what we think of ourselves.
Paul Valéry
People change, though, especially after they are dead.
Margaret Atwood
I got in a fight with my girlfriend," I said. "I was just driving around, blowing off steam, you know?"Well, you should be more careful where you drive," the officer said. "You're making people nervous. You don't fit the profile of the neighborhood."I wanted to tell him that I didn't fit the profile of the country but I knew it would just get me into trouble.
Sherman Alexie
Here is the life you have tried to throw away. Here is your second chance. Here is the destiny you have tried to shake off by inventing a hundred false roles, a hundred false identities for yourself. It will look at first like disaster, but is really good fortune in disguise, since fate too knows how to follow your evasions through a hundred forms of its own. Now you will become at last the one you intended to be.
David Malouf
So my life is a point-counterpoint, a kind of fugue, and a falling away–and everything winds up being lost to me, and everything falls into oblivion, or into the hands of the other man.
Jorge Luis Borges
Here. Where I am anonymous and alone in a white room with no history and no parading. So I can make something unknown in the shape of this room. Where I am King of Corners.
Michael Ondaatje
At least when one speaks of oneself one is passionate, well-informed and specific.
Jan Neruda
I myself shall continue living in my glass house where you can always see who comes to call, where everything hanging from the the ceiling and on the walls stays where it is as if by magic, where I sleep nights in a glass bed, under glass sheets, where who I am will sooner or later appear etched by a diamond.
André Breton
Tell me who loves, who admires you, and I will tell you who you are.
Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve
Where you are is who you are. The further inside you the place moves, the more your identity is intertwined with it. Never casual, the choice of place is the choice of something you crave.
Frances Mayes
I am neither I nor the other oneI am something in between
Mário de Sá-Carneiro
He that commends me to mine own contentCommends me to the thing I cannot get.I to the world am like a drop of waterThat in the ocean seeks another drop,Who, falling there to find his fellow forth,Unseen, inquisitive, confounds himself:So I, to find a mother and a brother,In quest of them, unhappy, lose myself.
William Shakespeare
I won't sleepif that's what it takesto not wake upas myself
Casey Renee Kiser
The desert could not be claimed or owned–it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names... Its caravans, those strange rambling feasts and cultures, left nothing behind, not an ember. All of us, even those with European homes and children in the distance, wished to remove the clothing of our countries. It was a place of faith. We disappeared into landscape.
Michael Ondaatje
I find I am constantly being encouraged to pluck out some one aspect of myself and present this as the meaningful whole, eclipsing or denying the other parts of self.
Audre Lorde
What's in a name? that which we call a roseBy any other name would smell as sweet.
William Shakespeare
We know what we are, but not what we may be.
William Shakespeare
That is where my dearest and brightest dreams have ranged — to hear for the duration of a heartbeat the universe and the totality of life in its mysterious, innate harmony.
Hermann Hesse
The universe did not invent justice. Man did. Unfortunately, man must reside in the universe.
Roger Zelazny
Life turns, and returns death. Where death digs its claws into the grave only to pull out life, as a baby from a womb; and the recycle of air, the recycle of struggles that never achieve satisfaction, in a constant turning world, of an untuned universe.
Anthony Liccione
The world, whatever we might think about it terrified by its vastness and by our helplessness in the face of it, embittered by its indifference to individual suffering—of people, animals, and perhaps also plants, for how can we be sure that plants are free of suffering; whatever we might think about its spaces pierced by the radiation of stars, stars around which we now have begun to discover planets, already dead? still dead?—we don’t know; whatever we might think about this immense theater, to which we may have a ticket, but it is valid for a ridiculously brief time, limited by two decisive dates; whatever else we might think about this world—it is amazing.
Wisława Szymborska
Happiness is feeling confident that the god of this universe is pleased with the things you say and do.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Dear Neil Armstrong,I write this to you as she sleeps down the hall. I need answers I think only you might have. When you were a boy, and space was simple science fiction, when flying was merely a daydream between periods of History and Physics, when gifts of moon dust to the one you loved could only be wrapped in your imagination.. Before the world knew your name; before it was a destination in the sky.. What was the moon like from your back yard?Your arm, strong warm and wrapped under her hair both of you gazing up from your back porch summers before your distant journey. But upon landing on the moon, as the earth rose over the sea of tranquility, did you look for her? What was it like to see our planet, and know that everything, all you could be, all you could ever love and long for.. was just floating before you. Did you write her name in the dirt when the cameras weren't looking? Surrounding both your initials with a heart for alien life to study millions of years from now? What was it like to love something so distant? What words did you use to bring the moon back to her? And what did you promise in the moons ear, about that girl back home? Can you, teach me, how to fall from the sky?I ask you this, not because I doubt your feat, I just want to know what it's like to go somewhere no man had ever been, just to find that she wasn't there. To realize your moon walk could never compare to the steps that led to her. I now know that the flight home means more. Every July I think of you. I imagine the summer of 1969, how lonely she must have felt while you were gone.. You never went back to the moon. And I believe that's because it dosen't take rockets to get you where you belong. I see that in this woman down the hall, sometimes she seems so much further. But I'm ready for whatever steps I must take to get to her.I have seem SO MANY skies.. but the moon, well, it always looks the same. So I gotta say, Neil, that rock you landed on, has got NOTHING on the rock she's landed on. You walked around, took samples and left.. She's built a fire cleaned up the place and I hope she decides to stay.. because on this rock.. we can breath.Mr. Armstrong, I don't have much, many times have I been upside down with trauma, but with these empty hands, comes a heart that is often more full than the moon. She's becoming my world, pulling me into orbit, and I now know that I may never find life outside of hers. I want to give her EVERYTHING I don't have yet.. So YES, for her, I would go to the moon and back.... But not without her. We'd claim the moon for each other, with flags made from sheets down the hall. And I'd risk it ALL to kiss her under the light of the earth, the brightness of home... but I can do all of that and more right here, where she is..And when we gaze up, her arms around ME, I will NOT promise her gifts of moon dust, or flights of fancy. Instead I will gladly give her all the earth she wants, in return for all the earth she is. The sound of her heart beat and laughter, and all the time it takes to return to fall from the sky,down the hall, and right into love.God, I'd do it every day, if I could just land next to her.One small step for man, but she's one giant leap for my kind.
Mike McGee
And then, suddenly, an extraordinary question rose in my mind, whether this stupendous globe of green fire might not be the vast Central Sun—the great sun, round which our universe and countless others revolve. I felt confused. I thought of the probable end of the dead sun, and another suggestion came, dumbly—Do the dead stars make the Green Sun their grave? The idea appealed to me with no sense of grotesqueness; but rather as something both possible and probable.
William Hope Hodgson
The Library is a sphere whose exact centre is any one of its hexagons and whose circumference is inaccessible.
Jorge Luis Borges
I guess I didn't have it so bad.Maybe everybody didn't love me,but i wasn't one of those kids that everyone hated,either.I was good in a fight.So people left me alone.i was almost invisible.i think i liked it that way.And then Dante came along.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz