Quotes by Poets - Page 3

One of my roommates, Rafael, he's an expert on monsters. Not that he talks about them. I can just tell. People who have monsters recognize each other. They know each other without even saying a word.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
You may not want to hear that or think of it as writing, but I’m telling you that the moving of information is a literary act in and of itself. Even when people aren’t reading it.
Kenneth Goldsmith
Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense. They listen so much that they forget to be natural. This is a nice story.
Gertrude Stein
She had expressed herself, as women will, in a smug broadside of pastel shades. Nothing clashed because nothing had the strength to clash; everything murmured of safety among the hues; all was refinement.
Mervyn Peake
Being here with him is safety; it's a cave, where we huddle together while the storm goes on outside. This is a delusion, of course. This room is one of the most dangerous places I could be.
Margaret Atwood
I don't have to be safe to feel safe, I always feel safe at my core.
Jay Woodman
The best way to stay safe is, let them think your insane.
Anthony Liccione
Tell all the truth but tell it slant.
Emily Dickinson
I’m a man of music as much as I am a man of words and prose. One could even possibly say that they, music and prose, are connected to a lengthy and mutually beneficial extent and that they have been of centuries or millenniums.
Nicholas Trandahl
In general, dividing literature into prose and poetry began with the appearance of prose, for only in prose could such a division be expressed. By its nature, by its essence, art is hierarchical, automatically, and in this hierarchy, poetry stands above prose. If only because poetry is older. Poetry really is a very strange thing, because it belongs to a troglodyte as well as to a snob. It can be produced in the Stone Age and in the most modern salon, whereas prose requires a developed society, a developed structure, certain established classes, if you like. Here you could start reasoning like a Marxist without even being wrong. The poet works from the voice, from the sound. For him, content is not as important as is ordinarily believed. For a poet, there is almost no difference between phonetics and semantics. Therefore, only very rarely does the poet give any thought to who in fact comprises his audience. That is, he does so much more rarely than the prose writer.
Joseph Brodsky
DADDYYou do not do, you do not doAny more, black shoeIn which I have lived like a footFor thirty years, poor and white,Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.Daddy, I have had to kill you.You died before I had time―Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,Ghastly statue with one grey toeBig as a Frisco sealAnd a head in the freakish AtlanticWhen it pours bean green over blueIn the waters of beautiful Nauset.I used to pray to recover you.Ach, du.In the German tongue, in the Polish townScraped flat by the rollerOf wars, wars, wars.But the name of the town is common.My Polack friendSays there are a dozen or two.So I never could tell where youPut your foot, your root,I never could talk to you.The tongue stuck in my jaw.It stuck in a barb wire snare.Ich, ich, ich, ich,I could hardly speak.I thought every German was you.And the language obsceneAn engine, an engineChuffing me off like a Jew.A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.I began to talk like a Jew.I think I may well be a Jew.The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of ViennaAre not very pure or true.With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luckAnd my Taroc pack and my Taroc packI may be a bit of a Jew.I have always been scared of you,With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.And your neat mustacheAnd your Aryan eye, bright blue.Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You―Not God but a swastikaSo black no sky could squeak through.Every woman adores a Fascist,The boot in the face, the bruteBrute heart of a brute like you.You stand at the blackboard, daddy,In the picture I have of you,A cleft in your chin instead of your footBut no less a devil for that, no notAnd less the black man whoBit my pretty red heart in two.I was ten when they buried you.At twenty I tried to dieAnd get back, back, back to you.I thought even the bones would do.But they pulled me out of the sack,And they stuck me together with glue.And then I knew what to do.I made a model of you,A man in black with a Meinkampf lookAnd a love of the rack and the screw.And I said I do, I do.So daddy, I’m finally through.The black telephone’s off at the root,The voices just can’t worm through.If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two―The vampire who said he was youAnd drank my blood for a year,Seven years, if you want to know.Daddy, you can lie back now.There’s a stake in your fat black heartAnd the villagers never like you.They are dancing and stamping on you.They always knew it was you.Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.
Sylvia Plath
Closer, it’s all right. Touch the man of grief.Do. Don’t be afraid. My troubles are mine and I am the only man alive who can sustain them.
Sophocles
It is also good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation.... Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person (for what would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent?), it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances... Merging and surrendering and every kind of communion is not for them (who must still, for a long, long time, save and gather themselves); it is the ultimate, is perhaps that for which human lives are as yet barely large enough.
Rainer Maria Rilke
At fifteen life had taught me undeniably that surrender, in its place, was as honorable as resistance, especially if one had no choice.
Maya Angelou
Happiness is so simple in life:If I laugh then you are laughing too.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
I break out laughing. I frown.I yell and scream. Sometimes,if one jokes and giggles,one causes war.So I hide how tickled I am.Tears well up in my eyes.My body is a large city.Much grieving in one sector.I live in another part.Lakewater.Something on fire over here.I am sour when you are sour,sweet when you are sweet.You are my face and my back.Only through you can I knowthis back-scratching pleasure.Now people the likes of you and Icome clapping, inventing dances,climbing into this high meadow.I am a spoiled parrot who eats only candy.I have no interest in bitter food.Some have been given harsh knowledge. Not I.Some are lame and jerking along.I am smooth and glidingly quick.Their road is full of washed-out placesand long inclines. Mine isroyally level, effortless.The huge Jerusalem mosque stands inside me,and women full of light.Laughter leaps out.It is the nature of the rose to laugh.It cannot help but laugh.
