Quotes by Poets - Page 427

There’s no money in poetry, but there’s no poetry in money, either
Robert Graves
I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job
Seamus Heaney
Mute in that golden silence hung with green,Come down from heaven and bring me in your eyesRemembrance of all beauty that has been,And stillness from the pools of Paradise.
Siegfried Sassoon
There will never be an endTo this droning of the surf.
Wallace Stevens
How can the confessor teach/ those who are lost and sick at heart,/ when he himself, among the sinners,/ is worst, and most forsaken?/ It is only a game we play/ with other people's sins./ Besides, everyone knows/ that everyone lies confessing.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
… the fisherman’s daughter grinding serenity in her coffee grinder.
Yiannis Ritsos
Amé, fuí amado, el sol acarició mi faz.¡Vida, nada me debes! ¡Vida, estamos en paz!I loved, I was loved, the sun stroked my face.Life, you owe me nothing! Life, we are at peace!
Amado Nervo
They mutilate they torment each otherwith silences with wordsas if they had anotherlife to livethey do soas if they had forgottenthat their bodiesare inclined to deaththat the insides of men easily break downruthless with each otherthey are weakerthan plants and animalsthey can be killed by a wordby a smile by a look
Tadeusz Różewicz
Sharing one umbrella,We have to hold each other,Round the waist to keep together,You ask me why I'm smiling-It's because I'm thinking,I want it to rain forever.
Vicki Feaver
i have had my ups and downsbut wotthehell wotthehellyesterday sceptres and crownsfried oysters and velvet gownsand today i herd with bumsbut wotthehell wotthehelli wake the world from sleepas i caper and sing and leapwhen i sing my wild free tunewotthehell wotthehellunder the blear eyed mooni am pelted with cast off shoonbut wotthehell wotthehell
Don Marquis
I said: 'A line will take us hours maybe;Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought,Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
W.B. Yeats
Laser technology has fulfilled our people's ancient dream of a blade so fine that the person it cuts remains standing and alive until he moves and cleaves. Until we move, none of us can be sure that we have not already been cut in half, or in many pieces, by a blade of light. It is safest to assume that our throats have already been slit, that the slightest alteration in our postures will cause the painless severance of our heads.
Ben Lerner
When people say, "I've told you fifty times," / They mean to scold, and very often do; / When poets say, "I've written fifty rhymes," / They make you dread that they 'II recite them too;In gangs of fifty, thieves commit their crimes; / At fifty love for love is rare, 't is true, / But then, no doubt, it equally as true is, / A good deal may be bought for fifty Louis.
George Gordon Byron
At the round earth's imagined corners blowYour trumpets, angels, and arise, ariseFrom death, you numberless infinitiesOf souls, and to your scattered bodies go ;All whom the flood did, and fire shall o'erthrow,All whom war, dea[r]th, age, agues, tyrannies,Despair, law, chance hath slain, and you, whose eyesShall behold God, and never taste death's woe.But let them sleep, Lord, and me mourn a space ;For, if above all these my sins abound,'Tis late to ask abundance of Thy grace,When we are there. Here on this lowly ground,Teach me how to repent, for that's as goodAs if Thou hadst seal'd my pardon with Thy blood.
John Donne
Don't patronize the chain bookstores. Every time I see some author scheduled to read and sign his books at a chain bookstore, I feel like telling him he's stabbing the independent bookstores in the back.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
It is ferocious, life, but it must eat . . .
Lucia Perillo
Landscape is my religion....God in a green legend, I lean over the poolIn a testament of leaves. I dangle my twinkling mood Before me in a cool cave roofed with branchesAnd floored with a skin of water.
Norman MacCaig
If words allow themselves to be handled, it is with the help of infinite carefulness. One has to welcome them, listen to the, before asking any service of them. Words are living things closely involved with human life.
Paul Nougé
This dream the world is having about itselfincludes a trace on the plains of the Oregon trail,a groove in the grass my father showed us allone day while meadowlarks were trying to tellsomething better about to happen.
