Quotes by Poets - Page 4

Love and honor. They are the two great things, and now they’re dimmed and blighted. Today, love is just sex and sentimentality. Love is really a recognition of truth, a recognition of another person’s integrity and truth in a way that is compatible with — that makes both of you light up when you recognize the quality in the other. That’s what love is. It’s a recognition of singularity… And love is giving and giving and giving … not looking for any return. Until you do that, you can’t love.
Robert Graves
As I love the name of honour more than I fear death.
William Shakespeare
It’s the steady, quiet, plodding ones who win in the lifelong race.
Robert W. Service
It's the giving that makes one stronger, but sometimes the taking can make one weaker, if even vulnerable or blinding.
Anthony Liccione
[O]ver the years I travelled to another universe. However alert we are, however much we think we know what will happen, antiquity remains an unknown, unanticipated galaxy. It is alien, and old people are a separate form of life. They have green skin, with two heads that sprout antennae. They can be pleasant, they can be annoying--in the supermarket, these old ladies won't get out of my way--but most important they are permanently other. When we turn eighty, we understand that we are extraterrestrial. If we forget for a moment that we are old, we are reminded when we try to stand up, or when we encounter someone young, who appears to observe green skin, extra heads, and protuberances.
Donald Hall
It is when we finally realize the futility of violence and the invalidity of war will we, the people of this world finally wake up!
Avijeet Das
Writers don't suffer from insanity, they depend upon it!
Avijeet Das
Rather than you smoking a cigarette, the cigarette is really smoking you.
Anthony Liccione
With Cats, some say, one rule is true:Don’t speak till you are spoken to.Myself, I do not hold with that —I say, you should ad-dress a Cat.But always keep in mind that heResents familiarity.I bow, and taking off my hat,Ad-dress him in this form: O Cat!But if he is the Cat next door,Whom I have often met before(He comes to see me in my flat)I greet him with an oopsa Cat!I think I've heard them call him James —But we've not got so far as names.
T.S Eliot
We think the fire eats the wood. We are wrong. The wood reaches out to the flame. The fire licks at what the wood harbors, and the wood gives itself away to that intimacy, the manner in which we and the world meet each new day.
Jack Gilbert
Beshrew your eyes,They have o'erlook'd me and divided me;One half of me is yours, the other half yours,Mine own, I would say; but if mine, then yours,And so all yours.
William Shakespeare
The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Captain," said the squire, "the house is quite invisible from the ship. It must be the flag they are aiming at. Would it not be wiser to take it in?""Strike my colours!" cried the captain, "No sir, not I"...
Robert Louis Stevenson
It must be October, the trees are falling away and showing their true colors.
Charmaine J.Forde
He shook hands. With greening faces, with eyes full of sparks, his two friends leaned upon their canes. One had on a crushed bowler (why?)... Both were weary. Both knew that what was approaching was the end. Both had spent the day in their offices and when they interrupted their work with an indiscreet nod, when they turned the conversation toward that end, both broke in "Lord, we have strayed from our business." And ever deeper sunk their eyes, a deathly shadow was descending. The words of his friends had been bought with blood, but they were stolen. Someone, listening, recorded them on a phonograph and thousands of cylinders began to twang. A new enterprise opened, on sale a bronze throat, a screaming cavity; an experienced mechanic installed the throat phonograph. The purchased throat squealed day and night and his friends grew exhausted and one day he said to them both "Lord, I am going." He grinned. And they grinned: they understood everything. Now they stood on the platform, stood with him and saw him off. Someone long and dark with the face of an ox, shoulders crooked as a sorrowful cemetery cross and wrapped up in a frock-coat, swept into the coach. And then the bell rang, and then they waved their bowlers; three wooden arms swung in the air.("Adam")
Andrei Bely
Christmas comes but once a year, starts in August ends in July
Benny Bellamacina
The best way to compete is to get defeat.
Santosh Kalwar
It's always funny that you can try and try again to steal all your critics' ammo, predict their responses, but no matter what, they'll still have a water gun stashed somewhere.
Criss Jami
Some people will still find a way to create a fire with wet logs.
Anthony Liccione
Well, in the early days of humans, the community was our only protection against predators, and against the starvation. We survived because we trusted one another.
Sherman Alexie
impossible situations can arise on other planets too. We don’t need to think that we’re the only ones who struggle and fight.
Gunnhild Øyehaug
She goes on with her beautiful hair and mouth like before,I go on like before, alone in the field.It’s like my head had been lowered,And if I think this, and raise my headAnd the golden sun dries the need to cry I can’t stop having.How vast the field and interior love... !I look, and I forget, like dryness where there was water and trees losing their leaves.