Jalaluddin Rumi
Love me, and I will laugh for you, and if you can make me laugh, my laughter will, quite simply, ransom the whole of the world from death.
Catherynne M. Valente
September laughed and her laugh sounded like a roar; as if she had never been able to properly laugh in her whole life, only giggle or chuckle or grin, and now that she could do it right, now that her laughing had grown up and put bells on, it had become the most boisterous, rowdy roar you ever heard.
Catherynne M. Valente
Drive-Thru McDonalds was more expensive than I thought...once you've hired the car...
Tim Key
Until you eliminate your own fears, you will never know your capabilities.
Gugu Mona
You know you are wealthy when you lose count of the people whose lives you changed for the better.
Gugu Mona
Then I said something. I said, Suppose, just suppose, nothing had ever happened. Suppose this was for the first time. Just suppose. It doesn't hurt to suppose. Say none of the other had ever happened. You know what I mean? Then what? I said.
Raymond Carver
The man slips along the stoically congealed houses Perpendicular like them A moving ornament Burning fiction His fragility contradicts the duration of his torments
Hélène Baronne d’Oettingen
The City is free of sinThe snow has given it absolution A man who slips A horse that fallsOh no, the city is in a nightgown
Pierre Albert-Birot
Do you remember the long orphanage of the train stationsWe crossed cities that turn-tabled all dayAnd vomited at night the sunshine of the day ("The Voyager")
Pierre Albert-Birot
Everything has been planned. The ascent will be completed in two days’ time. He will climb another one hundred floors today. Another hundred the next day. He does not want to take the lift. The rush of life causes people to drown in the temporary. He wishes to dip into eternity before he leaves.
Isa Kamari
For him, the kampung was a place to live and work that was based on a steadfast and intimate relationship between man and nature. The village was a true reflection of life in the tropics.
Isa Kamari
Streets that follow like a tedious argumentOf insidious intentTo lead you to an overwhelming question...
T.S Eliot
We think our fathers fools so wise we grow Our wiser sons no doubt will think us so.
Alexander Pope
Keep true to the dreams of thy youth.
Friedrich von Schiller
Youth comes but once in a lifetime.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
How beautiful is youth! how bright it gleams With its illusions aspirations dreams! Book of Beginnings Story without End Each maid a heroine and each man a friend!
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Youth! youth! how buoyant are thy hopes they turn Like marigolds toward the sunny side.
Jean Ingelow
Blind zeal can only do harm.
Magnus Gottfried Lichtwer
Live as long as you may the first twenty years are the longest half of your life.
Robert Southey
She bid me take love easy as the leaves grow on the tree But I being young and foolish with her would not agree.
William Butler Yeats
Crabbed age and youth cannot live together Youth is full of pleasure age is full of care Youth like summer morn age like winter weather Youth like summer brave age like winter bare. Youth is full sport age's breath is short Youth is nimble age is lame Youth is hot and bold age is weak and cold Youth is wild age is tame. Age I do abhor thee youth I do adore thee.
William Shakespeare
Ah sorts of allowances are made for the illusions of youth and none or almost none for the disenchantments of age.
Robert Louis Stevenson
For God's sake give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Ah! happy years! once more who would not be a boy!
Lord Byron
Yes you may depend upon it he has the ability! He is the younger generation that stands ready to knock at my door - to make an end of Halvard Solness.
Henrik Ibsen
The joy of the young is to disobey - but the trouble is that there are no longer any orders.
Jean Cocteau
No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.
Ezra Pound
Truth forever on the scaffold wrong forever on the throne.
James Russell Lowell
Whatever we conceive well we express clearly.
Nicolas Boileau
The multitude is always in the wrong.
Wentworth Dillon
I have cultivated my hysteria with joy and terror.
Charles Baudelaire
You praise the firm restraint with which they write - I'm with you there of course: They use the snaffle and the curb all right But where's the bloody horse?
Roy Campbell
I write for myself and strangers. The strangers dear Readers are an afterthought.
Gertrude Stein
An editor should tell the author his writing is better than it is. Not a lot better a little better.
T.S Eliot
Just as there is nothing between the admirable omelette and the intolerable so with autobiography.
Hilaire Belloc
Please never despise the translator. He's the mailman of human civilization.
Alexander Pushkin
If a man means his writing seriously he must mean to write well. But how can he write well until he learns to see what he has written badly. His progress toward good writing and his recognition of bad writing are bound to unfold at something like the same rate.
John Ciardi
The llama is a woolly sort of fleecy hairy goat With an indolent expression and an undulating throat - Like an unsuccessful literary man.
Hilaire Belloc
I like prefaces. I read them. Sometimes I do not read any further.
Malcolm Lowry
When the style is fully formed if it has a sweet undersong we call it beautiful and the writer may do what he likes in words or syntax.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Nature not content with denying him the ability to think has endowed him with the ability to write.
A.E. Housman
Less is more.
Robert Browning
There is but one art to omit.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Self-expression is for babies and seals where it can be charming. A writer's business is to affect the reader.
Vincent McHugh