Quotes by Poets - Page 207

The silence between us was so profound I thought part of it must be my fault.
Sylvia Plath
It is well, when in difficulties, to say never a word, neither black nor white. Speech is silver but silence is golden.
Muriel Spark
If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spentIf the unheard, unspokenWord is unspoken, unheard;Still is the spoken word, the Word unheard,The Word without a word, the Word withinThe world and for the world;And the light shone in the darkness andAgainst the Word the unstilled world still whirledAbout the center of the silent Word.Oh my people, what have I done unto thee.Where shall the word be found, where shall the wordResound? Not here, there is not enough silence
T.S Eliot
Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation...tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego. His anxiety subsides. His inhuman void spreads monstrously like a gray vegetation.
Jean Arp
Let silence take you to the core of life.
Jalaluddin Rumi
We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.
W.B. Yeats
Such a deep silence surrounds me, that I think I hear moonbeams striking on the windows.
Lucian Blaga
The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence.
Marianne Moore
Then we had the irises, rising beautiful and cool on their tall stalks, like blown glass, like pastel water momentarily frozen in a splash, light blue, light mauve, and the darker ones, velvet and purple, black cat's ears in the sun, indigo shadow, and the bleeding hearts, so female in shape it was a surprise they'd not long since been rooted out. There is something subversive about this garden of Serena's, a sense of buried things bursting upwards, wordlessly, into the light, as if to point, to say: Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently.
Margaret Atwood
May my silences become more accurate.
Theodore Roethke
My friend, I am not what I seem. Seeming is but a garment I wear — a care-woven garment that protects me from thy questionings and thee from my negligence. The "I" in me, my friend, dwells in the house of silence, and therein it shall remain for ever more, unperceived, unapproachable.
Kahlil Gibran
All I want is blackness. Blackness and silence.
Sylvia Plath
In Silence there is eloquence. Stop weaving and see how the pattern improves.
Jalaluddin Rumi
I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.
Audre Lorde
The true genius shudders at incompleteness — imperfection — and usually prefers silence to saying the something which is not everything that should be said.
Edgar Allan Poe
Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?
Lawrence Durrell
This is the body's nurse; but since man's witFound the art of cookery, to delight his sense,More bodies are consumed and kill'd with itThan with the sword, famine, or pestilence.
John Davies of Hereford
I'm going on a diet.  (Crud, I know)I am going to be cranky. I am going to be irritable.I am going to be moody and sad and mean. And, yes, I am going to be hungry. Please don't feed me, even if I try to bite you. Please don't tease me, I may hurt you.Please don't try to encourage me, I may growl and snap at you. Please don't help me, I may blame you for everything aggravating in the known universe.  Please don't be offended by my scowl, I cannot smile.  But most importantly, please keep your distance until this trial is over to prevent any unnecessary casualties. Thank you for your understanding. 
Richelle E. Goodrich
We look up to see if it is day or night. If stars burn cool and moon does shine, we take to smoke divine and wine. If breath of sun does belch its heat, we boil coffee and prepare to eat.
Roman Payne
Reading is food for the brain.
Maribel C. Pagan
That’s what you get for being food.
Margaret Atwood
The word God can mean whatever you believe it to mean, for me it is the conscious stream of life from which we all come, and to which we can stayconnected throughout our lives as a source of peace, wisdom, love, support, knowing, inspiration, vitality, security, balance, and inner strength.I think that awareness is paramount, because in awareness we gain understanding, which then enables us to regain our feeling of empowerment.We need to feel empowered to make our choices conciously, about how to deal with changes in life, rather than reacting in fear (which tends to make us blind and weak).If we are aware, we can be realistic yet postive, and we can properly focus our intentions.Awareness can be quite sensual (which can add to your sense of feeling empowered). Think about how your body moves as you live your life, how amazing it is; think about nature, observe the intricate beautiful details of natural thngs, and of things we create, and breathe deeply to soak it all in.. Focus on the taste of food, the feel of textures in cloth, the feel of you partner's hand in yours; smell the sea breeze, listen to the wind in the trees, witness the colours of the leaves, the children playing; and be thankful for this life we are experiencing - this life we can all help to keep wonderful. Feel the wonder of being alive flood into you anytime you want, by taking a deep breath and letting the experience of these things fill you, even just by remembering.We all have that same stream of life within us, so you are a part of everything. Each one of us has the power to make a difference to everything.Breathe in that vital connection to the life source and sensual beauty everywhere, Feel loved and strong.
Jay Woodman
I am a practical girl, and a life is only so long. It should be spent in as much peace and good eating and good reading as possible and no undue excitement. That is all I am after.
