Quotes by Poets - Page 220

Experience is by industry achiev'd,And perfected by the swift course of time.
William Shakespeare
You can’t translate somethingthat was never in a languagein the first place.
Chase Twichell
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
I don’t want us to be ashamed anymore (we all were crying by this point) of being pregnant or gay or poor or having a crackhead dad! I want us to be fucking proud of ourselves. (...) So we have to be proud and always remember who we are and when we make it to college, who we were.
Isabel Quintero
He who has lived and thought can neverHelp in his soul despising men,He who has felt will be foreverHaunted by days he can’t regain.For him there are no more enchantments,Him does the serpent of remembrance,Him does repentance always gnaw.All this will frequently affordA great delight to conversations.
Alexander Pushkin
I'm told by my young friends that experience is much more important than books. Of course Ben Franklin had something to say about experience and fools, but even Franklin thought that a fool would learn by his experience. That has proven false in the modern world. Some people are simply unwilling to learn under any circumstances, which maybe, even then, wouldn't be so bad if they weren't so damned proud of it.
Nikki Giovanni
I speak here of poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean--in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight.For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.
Audre Lorde
Illusions fall away one after another like the husks of a fruit, and that fruit is experience. It is bitter to the taste, but there is fortitude to be found in gall – forgive me my old-fashioned turns of phrase.
Gérard de Nerval
It is good," he thought, "to get a taste of everything for oneself, which one needs to know. That lust for the world and riches do not belong to the good things, I have already learned as a child. I have known it for a long time, but I have experienced only now. And now I know it, don't just know it in my memory, but in my eyes, in my heart, in my stomach. Good for me, to know this!
Hermann Hesse
You can teach a person all you know, but only experience will convince him that what you say is true.
Richelle E. Goodrich
There is a large stock on hand; but somehow or other, nobody's experience ever suits us but our own.
Letitia Landon
It [enlightenment] has not come to you by means of teaching! And-thus is my thought, oh exalted one,-nobody will obtain salvation by means of teachings! (character of Siddhartha, speaking to the Buddha)
Hermann Hesse
The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use. The African writer should aim to use English in a way that brings out his message best without altering the language to the extent that its value as a medium of international exchange will be lost. He should aim at fashioning out an English which is at once universal and able to carry his peculiar experience.
Chinua Achebe
GLOUCESTERNow, good sir, what are you?EDGARA most poor man made tame to fortune's blows,Who by the art of known and feeling sorrowsAm pregnant to good pity.
William Shakespeare
Many besides Angel have learnt that the magnitude of lives is not as to their external displacements but as to their subjective experiences.
Thomas Hardy
We own the country we grow up in, or we are aliens and invaders.
Michael Ondaatje
A being who, as I grew older, lost imagination, emotion, a type of intelligence, a way of feeling things - all that which, while it made me sorry, did not horrify me. But what am I experiencing when I read myself as if I were someone else? On which bank am I standing if I see myself in the depths?
Fernando Pessoa
An optimist is a man who has never had much experience.
Don Marquis
We are taught to believe that the ‘alienation’ that we experience sometimes, when we withdraw from everything or feel alone, is a craving for something sexual, material, or in the physical - and can be cured by popping a pill in most cases. When in Truth, it’s the circuitry within our souls and minds that is hinting to be connected - to real flowing energy - outside of our TVs and computer monitors. What many of us mistaken for depression is actually a need to be understood, or to see desires come to fruition. There is absolutely nothing abnormal about feeling disconnected. Your sensitivity only means you are more human than most. If you cry, you are alive. I’d be more worried if you didn’t.
Suzy Kassem
We try so hard to instruct our children in all the right things―teaching good from bad, explaining choices and consequences―when in reality most lessons are learned through observation and experience. Perhaps we'd be better off training our youth to be highly observant.
Richelle E. Goodrich
most people come to know only one corner of their room, one spot near the window, one narrow strip on which they keep walking back and forth.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Whoever you are, go out into the evening,leaving your room, of which you know every bit;your house is the last before the infinite,whoever you are.