William Stafford
THIS IS WHYHe will never be given to wonder muchif he was the mouth for some cruel forcethat said it. But if he were(this will comfort her) less than one momentout of millions had he meant it. So many years and so many turnsthey had swerved around the subject.And he will swear for many morethe kitchen and everything in it vanished --the oak table, their guests, the refrigerator doorhe had been surely propped against--all changed to rusted ironwork and ashexcept in the center in her linen caftan:she was not touched.He remembers the silence before he spokeand her nodding a little,as if in the meat of this gray wastehere was the signalfor him to speak what they had long agreed,what somewhere they had prepared together.And this one moment in the desert of ashstretches into forever.They had been having a dinner party.She had been lonely. A friend asked her almost jokingif she had ever felt really crazy,and when she started to unwind her answerin long, lovely sentences like scarves within herhe saw this was the waythey could no longer talk together.And that is when he said it,in front of the guests,because he couldn't bear to hear her.And this is why the guests have leftand she screams as he comes near her.
Michael Ryan
the poet I saw once...but whose words have long beenin my mind, windows of invincible candles...
Nathalie Handal
Bring to me, it said, continual proof / you've been alive.
Stephen Dunn
My art unkind, my energy all gone blind;The limbs uneven, the face shallower,Because those who I see are not seen,Those who see me are rude indeed. So blow, blow dear winter, just blow along me!
Santosh Kalwar
The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful.
Robert Penn Warren
L'aube exalteé ainsi qu'un peuple de colombes, et j'ai vu quelquefois ce que l'homme a cru voir!(And dawn, exalted like a host of doves - and then I've seen what men believe they've seen!)
Arthur Rimbaud
If rape or arson, poison or the knifeHas wove no pleasing patterns in the stuffOf this drab canvas we accept as life -It is because we are not bold enough!
Charles Baudelaire
Poetry is an orphan of silence.
Charles Simic
We are spirits clad in veils.
Christopher Pearse Cranch
It is not what they built. It is what they knocked down.It is not the houses. It is the spaces between the houses.It is not the streets that exist. It is the streets that no longer exist.
James Fenton
And so I pray I am today as honestwith myself, with life all around me and below and above me,with all who I encounter.
Jimmy Santiago Baca
Flow gently, sweet Afton,amang thy green braes,Flow gently, I'll sing theea song in thy praise;My Mary's asleepby thy murmuring stream,Flow gently, sweet Afton,disturb not her dream.Thou stock dove whose echoresounds thro' the glen,Ye wild whistly blackbirdsin yon thorny den,Thou green crested lapwingthy screaming forbear,I charge you, disturb notmy slumbering fair.How lofty, sweet Afton,thy neighboring hills,Far mark'd with the coursesof clear winding rills;There daily I wanderas noon rises high,My flocks and my Mary'ssweet cot in my eye.How pleasant thy banks and green valleys below, Where, wild in the woodlands,the primroses blow;There oft, as mild eveningweeps over the lea,The sweet-scented birk shadesmy Mary and me.Thy crystal stream, Afton,how lovely it glides,And winds by the cot wheremy Mary resides;How wanton thy watersher snowy feet lave,As, gathering sweet flowerets,she stems thy clear wave.Flow gently, sweet Afton,amang thy green braes,Flow gently, sweet river,the theme of my lays; My Mary's asleepby thy murmuring stream,Flow gently, sweet Afton,disturb not her dreams.
Robert Burns
For the beginning is assuredlythe end- since we know nothing, pureand simple, beyondour own complexities.
William Carlos Williams
I heard a bird congratulating itselfall day for being a jay.Nobody cared. But it was gladall over again, and said so, again.
William Stafford
The purpose of poetry is to remind us / how difficult it is to remain just one person...
Czesław Miłosz
Each and every words count.Each and every thoughts count.
Santosh Kalwar
The answer to our existence lies in existence itself.
Santosh Kalwar
And when I stand in the receiving linelike Jackie Kennedywithout the pillbox hat,if Jackie were fat and had taken enough Klonopinto still an ox,and you whisperI think of youdon't finish withbecause I've been going to Weight Watcherson Tuesdays and wonder
Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno
One writes a poem when one is so taken up by an emotional concept that one is unable to remain silent.
