Quotes by Poets - Page 434

De pronto no puedo decirtelo que yo te debo decir,hombre,perdóname; sabrásque aunque no escuches mis palabrasno me eché a llorar ni a dormiry que contigo estoy sin vertedesde hace tiempo y hasta el fin.I can't just suddenly tell youwhat I should be telling you,friend, forgive me; you knowthat although you don't hear my words,I wasn't asleep or in tears,that I am with you without seeing youfor a good long time and until the end.
Pablo Neruda
Keats mourned that the rainbow, which as a boy had been for him a magic thing, had lost its glory because the physicists had found it resulted merely from the refraction of the sunlight by the raindrops. Yet knowledge of its causation could not spoil the rainbow for me. I am sure that it is not given to man to be omniscient. There will always be something left to know, something to excite the imagination of the poet and those attuned to the great world in which they live (p. 64)
Robert Frost
A wealth you cannot imagineflows through you.Do not consider what strangers say.Be secluded in your secret heart-house,that bowl of silence.
Jalaluddin Rumi
Let me keep my distance, always, from those who think they have the answers.Let me keep company always with those who say "Look!" and laugh in astonishment, and bow their heads.
Mary Oliver
Poem (the spirit likes to dress up) The spirit likes to dress up like this: ten fingers, ten toes,shoulders, and all the rest at night in the black branches, in the morningin the blue branches of the world. It could float, of course, but would ratherplumb rough matter. Airy and shapeless thing, it needs the metaphor of the body,lime and appetite, the oceanic fluids; it needs the body’s world, instinctand imagination and the dark hug of time, sweetness and tangibility,to be understood, to be more than pure light that burns where no one is –so it enters us – in the morning shines from brute comfort like a stitch of lightning;and at night lights up the deep and wondrous drownings of the body like a star.
Mary Oliver
THOUGH you are in your shining days,Voices among the crowdAnd new friends busy with your praise,Be not unkind or proud,But think about old friends the most:Time's bitter flood will rise,Your beauty perish and be lostFor all eyes but these eyes.
W.B. Yeats
For now, poetry has the capacity - in its own ways and by its own means - to remind us of something we are forbidden to see.
Adrienne Rich
The Wit of Cheats, the Courage of a Whore,Are what ten thousand envy and adore:All, all look up, with reverential Awe,At crimes that 'scape, or triumph o'er the Law:While Truth, Worth, Wisdom, daily they decry-`'Nothing is sacred now but Villainy'- Epilogue to the Satires, Dialogue I
Alexander Pope
Without poets, without artists... everything would fall apart into chaos. There would be no more seasons, no more civilizations, no more thought, no more humanity, no more life even; and impotent darkness would reign forever. Poets and artists together determine the features of their age, and the future meekly conforms to their edit.
Guillaume Apollinaire
My tongue remembers your wounded flavor.The vein in my neckadores you. A swordstands up between my hips,my hidden fleece sends forth its scent of human oil.
Li-Young Lee
These wrinkles are nothingThese gray hairs are nothing,This stomach which sagswith old food, these bruisedand swollen ankles, my darkening brain,they are nothing.I am the same boymy mother used to kiss.
Mark Strand
Modern poetry, for me, began not in English at all but in Spanish, in the poems of Lorca.
W.S. Merwin
But now, you are twain, you are cloven apartFlesh of his flesh, but heart of my heart.
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Men had always been the reciters of poetry in the desert.
Michael Ondaatje
With you a part of me hath passed away; For in the peopled forest of my mind A tree made leafless by this wintry wind Shall never don again its green array. Chapel and fireside, country road and bay, Have something of their friendliness resigned; Another, if I would, I could not find, And I am grown much older in a day. But yet I treasure in my memory Your gift of charity, and young hearts ease, And the dear honour of your amity; For these once mine, my life is rich with these. And I scarce know which part may greater be,-- What I keep of you, or you rob from me.
George Santayana
How surely gravity's law,strong as an ocean current,takes hold of the smallest thingand pulls it toward the heart of the world.Each thing---each stone, blossom, child---is held in place.Only we, in our arrogance,push out beyond what we each belong tofor some empty freedom.If we surrenderedto earth's intelligencewe could rise up rooted, like trees.Instead we entangle ourselvesin knots of our own makingand struggle, lonely and confused.So like children, we begin againto learn from the things,because they are in God's heart;they have never left him.This is what the things can teach us:to fall,patiently to trust our heaviness.Even a bird has to do thatbefore he can fly.