Catherynne M. Valente
Sandwiches,' she said, 'like diamonds, are forever.
Muriel Spark
He toasted his bacon on a fork and caught the drops of fat on his bread; then he put the rasher on his thick slice of bread, and cut off chunks with a clasp-knife, poured his tea into his saucer, and was happy.
D.H. Lawrence
We may live without poetry, music, and art;tWe may live without conscience, and live without heart;tWe may live without friends; we may live without books;tBut civilized man cannot live without cooks.tHe may live without books,—what is knowledge but grieving?t 20He may live without hope,—what is hope but deceiving?tHe may live without love,—what is passion but pining?tBut where is the man that can live without dining?
Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton
I don't know what I ate, but I felt immensely better after the first mouthful. It occurred to me that my vision of the fig-tree and all the fat figs that withered and fell to the earth might well have arisen from the profound void of an empty stomach.
Sylvia Plath
I'm not sure why it is, but I love food more than just about anything else.
Sylvia Plath
And let your board stand an altar on which the pure and the innocent of forest and plain are sacrificed for that which is purer and still more innocent in man.
Kahlil Gibran
Murder is commoner among cooks than among members of any other profession.
W.H. Auden
My mother use to say she would rather be dead than not eat the foods she liked. At eighty-six she met with death but she enjoyed every breath
Stanley Victor Paskavich
Mrs Guinea answered my letter and invited me to lunch at her home. That was where I saw my first finger-bowl.The water had a few cherry blossoms floating in it, and I thought it must be some clear sort of Japanese after-dinner soup and ate every bit of it, including the crisp little blossoms. Mrs Guinea never said anything, and it was only much later, when I told a debutant I knew at college about dinner, that I learned what I had done.
Sylvia Plath
Ramadan is not fasting. Ramadan is an Islamic feast where one stuffs oneself twice a day with food, and in between lets ones intestines dry out. To describe that process as 'fasting' seems rather ubiquitous to me. The amount of food transported into the body is probably exactly the same, but because of the dehydration the food is processed less effectively. As customs go, most customs are typically silly and Ramadan is no exception. I can accept such silliness when people keep it to themselves, but unfortunately one sees such a sharp rise in 'policing' others that even non Muslims are now experiencing violence because they are eating at daytime in the Ramadan period.
Martijn Benders
THE FIRST PRINCIPLE OF GASTRONOMY There's a rule for proper dosesin the dinner-eaters lore:one should stop the filling processwhile one still has room for more. And if someone at the tablehad reminded me before -Hallelujah! I'd be ableto absorb a little more.
Piet Hein
I've swallowed fish-eyes wholelike an endoscope.I once ate a trout cooked inside a dolphin. Felt like a shark eating another shark,inside the cold-blooded womb of yet another shark.
Yann Rousselot
As a dinner guest I gratefully eat just about anything that's set before me, because graciousness among friends is dearer to me than any other agenda.
Barbara Kingsolver
Eating is a genuine need, continuous from our first day to our last, amounting over time to our most significant statement of what we are made of and what we have chosen to make of our connection to home ground.
Barbara Kingsolver
In the absence of organized religion, faith abounds, in the form of song and art and food and strong arms.
Elizabeth Alexander
When you don't fit in anymore, eat less.
Benny Bellamacina
There was currant toast squishy with butter, caramel-marshmallow squares, strawberry boats oozing custard, chocolate exclairs that exploded with cream when the cats bit into them with their little white teeth and-- a special treat for Pleasant-- a pie made from thick slices of Bramley apple, with just the right amount of tangy in the tangy-sweet.
