Quotes by Poets - Page 219

I could displace the mystery of my speech onto writing, the latter perhaps recharging the former
Ben Lerner
There are stories that don't need a plot. Sooner or later they rise above the confusion and untangle their mysteries in a series of sentences.
Patrice Nganang
, Stanhope delayed a moment behind Miss Fox to add: "The substantive, of course, governs the adjective; not the other way round.""The substantive?" Pauline asked blankly."Good. It contains terror, not terror good. I'm keeping you. Good-bye, Periel," and he was gone.
Charles Williams
Language is where the tongue fails itself over & over again.
Christopher Soto
I was born with my voice in my hands.
Kathryn Lomer
before men could speak they enjoyed confounding another with signsthey enjoyed this as much as a mirror enjoys an imageas much as the evening like a ship enjoys a sapphire grave
Frank Stanford
a hymn then not to birds but to words which themselves feel like feather and wing and light, as if it were on the delicacy of such sweet syllables that flocks take flight.
Kei Miller
How much have we not seen or felt or heard because there was no word for it -- at least no word we knew? We speak to navigate ourselves away from dark corners and we become, each one of us, cartographers.
Kei Miller
If you look a word up in the dictionary and twenty minutes later you're still wandering around in the dictionary, you probably have the most basic equipment you need to be a poet.
Billy Collins
There was only one huge world with no back to itA world like a sunOne day it broke into tiny piecesThey were the words of the language we now speakPieces that will never come togetherBroken mirrors where the world sees itself shatterered
Octavio Paz
Language is a city, to the building of which every human being brought a stone.
Waldo Emerson
I did not foresee my words becoming such a reverie of mimic and refrain.
Joshua Kryah
This little boy playing next to me is an intellectual mass of cells - better yet, he's a clockwork of subatomic movements, a strange electrical conglomeration of millions of solar systems in minature. [58, Zenith trans.]
Fernando Pessoa
The thing she realised in that moment, that fraction of waiting, was lost. Nothing could bring the thing back, no words could make the thing solid and visible and therefore to be coped with. Solid and visible form was what she had been seeking. I will put this into visible language.
H.D.
Tragedy's language stresses that whatever is within us is obscure, many faceted, impossible to see. Performance gave this question of what is within a physical force. The spectators were far away from the performers, on that hill above the theatre. At the centre of their vision was a small hut, into which they could not see. The physical action presented to their attention was violent but mostly unseen. They inferred it, as they inferred inner movement, from words spoken by figures whose entrances and exits into and out of the visible space patterned the play. They saw its results when that facade opened to reveal a dead body. This genre, with its dialectics of seen and unseen, inside and outside, exit and entrance, was a simultaneously internal and external, intellectual and somatic expression of contemporary questions about the inward sources of harm, knowledge, power, and darkness.
Ruth Padel
We are all full of discourses that we only half understand and half mean.
Rae Armantrout
As with . . . even the written word, the remote overview is one more wrenched perspective that developing civilization has glued, collagelike, to the once unified experience of life.
Bruce Berger
To abandon language is to stop/creating a place other than your own life/in which to live. It is to enter/the terrible certainty of the flesh. Even god/is only possible through language.
Jude Nutter
Metaphor isn't just decorative language. If it were, it wouldn't scare us so much. . . . Colorful language threatens some people, who associate it, I think, with a kind of eroticism (playing with language in public = playing with yourself), and with extra expense (having to sense or feel more). I don't share that opinion. Why reduce life to a monotone? Is that truer to the experience of being alive? I don't think so. It robs us of life's many textures. Language provides an abundance of words to keep us company on our travels. But we're losing words at a reckless pace, the national vocabulary is shrinking. Most Americans use only several hundred words or so. Frugality has its place, but not in the larder of language. We rely on words to help us detail how we feel, what we once felt, what we can feel. When the blood drains out of language, one's experience of life weakens and grows pale. It's not simply a dumbing down, but a numbing.