Rainer Maria Rilke
I spit into the face of Time That has transfigured me.
W.B. Yeats
The horses suddenly began to neigh, protestingAgainst those who were drowning them in the ocean.The horses sank to the bottom, neighing, neighing.Until they had all gone down.That is all. Nevertheless, I pity them,Those bay horses, that never saw land again.
Boris Slutsky
Poetry seems especially like nothing else so much as itself. Poetry is not like, it is the very lining of the inner life.
C.D. Wright
Words are what sticks to the real. We use them to push the real, to drag the real into the poem. They are what we hold on with, nothing else. They are as valuable in themselves as rope with nothing to be tied to.
Jack Spicer
and if iif i ever let love gobecause the hatred and the whisperingsbecome a phantom dictate i o-bey in lieu of impulse and realities(the blossoming flamingos of mywild mimosa trees)then let love freeze meout.(from i must become a menace to my enemies)
June Jordan
See it was like this when we waltz into this place.A couple of papish cats is doing an Aztec two-stepAnd I says Dad let's cutbut then this dame comes up behind me see and says you and me could really existWow I says Only the next day she has bad teeth and really hates poetry.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Il pleure dans mon coeur Comme il pleut sur la ville.
Paul Verlaine
Ah! well a-day! what evil looks Had I from old and young! Instead of the cross, the Albatross About my neck was hung.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
from what we cannot hold the stars are made
W.S. Merwin
Say to them,say to the down-keepers,the sun-slappers,the self-soilers,the harmony-hushers,"Even if you are not ready for dayit cannot always be night."You will be right.For that is the hard home-run.Live not for battles won.Live not for the-end-of-the-song.Live in the along.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Thus weary of the world, away she hies,And yokes her silver doves; by whose swift aidTheir mistress mounted through the empty skiesIn her light chariot quickly is convey'd;Holding their course to Paphos, where their queenMeans to immure herself and not be seen.
William Shakespeare
You are only as free as you think you are and freedom will always be as real as you believe it to be.
Robert M. Drake
A JEWELRY STORE NAMED INDIAIf you hold this Dazzling emeraldUp to the sky,It will shine a billion Beautiful miraclesPainted from the tearsOf the Most High.Plucked from the lush gardensOf a yellowish-green paradise,Look inside this hypnotic gemAnd a kaleidoscope of Titillating, Soul-raising Sights and colorsWill tease and seduceYour eyes and mind.Tell me, sir.Have you ever heardA peacock sing?Hold your earTo this mystical stoneAnd you will hearSacred hymns flowingTo the vibrationsOf the perfumedWind.
Suzy Kassem
A poem is never a put-up job, so to speak. It begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is never a thought to begin with.
Robert Frost
Art too is just a way of living.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject.
John Keats
I've written some poetry I don't understand myself
Carl Sandburg
For our generation walks as in Hades, without the divine.
Friedrich Hölderlin
When the green woods laugh with the voice of joy, And the dimpling stream runs laughing by; When the air does laugh with our merry wit, And the green hill laughs with the noise of it.
George Gordon Byron
Little world, full of little peopleshouting for recognition, screaming for love, Rolling world, teeming with millions,carousel of the hungry,Is there food enough? Wheat and corn will not do.The fat are the hungriest of all, the skinny the most silent.
James Kavanaugh
I love women whose hidden desires make horses put an end to their lives at the threshold
Mahmoud Darwish
Don't sign your namebetween worlds,surmountthe manifold of meanings,trust the tearstain,learn to live.
Paul Celan
Don’t write with a pen. Ink tends to give the impression the words shouldn’t be changed.Write with what gives you the most sensual satisfaction.Write in a hard-covered notebook with green lined pages. Green is easy on the eyes. Blank white pages seems to challenge you to create the world before you start writing. It may be true that you, the modern poet, must make the world as you go, but why be reminded of it before you even have one word on the page?Don’t erase. Cross out rapidly and violently, never with slow consideration if you can help it.Start, as some smarty once said, in the middle of things.Play with syntax.Never want to say anything so strongly that you have to give up the option of finding something better – if you have to say it, you will.Read your poem aloud many times. If you don’t enjoy it every time, something may be wrong.If you ask a question, don’t answer it, or answer a question not asked, or defer. (If you can answer the question, to ask it is to waste time).Maximum sentence length: seventeen words.Minimum: One.Don’t be afraid to take emotional possession of words. If you don’t love a few words enough to own them, you will have to be very clever to write a good poem.