Alberto Caeiro
One thing at a time,' said the Boy. 'You must be patient. This is a day of hope and wild revenge. Do not interrupt me. I am a courier from another world. I bring you golden words.Listen!' said the Boy. 'Where I come from there is no more fear. But there is a roaring and a bellowing and a cracking of bones. And sometimes there is silence when, lolling on your thrones, your slaves adore you.
Mervyn Peake
But though, to landsmen in general, the native inhabitants of the seas have ever regarded with emotions unspeakably unsocial and repelling; though we know the sea to be an everlasting terra incognita, so that Columbus sailed over numberless unknown worlds to discover his one superficial western one; though, by vast odds, the most terrific of all mortal disasters have immemorially and indiscriminately befallen tens and hundreds of thousands of those who have gone upon the waters; though but a moment’s consideration will teach that, however baby man may brag of his science and skill, and however much, in a flattering future, that science and skill may augment; yet for ever and for ever, to the crack of doom, the sea will insult and murder him, and pulverize the stateliest, stiffest frigate he can make; nevertheless, by the continual repetition of these very impressions, man has lost that sense of the full awfulness of the sea which aboriginally belongs to it.
Herman Melville
TO ALL MANKINDSpeak kind wordsto mankindand the unkindwill attack you.Speak common senseusing any of your senses,and you will be attacked bythe senseless.Speak truth,and you will be attacked bythe untruthful.Speak about absolutely nothing,and absolutely nothingwill speak back,but then nothing at allwill ever change.
Suzy Kassem
He'd have improved if you'd not givenHim a mere glimmer of the light in heaven;He calls it Reason, and it has only increasedHis power to be beastlier than a beast.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The chaos on our planet, the plundering of resources, and the division of humanity are not the true works of any kind of man. They are the work of those who conquer over man.
Suzy Kassem
you can tell when people are truly happy.their energy is genuine.
Alexandra Elle
Let us not take offence over small cheese, let things slide off when they don’t really matter, not take things personally, be free to make better use of our energy, to get on with something meaningful instead.
Jay Woodman
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Love is an eternal shining star.
Sir Kristian Goldmund Aumann
If a writer writes something that he or she has never experienced, I think the reader can sense right away that it is garbage. The only thing that can replace experience, though, is imagination; however it takes experience to grow an imagination.
Roman Payne
Even a cockroach can be legendary by being killed by a legend.
Munia Khan
At the railroad station he noted that he still had thirty minutes. He quickly recalled that in a cafe on the Calle Brazil (a few dozen feet from Yrigoyen's house) there was an enormous cat which allowed itself to be caressed as if it were a disdainful divinity. He entered the cafe. There was the cat, asleep. He ordered a cup of coffee, slowly stirred the sugar, sipped it (this pleasure had been denied him in the clinic), and thought, as he smoothed the cat's black coat, that this contact was an illusion and that the two beings, man and cat, were as good as separated by a glass, for man lives in time, in succession, while the magical animal lives in the present, in the eternity of the instant.
Jorge Luis Borges
Deep down inside we always seek for our departed loved ones
Munia Khan
Not only are you what you eat, but you also can be what's eating you. Don't become your problems or let them overtake you.
Anthony Liccione
I've been melted into somethingtoo easy to spill. I make moreand more of myself in orderto make more and more of the baby. He takes it, this making. And somehowhe's made more of me, too.
Brenda Shaughnessy
Trying to be offensive for the sole purpose of being offensive should always deem one the least offensive of offenders.
Criss Jami
He had been searching for it his entire life. He had devoted himself to poetry to find it. Now, in the middle of his life, he found it. It was in the face of the love of his life, his daughter. She who had never blushed before, now blushed. And in that blushing, he knew, was the existence of God. That was the day her father learned what God was. God was pure beauty, God was his daughter’s face when she blushed.
Roman Payne
Every man possesses the Buddha-nature. Do not demean yourselves.
Dōgen
A pity it is evening, yetI do love the water of this springseeing how clear it is, how clean;rays of sunset gleam on it,lighting up its ripples, making itone with those who travelthe roads; I turn and facethe moon; sing it a song, thenlisten to the sound of the windamongst the pines.
Li Bai
I dreamed of dying, long before my dreams have died.
Anthony Liccione
I have beenhanging hereheadlessfor so longthat the body has forgottenwhyor where or when ithappenedand the toeswalk along in shoesthat do notcareand althoughthe fingersslice things andhold things andmove things andtouchthingssuch asorangesapplesonionsbooksbodiesI am no longerreasonably surewhat these thingsarethey are mostlylikelamplight andfogthen often the hands willgo to thelost headand hold the headlike the hands of achildaround a balla blockair and wood -no teethno thinking partand when a windowblows opento achurchhillwomandogor something singingthe fingers of the handare senseless to vibrationbecause they have noearssenseless to color becausethey have noeyessenseless to smellwithout a nosethey country goes by asnonsensethe continentsthe daylights and eveningsshineon my dirtyfingernailsand in some mirrormy facea block to vanishscuffed part of a child’sballwhile everywheremovesworms and aircraftfires on the landtall violets in sanctitymy hands let go let golet go
Charles Bukowski
If we take the widest and wisest view of a Cause, there is no such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause. We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors’ victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that anything will triumph.