Rainer Maria Rilke
In the middle of the night, things well up from the past that are not always cause for rejoicing--the unsolved, the painful encounters, the mistakes, the reasons for shame or woe. But all, good or bad, give me food for thought, food to grow on.
May Sarton
When the image is new, the world is new.
Gaston Bachelard
Feel what it's like to truly starve, and I guarantee that you'll forever think twice before wasting food.
Criss Jami
Let me also say I wanna make you sandwhiches,And soup,And peanut butter cookies,Though, the truth is peanutbutter is actually really bad for you 'cause they grow peanuts in old cotton fields to clean the toxins out of the soil,But hey, you like peanutbutter and I like you!
Andrea Gibson
You do not seem to realize that beauty is a liability ratherthanan asset - that in view of the fact that spirit creates formwe are justified in supposingthat you must have brains. For you, a symbol of theunit, stiff and sharp,conscious of surpassing by dint of native superiority andliking for everythingself-dependent, anything anambitious civilization might produce: for you, unaided, toattempt through sheerreserve, to confuse presumptions resulting fromobservation, is idle. You cannot make usthink you a delightful happen-so. But rose, if you arebrilliant, itis not because your petals are the without-which-nothingof pre-eminence. Would you not, minusthorns, be a what-is-this, a mereperculiarity? They are not proof against a worm, theelements, or mildew;but what about the predatory hand? What is brilliancewithout co-ordination? Guarding theinfinitesimal pieces of your mind, compelling audience tothe remark that it is better to be forgotten than to be re-membered too violently,your thorns are the best part of you.
Marianne Moore
A poem, as a manifestation of language and thus essentially dialogue, can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the –not always greatly hopeful-belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land, on heartland perhaps. Poems in this sense too are under way: they are making toward something. Toward what? Toward something standing open, occupiable, perhaps toward an addressable Thou, toward an addressable reality.
Paul Celan
I went out to the hazel woodbecause a fire was in my headcut and peeled a hazel wandand hooked a berry to a threadand when white moths were on the wingand moth-like stars were flickering outI dropped the berry in a stream,and caught a little silver trout....(Song of Wandering Aengus)
W.B. Yeats
Up the still, glistening beaches,Up the creeks we will hie,Over banks of bright seaweedThe ebb-tide leaves dry.We will gaze, from the sand-hills,At the white, sleeping town;At the church on the hill-side—And then come back down.Singing: "There dwells a loved one,But cruel is she!She left lonely for everThe kings of the sea.(from poem 'The Forsaken Merman')
Matthew Arnold
Then a hundred sad voices lifted a wail,And a hundred glad voices piped on the gale:'Time is short, life is short,' they took up the tale: 'Life is sweet, love is sweet, use to-day while you may;Love is sweet, and to-morrow may fail; Love is sweet, use to-day.
Christina Rossetti
Wear scarlet! Tear the green lemonsoff the tree! I don't wantto forget who I am, what has burned in me,and hang limp and clean, an empty dress -
Denise Levertov
I thought I was growing wings—it was a cocoon.I thought, now is the time to stepinto the fire—it was deep water.Eschatology is a word I learnedas a child: the study of Last Things;facing my mirror—no longer young,the news—always of death,the dogs—rising from sleep and clamoringand howling, howling....("Seeing For a Moment")
Denise Levertov
I am, a shadowthat grows longer as the sunmoves, drawn outon a thread of wonder.If I bear burdensthey begin to be rememberedas gifts, goods, a basketof bread that hurtsmy shoulders but closes mein fragrance. I caneat as I go. ("Stepping Westward")
Denise Levertov
The yellow moon dreamilytipping buttons of lightdown among the leaves. Marimba,marimba - from beyond theblack street.Somebody dancing,somebodygetting the helloutta here. Shadows of catsweave round the treetrunks,the exposed knotty roots.("Scenes from the Life of the Peppertrees")
Denise Levertov
For [W. B.] Yeats magic was not so much a kind of poetry as poetry a kind of magic, and the object of both alike was evocation of energies and knowledge from beyond normal consciousness.