Richard Hugo
Unless you call attentionto your presencewho will know you're there?Even a countryhas to weave and wave a flagas proof of its existence.
Rod McKuen
You must be careful not to deprive the poem of its wild origin.
Stanley Kunitz
What's madness but nobility of soulAt odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!I know the purity of pure despair,My shadow pinned against a sweating wall,That place among the rocks--is it a cave,Or winding path? The edge is what I have............... Dark,dark my light, and darker my desire.My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,Keeps buzzing at the sill.~From "The Waking" by Theodore Roethke
Theodore Roethke
I couldn't tell fact from fiction,Or if the dream was trueMy only sure predictionIn this world was you.I'd touch your features inchly. Beard love and dared the cost, The sented spiel reeled me unreal And I found my senses lost.
Maya Angelou
I'm going to do something bigger and better,bigger and betterand bolder, but first,I'm going to do somethingsmaller and worse.
JonArno Lawson
My Personalityunfolding before youlike a Swiss Army knife.
Katerina Stoykova-Klemer
I'd spent way more years worrying about how to look like a poet -- buying black clothes, smearing on scarlet lipstick, languidly draping myself over thrift-store furniture -- than I had learning how to assemble words in some discernible order.
Mary Karr
Interior of the hand. Sole that has come to walkonly on feelings. That faces upwardand in its mirrorreceives heavenly roads, which travelalong themselves.That has learned to walk upon waterwhen it scoops,that walks upon wells,transfiguring every path.That steps into other hands,changes those that are like itinto a landscape:wanders and arrives within them,fills them with arrival.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Still, what I want in my lifeis to be willingto be dazzled—to cast aside the weight of factsand maybe evento float a littleabove this difficult world.I want to believe I am lookinginto the white fire of a great mystery.I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing—that the light is everything—that it is more than the sumof each flawed blossom rising and falling. And I do.
Mary Oliver
Now therefore, while the youthful hue Sits on thy skin like morning dew, And while thy willing soul transpires At every pore with instant fires, Now let us sport us while we may, And now, like amorous birds of prey, Rather at once our time devour Than languish in his slow-chapped power.Let us roll all our strength and all Our sweetness up into one ball, And tear our pleasures with rough strife Thorough the iron gates of life: Thus, though we cannot make our sun Stand still, yet we will make him run.
Andrew Marvell
No one here likes a wet dog.
Billy Collins
Άλλα ζητεί η ψυχή σου, γι’ άλλα κλαίει·
Constantinos P. Cavafis
There's in my mind a...turbulent moon-ridden girlor old woman, or both,dressed in opals and rags, feathersand torn taffeta,who knows strange songsbut she is not kind.
Denise Levertov
Lives of great men all remind usWe can make our lives sublime,And, departing, leave behind usFootprints on the sands of time;Footprints, that perhaps another,Sailing o'er life's solemn main,A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,Seeing, shall take heart again.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
World is suddener than we fancy it.
Louis MacNeice
Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss.
Paul Celan
a woman will tell youevery home she has ever inhabitedhas been broken intostarting with her body
Suheir Hammad
¡Los suspiros son aire y van al aire!¡Las lágrimas son agua y van al mar!Dime, mujer, cuando el amor se olvida¿sabes tú adónde va?
Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer
Twas noontide of summer,And mid-time of night;And stars, in their orbits,Shone pale, thro' the lightOf the brighter, cold moon,'Mid planets her slaves,Herself in the Heavens,Her beam on the waves.I gazed awhileOn her cold smile;Too cold–too cold for me-There pass'd, as a shroud,A fleecy cloud,And I turned away to thee,Proud Evening Star,In thy glory afar,And dearer thy beam shall be;For joy to my heartIs the proud partThou bearest in Heaven at night,And more I admireThy distant fire,Than that colder, lowly light.
Edgar Allan Poe
I have no words — alas! — to tellThe loveliness of loving well!
Edgar Allan Poe
If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.
Thomas Hardy