Stephen Dobyns
I am not obsessing.I am just sitting hereperforating this post-itwith a push-pin.
Ada Limon
It was as important to live poetically as to write poems.
James Broughton
I do strongly feel that among the greatest pieces of luck for high achievement is ordeal. Certain great artists can make out without it, Titian and others, but mostly you need ordeal. My idea is this: the artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business: Beethoven's deafness, Goya's deafness, Milton's blindness, that kind of thing.
John Berryman
breathe in experience breathe out poetry
Muriel Rukeyser
Where to start?Everything cracks and shakes,The air trembles with similes,No one world's better than another;the earth moans with metaphors.
Osip Mandelstam
August is dust here. Droughtstuns the road,but juice gathers in the berries.
Robert Hass
bad breath and butt smell; that is prison, in a nutshell.
Raegan Butcher
Life is unbearable pain.
Santosh Kalwar
I can speak of you now to anyone because I’ve stopped wanting anything like what I once wanted from you.
Carol Guess
If we knew how to find the lost, we would know how to rediscover the parts of our mindsleft behindin battle.
Margarita Engle
Think neither fear nor courage saves us.Unnatural vices are fathered by our heroism. Virtues are forced upon us by our impudent crimes. These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.
T.S Eliot
Come boy, and pour for me a cupOf old Falernian. Fill it upWith wine, strong, sparkling, bright, and clear;Our host decrees no water here.Let dullards drink the Nymph's pale brew,The sluggish thin their blood with dew.For such pale stuff we have no use;For us the purple grape's rich juice.Begone, ye chilling water sprite;Here burning Bacchus rules tonight!
Catullus
Les enfants qui s'aiment s'embrassent deboutContre les portes de la nuitEt les passants qui passent les désignent du doigtMais les enfants qui s'aimentNe sont là pour personneEt c'est seulement leur ombreQui tremble dans la nuitExcitant la rage des passantsLeur rage, leur mépris, leurs rires et leur envieLes enfants qui s'aiment ne sont là pour personneIls sont ailleurs bien plus loin que la nuitBien plus haut que le jourDans l'éblouissante clarté de leur premier amour
Jacques Prévert
New York! I say New York, let black blood flow into your blood.Let it wash the rust from your steel joints, like an oil of life Let it give your bridges the curve of hips and supple vines. Now the ancient age returns, unity is restored, The recociliation of the Lion and Bull and Tree Idea links to action, the ear to the heart, sign to meaning. See your rivers stirring with musk alligators And sea cows with mirage eyes. No need to invent the Sirens. Just open your eyes to the April rainbow And your eyes, especially your ears, to God Who in one burst of saxophone laughter Created heaven and earth in six days, And on the seventh slept a deep Negro sleep.
Léopold Sédar Senghor
I see a bird carrying me and carrying you, with us as its wings, beyond the dream, to a journey that has no end and no beginning, no purpose and no goal. I do not speak to you, and you do not speak to me; we listen only to the music of silence. Silence is the friend's trust of friend, imagination's self-confidence between rain and rainbow. A rainbow is inspiration provoking the poet, uninvited, the infatuation of the poet with the prose of the Quran. Which of your Lord's blessings do you disown? We are absent, you and I; we are present, you and I. And absent. Which of your Lord's blessings do you disown?
Mahmoud Darwish
And I choose to be aloneRather than wrapped in arms I could never need.
Merrit Malloy
From love's plectrum arisesthe song of the string of lifeLove is the light of lifelove is the fire of life
Muhammad Iqbal
Everyone should be forcibly transplanted to another continent from their family at the age of three.
Philip Larkin
Dear, I can't write, it's all a fantasy: a kind of circling obsession.
Philip Larkin
There is bad in all good authors: what a pity the converse isn't true!
Philip Larkin
Saki says that youth is like hors d'oeuvres: you are so busy thinking of the next courses you don't notice it. When you've had them, you wish you'd had more hors d'oeuvres.
Philip Larkin
Sexual intercourse began in nineteen sixty-three (Which was rather late for me) between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles' first LP.
Philip Larkin