Kathleen Raine
Most things may never happen: this one will.
Philip Larkin
-A Word On Statistics-Out of every hundred people, those who always know better:fifty-two.Unsure of every step:almost all the rest. Ready to help,if it doesn't take long:forty-nine. Always good,because they cannot be otherwise:fourwell, maybe five. Able to admire without envy:eighteen. Led to errorby youth (which passes):sixty, plus or minus. Those not to be messed with:four-and-forty. Living in constant fearof someone or something:seventy-seven. Capable of happiness:twenty-some-odd at most. Harmless alone,turning savage in crowds:more than half, for sure. Cruelwhen forced by circumstances:it's better not to know,not even approximately. Wise in hindsight:not many morethan wise in foresight. Getting nothing out of life except things:thirty(though I would like to be wrong). Balled up in painand without a flashlight in the dark:eighty-three, sooner or later. Those who are just:quite a few, thirty-five. But if it takes effort to understand:three. Worthy of empathy:ninety-nine. Mortal:one hundred out of one hundreda figure that has never varied yet.
Wisława Szymborska
From the time I began to read, as a child, I loved to feel their heft in my hand and the warm spot caused by their intimate weight in my lap; I loved the crisp whisper of a page turning, the musky odor of old paper and the sharp inky whiff of new pages. Leather bindings sent me into ecstasy. I even loved to gaze at a closed book and daydream about the possibilities inside.
Rita Dove
The Wolf trots to and fro,The world lies deep in snow,The raven from the birch tree flies,But nowhere a hare, nowhere a roe,The roe -she is so dear, so sweet -If such a thing I might surpriseIn my embrace, my teeth would meet,What else is there beneath the skies?The lovely creature I would so treasure,And feast myself deep on her tender thigh,I would drink of her red blood full measure,Then howl till the night went by.Even a hare I would not despise;Sweet enough its warm flesh in the night.Is everything to be deniedThat could make life a little bright?The hair on my brush is getting grey.The sight is failing from my eyes.Years ago my dear mate died.And now I trot and dream of a roe.I trot and dream of a hare.I hear the wind of midnight howl.I cool with the snow my burning jowl,And on to the devil my wretched soul I bear.
Hermann Hesse
I’ve seen daggers pierce the chest,Children dying in the road,Crawling things hooked and baited,Rapists bound and then castrated,Villains singed in public square.Yet none these sights did make me cringeLike when my Love cut all her hair.
Roman Payne
The children walk away from me, flick flickety off at a tangent between thin blotched beech trunks, then turn like yo-yos at the end of their strings and come back to me" from the poem "In a BishopsWood Clearing
Jay Woodman
No rest without love, no sleep without dreams of love- be mad or chill obsessed with angels or machines, the final wish is love -cannot be bitter, cannot deny,cannot withhold if denied: the weight is too heavy
Allen Ginsberg
If liberty sang a song, little,as the larynx of a bird,nowhere would there remain a tumbling wall.
Ahmad Shamlou
All day long you sit and sew,Stitch life down for fear it grow,Stitch life down for fear we guessAt the hidden ugliness.Dusty voice that throbs with heat,Hoping with your steel-thin beatTo put stitches in my mind,Make it tidy, make it kind,You shall not: I'll keep it freeThough you turn earth, sky and seaTo a patchwork quilt to keepYour mind snug and warm in sleep!
Edith Sitwell
Your soul: pure glucose edged with hintsOf tentative and half-soiled tints
Edith Sitwell
The fusty showman fumbles, must Fit in a particle of dustThe universe, for fear it gainIts freedom from my cube of brain.Yet dust bears seeds that grow to graceBehind my crude-striped wooden faceAs I, a puppet tinsel-pinkLeap on my springs, learn how to think—Till like the trembling golden stalkOf some long-petalled star, I walkThrough the dark heavens, and the dewFalls on my eyes and sense thrills through.