Diane Ackerman
It is still not enough for language to have clarity and content…it must also have a goal and an imperative. Otherwise from language we descend to chatter, from chatter to babble, and from babble to confusion.
René Daumal
There is nothing but quotations left for us. Our language is a system of quotations.
Jorge Luis Borges
Life doesn't exist inside language: too bad for me.
Kathy Acker
To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.
Charles Baudelaire
No new world without a new language.
Ingeborg Bachmann
To knot a sentence up properly, it has to be thought out carefully, and revised. New phrases have to be put in; sudden changes of subject must be introducted; verbs must be shifted to unsuspected localities; short words must be excised with ruthless hand; archaisms must be sprinkled like sugar-plums upon the concoction; the fatal human tendency to say things straightforwardly must be detected and defeated by adroit reversals; and, if a glimmer of meaning yet remain under close scrutiny, it must be removed by replacing all the principal verbs by paraphrases in some dead language.
Aleister Crowley
That is the strangeness of language: it crosses the boundaries of the body, is at once inside and outside, and it sometimes happens that we don't notice the threshold has been crossed.
Siri Hustvedt
Tír gan teanga, tír gan anam. A country without a language is a country without a soul.
Pádraic Pearse
I remember thinking how easy it is to speak in clichés, to steal a line from pulp fiction and let it fall. We can only hover around the inexpressible with our words anyway, and there is comfort in saying what we have heard before.
Siri Hustvedt
Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form.
Robert Bringhurst
Every sickness has an alien quality, a feeling of invasion and loss of control that is evident in the language we use about it.
Siri Hustvedt
Language is the only homeland.
Czesław Miłosz
The fact that Iam writing to youin Englishalready falsifies what Iwanted to tell you.My subject:how to explain to you that Idon't belong to Englishthough I belong nowhere else
Gustavo Perez Firmat
silence is the language of god, all else is poor translation.
Jalaluddin Rumi
I like you; your eyes are full of language."[Letter to Anne Clarke, July 3, 1964.]
Anne Sexton
Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.
Margaret Atwood
The buzzard has nothing to fault himself with.Scruples are alien to the black panther.Piranhas do not doubt the rightness of their actions.The rattlesnake approves of himself without reservations.The self-critical jackal does not exist.The locust, alligator, trichina, horseflylive as they live and are glad of it.The killer whale's heart weighs one hundred kilosbut in other respects it is light.There is nothing more animal-likethan a clear conscienceon the third planet of the Sun.
Wisława Szymborska
Do not be too sure, young fellows,That you are better than your ancestors.
William Kean Seymour
We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience.
Rainer Maria Rilke
What was to be the value of the long looked forward to,Long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenityAnd the wisdom of age? Had they deceived usOr deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders,Bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit?The serenity only a deliberate hebetude,The wisdom only the knowledge of dead secretsUseless in the darkness into which they peeredOr from which they turned their eyes. There is, it seems to us,At best, only a limited valueIn the knowledge derived from experience.The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,For the pattern is new in every momentAnd every moment is a new and shockingValuation of all we have been. We are only undeceivedOf that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.
T.S Eliot
Reality lies in the greatest enchantment you have ever experienced.
Hugo von Hofmannsthal
Koschei the Deathless made a face as he tasted the wine. "It is far too sweet. Comrade Stalin fears bitterness and has the tastes of a spoiled princess. I savor bitterness--it is born of experience. It is the privilege of one who has truly lived. You, too, must learn to prefer it. After all, when all else is gone, you may still have bitterness in abundance.
Catherynne M. Valente
When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.
T.S Eliot
Only he whose bright lyrehas sounded in shadowsmay, looking onward, restorehis infinite praise. Only he who has eatenpoppies with the deadwill not lose ever againthe gentlest chord.Though the image upon the pooloften grows dim:Know and be still.Inside the Double Worldall voices becomeeternally mild.