T.S Eliot
My sister is running away to get lost, but I am running away because I want to find something. And my parents love me so much that they want to help me. Yeah, Dad is a drunk and Mom is an ex-drunk, but they don't want their kids to be drunks.
Sherman Alexie
When my mind plays tricks on me I can deal. But when my mind plays tricks on my mind I can not tell what's real
Stanley Victor Paskavich
It was a good apple too. A good apple, picked by a madman on a full moon night.
Steven Herrick
And at night the river flows, it bears pale stars on the holy water, some sink like veils, some show like fish, the great moon that once was rose now high like a blazing milk flails its white reflection vertical and deep in the dark surgey mass wall river's grinding bed push. As in a sad dream, under the streetlamp, by pocky unpaved holes in dirt, the father James Cassidy comes home with lunchpail and lantern, limping, redfaced, and turns in for supper and sleep.Now a door slams. The kids have rushed out for the last play, the mothers are planning and slamming in kitchens, you can hear it out in swish leaf orchards, on popcorn swings, in the million-foliaged sweet wafted night of sighs, songs, shushes. A thousand things up and down the street, deep, lovely, dangerous, aureating, breathing, throbbing like stars; a whistle, a faint yell; the flow of Lowell over rooftops beyond; the bark on the river, the wild goose of the night yakking, ducking in the sand and sparkle; the ululating lap and purl and lovely mystery on the shore, dark, always dark the river's cunning unseen lips, murmuring kisses, eating night, stealing sand, sneaky.'Mag-gie!' the kids are calling under the railroad bridge where they've been swimming. The freight train still rumbles over a hundred cars long, the engine threw the flare on little white bathers, little Picasso horses of the night as dense and tragic in the gloom comes my soul looking for what was there that disappeared and left, lost, down a path--the gloom of love. Maggie, the girl I loved.
Jack Kerouac
Life is very tough and fragile at the same time, it never backs down or surrenders, but will break open to reveal its beauty and ugliness. As a evening primrose that blooms in the flooding moonlight, just before being trampled upon underfoot by the four-legged frost of the night.
Anthony Liccione
The blue light of the rising moon fell on the rocks and the scant forest of the taiga, revealing each projecting rock, each tree in a peculiar fashion, different from the way they looked by day. Everything seemed real but different than in the daytime. It was as if the world had a second face, a nocturnal face.
Octavio Paz
That's Venus, September thought. She was the goddess of love. It's nice that love comes on first thing in the evening, and goes out last in the morning. Love keeps the light on all night.
Catherynne M. Valente
Let us hush this cry of 'Forward', till ten thousand years have gone.
Alfred Tennyson
She is my morning, she is my evening; we have a love that blooms over and again, more beautifully each time than the last.
Roman Payne
Intoxication, like sexual euphoria, is the privilege of the human animal.
Roman Payne
Dreams are achieved by sweat, blood, tears and an iron will!
Avijeet Das
Hundreds of ladybugs had taken shelter from the winter in the crevices of the decayed windows. From there, they broke into the apartment in commando squads. My joy at that first sighting of the ladybug spreading its lower winglets on the rim of the jam glass, flashing three spots of fortune, soon turned into something tragic and Greek, a bloodied slaughter. Like in Ajax, I had to pluck ladybugs from my toothbrush every evening and in the morning shake out my shirt that, overnight, was infested with too much luck, and at lunch, I'd fish kamikazee-ladybugs out of my soup bowl, their Etna's crater in the middle of the round kitchen table. When I shut my eyes and held the hose to my ear and heard the little crackle of tiny bodies sucked into the eye of the tornado, I couldn't remain neutral. Putting away the vacuum, I consoled myself with sentences of friends who, after a beer or three, like to repeat to me the axiom that sooner or later, living in the city, each person discovers himself to be the murder of his own happiness. They were genuine Berlin ladybugs, they'd occupied the windows illegally like my friends in apartments from which they were later evicted.
Aleš Šteger
Like many human beings, he took the least sign of conversation as his cue to make noise.
Barbara Kingsolver
My favorite, how did you put it now? Landscapes, animals, plants? Favorite what? Books, music, architecture, painting? I don't have any favorite animals, no favorite mosquitoes, favorite beetles, favorite worms, even with the best will in the world I cannot tell you which birds or fish or predators I prefer, it would also be difficult for me to have to choose much more generally.
Ingeborg Bachmann
Throw away thy rod, throw away thy wrath; O my God, take the gentle path.
George Herbert
Never depend on a road, depend on your strides
Munia Khan