Edith Sitwell
Answers I kept my answers small and kept them near;Big questions bruised my mind but still I letSmall answers be a bullwark to my fear.The huge abstractions I kept from the light;Small things I handled and caressed and loved.I let the stars assume the whole of night.But the big answers clamoured to be moved Into my life. Their great audacityShouted to be acknowledged and believed.Even when all small answers build up toProtection of my spirit, still I hearBig answers striving for their overthrow.And all the great conclusions coming near
Edith Sitwell
Solo For Ear-Trumpet The carriage brushes through the brightLeaves (violent jets from life to light);Strong polished speed is plunging, heavesBetween the showers of bright hot leavesThe window-glasses glaze our facesAnd jar them to the very basis — But they could never put a polishUpon my manners or abolishMy most distinct disinclinationFor calling on a rich relation!In her house — (bulwark built betweenThe life man lives and visions seen) — The sunlight hiccups white as chalk,Grown drunk with emptiness of talk,And silence hisses like a snake — Invertebrate and rattling ache….Then suddenly EternityDrowns all the houses like a seaAnd down the street the Trump of DoomBlares madly — shakes the drawing-roomWhere raw-edged shadows sting forlornAs dank dark nettles. Down the hornOf her ear-trumpet I conveyThe news that 'It is Judgment Day!''Speak louder: I don't catch, my dear.'I roared: 'It is the Trump we hear!''The What?' 'THE TRUMP!' 'I shall complain!…. the boy-scouts practising again.
Edith Sitwell
There is a blue bird in my heart that wants to get out.
Charles Bukowski
Even this shall pass away
Theodore Tilton
My cup is yellowOr not, though not'sImpossibleIt's yellow
Aram Saroyan
And you know what the worst thing was?The worst thing was that nobody ever believed how hard we tried.
Jack McCarthy
When I dieI'm sureI will have aBig Funeral.Curiosityseekers...coming to seeif Iam reallyDeador justtrying to makeTrouble.
Mari Evans
So this is love:the Sculptor’s chisel.And stone, which in its whole lifedoes not utter a single word,suddenly sings.
Milan Rúfus
Phantoms of thought and memory thinned and fled.
Siegfried Sassoon
I would say poetry is language charged with emotion. It's words, rhythmically organized . . . A poem is a complete little universe. It exists separately. Any poem that has any worth expresses the whole life of the poet. It gives a view of what the poet is.
William Carlos Williams
Holding up an oil-paper umbrella,I loiter aimlessly in the long, longAnd lonely rainy alley,I hope to encounterA lilac-like girlNursing her resentmentA lilac-like color she hasA lilac-like fragrance,A lilac-like sadness,Melancholy in the rain,Sorrowful and uncertain;She loiters aimlessly in this lonely rainy alleyHolding up an oil-paper umbrellaJust like meAnd just like meWalks silently,Apathetic, sad and disconsolateSilently she moves closerMoves closer and castsA sigh-like glanceShe glides byLike a dreamHazy and confused like a dreamAs in a dream she glides pastLike a lilac spray,This girl glides past beside me;She silently moves away, moves awayUp to the broken-down bamboo fence,To the end of the rainy alley.In the rains sad song,Her color vanishesHer fragrance diffuses,Even herSigh-like glance,Lilac-like discontentVanish.Holding up an oil-paper umbrella, aloneAimlessly walking in the long, longAnd lonely rainy alley,I wish forA lilac-like girlNursing her resentment glide by.
Dai Wangshu
So Lightning says to Mud,“What would happen if I struck your blood?”And Mud says, “Brother, It would hurt, And make me the motherOf every living thing.But, Fire Boy, you ain’t lifting my grass skirtUntil you burn me a ring.
Sherman Alexie
Sure, we thought the acresThat we tilled were sacred,But how could we have knownThat wheat can haunt like ghosts
Sherman Alexie