Rainer Maria Rilke
I neither oblige the belief of other person, nor overhastily subscribe mine own. Nor have I stood with others computing or collating years and chronologies, lest I should be vainly curious about the time and circumstance of things, whereof the substance is so much in doubt. By this time, like one who had set out on his way by night, and travelled through a region of smooth or idle dreams, our history now arrives on the confines, where daylight and truth meet us with a clear dawn, representing to our view, though at a far distance, true colours and shapes.
John Milton
Character is not purchased with a dance in the street. It's expensive and hard to come by. Though it is the heir of disappointment, betrayal and frustration, it is not the inheritance that matters but what you do with it. No one ever developed their character by arranging their experiences in such a way that only ‘good’ things are allowed to happen.
Billy Marshall-Stoneking
The Complete Work is essentially dramatic, thought it takes different forms - prose passages in this first volume, poems and philosophies in other volumes. It's the product of the temperament I've been blessed or cursed with - I'm not sure which. All I know is that the author of these lines (I'm not sure if also of these books) has never had just one personality, and has never thought or felt except dramatically - that is, through invented persons, or personalities, who are more capable than he of feeling what's to be felt.
Fernando Pessoa
Experience is as to intensity and not as to duration.
Thomas Hardy
If you are present, then you can see that you give yourself presents in each moment that you can unwrap and thoroughly enjoy - the amazing world around us that we can explore, each incredible detail, the lives, and the stories we tell ourselves or experience so that we can feel what it's like to be human, the things we can learn from an interaction, about ourselves as well as everything and everyone else.Everyone is here in their own story, writing the script as they go, living the movie picture.... choosing who to meet, what to do, how to react to each new experience. We each find our own tools to help us traverse the terrain of each particular part of our journeys. It cannot be right to judge another, or yourself, for we are all at different stages, or on different stages. We do as we need to according to where and how we find ourselves, but the more you realise that you actually put yourself exactly where you are in each moment, the more your eyes will widen. You are an amazing Being playing the game of life - your attitude makes all the difference.
Jay Woodman
Life is a repeated cycle of getting lost and then finding yourself again. There are many smaller cycles within that cycle where you get lost to a smaller degree and then remember yourself again. Sometimes you do it to yourself on purpose, consciously or unconsciously. Every time you get lost it is so that you can learn something or experience something from a different perspective.
Jay Woodman
Art is the expression of appreciation of beauty real or imagined. It's also an examination of what it means to be alive with all its varied things, emotions, and experiences. We are forever trying to explain ourselves to the world or the world to ourselves.
Jay Woodman
Life is an extraordinary gift some people appear not to appreciate. In every breath and scent, every touch and sight we are gifted by new experience and the chance to feel the richness of experience. Every sound we hear, from the song of a bird to the harshness of an angry voice, is a miracle.
Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum
I tended to find lines of poetry beautiful only when I encountered them quoted in prose, in the essays my professors had assigned in college, where the line breaks were replaced with slashes, so that what was communicated was less a particular poem than the echo of poetic possibility. Insofar as I was interested in the arts, I was interested in the disconnect between my experience of actual artworks and the claims made on their behalf; the closest I'd come to having a profound experience of art was probably the experience of this distance, a profound experience of the absence of profundity.
Ben Lerner
Poetry is alive because it is a medium of vision and experience. It is not necessarily comfortable.It is not necessarily safe.
Lenore Kandel
If you will call your troubles experiences, and remember that every experience develops some latent force within you, you will grow vigorous and happy, however adverse your circumstances may seem to be.
John Heywood
You cannot appreciate what you have never experienced. Sadly, full appreciation tends to come only after the experience is past.
Richelle E. Goodrich
I was born with the ability to see in metaphor.
Mark Nepo
I have no time in the world but the time in which I amand that lasts a moment and passes like a cloud.
Samuel ha-Nagid
Experiences were what you got when you couldn’t get what you wanted.
Margaret Atwood
Accumulated experience always alters perception of the past.
Siri Hustvedt
I can only be me.
Jonathan Anthony Burkett