Anne Michaels
Pavlov’s dogs will drool at the site of any food,So go ahead and ring the bell, Sing a classical song about it and Then advertises what sells
Charmaine J.Forde
For about 48 weeks of the year an asparagus plant is unrecognizable to anyone except an asparagus grower. Plenty of summer visitors to our garden have stood in the middle of the bed and asked, 'What is this stuff? It's beautiful!' We tell them its the asparagus patch, and they reply, 'No this, these feathery little trees.' An asparagus spear only looks like its picture for one day of its life, usually in April, give or take a month as you travel from the Mason-Dixon Line. The shoot emerges from the ground like a snub nose green snake headed for sunshine, rising so rapidly you can just about see it grow. If it doesn't get it's neck cut off at ground level as it emerges, it will keep growing. Each triangular scale on the spear rolls out into a branch until the snake becomes a four foot tree with delicate needles. Contrary to lore, fat spears are no more tender or mature than thin ones. Each shoot begins life with its own particular girth. In the hours after emergence, it lengthens but does not appreciably fatten. To step into another raging asparagus controversy, white spears are botanically no different from their green colleagues. White shoots have been deprived of sunlight by a heavy mulch pulled up over the plant's crown. European growers go to this trouble for consumers who prefer the stalks before they've had their first blush of photosynthesis. Most Americans prefer the more developed taste of green. Uncharacteristically, we're opting for the better nutritional deal here also. The same plant could produce white or green spears in alternate years, depending on how it is treated. If the spears are allowed to proceed beyond their first exploratory six inches, they'll green out and grow tall and feathery like the house plant known as asparagus fern, which is the next of kin. Older, healthier asparagus plants produce chunkier, more multiple shoots. Underneath lies an octopus-shaped affair of chubby roots called a crown that stores enough starch through the winter to arrange the phallic send-up when winter starts to break. The effect is rather sexy, if you're the type to see things that way. Europeans of the Renaissance swore by it as an aphrodisiac and the church banned it from nunneries.
Barbara Kingsolver
The meal she served was unlike any I had encountered in Vienna, or anywhere else: red seaweed garnished with pickled radishes; black rice noodles and spotted mushrooms boiled in wine, grilled squid stuffed with flying fish roe; and yellow cherries sauteed in butter. The hot bread was laced with cinnamon and paprika. The goat cheese was coated with thyme honey.
Nicholas Christopher
Never before have the American people had their noses so deeply in one another's business. If I announce that I and eleven other diners shared a thirty-seven-course lunch that likely cost as much as a new Volvo station wagon, Those of a critical nature will let their minds run in tiny, aghast circles of condemnation. My response to them is that none of us twelve disciples of gourmandise wanted a new Volvo. We wanted only lunch and since lunch lasted approximately eleven hours we saved money by not having to buy diner. The defense rests.
Jim Harrison
I went to the kitchen and felt-up the turkey.
Charles Bukowski
I’ve supped on potatoes and groats and am waiting to be sick. How about you?I supped like the Lord in Heaven.’and what does the Lord in Heaven have for supper?’Nothing.
Jan Neruda
In any case, muffins that are only imaginary aren't liable to get stuck.
Thomas M. Disch
It appeals to the higher nature of the self to put aside food which once lived - I do not consider myself food, why should I ask all other creatures to consider themselves so?
Catherynne M. Valente
The longer I think about a food industry organized around an animal that cannot reproduce itself without technical assistance, the more I mistrust it. Poultry, a significant part of the modern diet, is emblematic of the whole dirty deal. Having no self-sustaining bloodlines to back up the industry is like having no gold standard to underpin paper currency. Maintaining a natural breeding poultry flock is a rebellion, at the most basic level, against the wholly artificial nature of how foods are produced.
Barbara Kingsolver
Though we eat little flesh and drink no wine,Yet let's be merry; we'll have tea and toast;Custards for supper, and an endless hostOf syllabubs and jellies and mincepies,And other such ladylike luxuries.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
It struck her how eating was a comfort during a hard time because it reminded you that there had been other days, good days, when you’d eaten the same thing. Reminded you there were good days in life, when precious little else did. (268)
Ron Rash
In our heart we know that life loves life. Yet we feast on some of the other life-forms with which we share our planet; we kill to live. Taste is what carries us across that rocky moral terrain, what makes the horror palatable, and the paradox we could not defend by reason melts into a jungle of sweet temptations.
Diane Ackerman
Kissing don't last: cookery do !
George Meredith
I finally figured out the big, elusive secret to weight loss. Don't eat! Who knew?
Richelle E. Goodrich
Our holiday food splurge was a small crate of tangerines, which we found ridiculously thrilling after an eight-month abstinence from citrus.... Lily hugged each one to her chest before undressing it as gently as a doll. Watching her do that as she sat cross-legged on the floor one morning in pink pajamas, with bliss lighting her cheeks, I thought: Lucky is the world, to receive this grateful child. Value is not made of money, but a tender balance of expectation and longing.
Barbara Kingsolver
Parsley is gharsley.
Ogden Nash
Oh, pity the poor gluttonWhose troubles all beginIn struggling on and on to turnWhat's out into what's in.
Walter de la Mare
This story about good food begins in a quick-stop convenience market.
Barbara Kingsolver
She spoke of evenings in the country making popcorn on the porch. Once this would have gladdened my heart but because her heart was not glad when she said it I knew there was nothing in it but the idea of what one should do.
Jack Kerouac
There is no technique, there is just the way to do it.Now, are we going to measure or are we going to cook?
Frances Mayes