Quotes by Poets - Page 443

Real poetry, is to lead a beautiful life. To live poetry is better than to write it.
Bashō Matsuo
Books, books, books!I had found the secret of a garret roomPiled high with cases in my father’s name;Piled high, packed large,--where, creeping in and outAmong the giant fossils of my past,Like some small nimble mouse between the ribsOf a mastodon, I nibbled here and thereAt this or that box, pulling through the gap,In heats of terror, haste, victorious joy,The first book first. And how I felt it beatUnder my pillow, in the morning’s dark,An hour before the sun would let me read!My books!
Elizabeth Barrett-Browning
My head is full of fireand grief and my tongueruns wild, piercedwith shards of glass.
Federico García Lorca
Ozymandias"I met a traveller from an antique landWho said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stoneStand in the desert. Near them on the sand,Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frownAnd wrinkled lip and sneer of cold commandTell that its sculptor well those passions readWhich yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.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 decayOf that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless, Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best. Night, sleep, and the stars.
Walt Whitman
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,Hath had elsewhere its setting,And cometh from afar:Not in entire forgetfulness,And not in utter nakedness,But trailing clouds of glory do we come
William Wordsworth
The blood jet is poetryThere is no stopping it.
Sylvia Plath
eat, baby.eat.chew.please.I know it hurts. I know it doesn’t feel good.please.I know your hunger is different than mine.I know it doesn’t taste the same as mine.imagine you could grow up all over againand pinpoint the millisecond that you startedcounting calories like casualties of war,mourning each one like it had a family.would you?sometimes I wonder that.sometimes I wonder if you would go backand watch yourself reappear and disappear right in front of your own eyes.and I love you so much.I am going to hold your little hand through the night.just please eat. just a little.you wrote a poem once,about a city of walking skeletons.the teacher called home because youtold her you wished it could be like thathere.let me tell you something about bones, baby.they are not warm or soft.the wind whistles through them like they areholes in a tree.and they break, too. they break right in half.they bruise and splinter like wood.are you hungry?I know. I know how much you hate that question.I will find another way to ask it, someday.please.the voices.I know they are all yelling at you to stretch yourself thinner.l hear them counting, always counting.I wish I had been there when the world made yousnap yourself in half.I would have told you that your body is not a war-zone,that, sometimes,it is okay to leave your plate empty.
Caitlyn Siehl
My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.t 'Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak.t 'What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?t 'I never know what you are thinking. Think.
T.S Eliot
So I find words I never thought to speakIn streets I never thought I should revisitWhen I left my body on a distant shore.
T.S Eliot
You know how this is:if I lookat the crystal moon, at the red branchof the slow autumn at my window,if I touchnear the firethe impalpable ashor the wrinkled body of the log,everything carries me to you,as if everything that exists,aromas, light, metals,were little boatsthat sailtoward those isles of yours that wait for me.
Pablo Neruda
Humanity i love you because youare perpetually putting the secret oflife in your pants and forgettingit's there and sitting downon itand because you areforever making poems in the lapof death Humanityi hate you
E.E. Cummings
Your reason and your passion are the rudder and the sails of your seafaring soul.If either your sails or your rudder be broken, you can but toss and drift, or else be held at a standstill in mid-seas.For reason, ruling alone, is a force confining; and passion, unattended, is a flame that burns to its own destruction.Therefore let your soul exalt your reason to the height of passion, that it may sing;And let it direct your passion with reason, that your passion may live through its own daily resurrection, and like the phoenix rise above its own ashes.
Kahlil Gibran
I know many lives worth living.
Mary Oliver
My world was the size of a crayon box, and it took every colour to draw her
Sarah Kay
I act as the tongue of you,... tied in your mouth . . . . in mine it begins to be loosened.
Walt Whitman
You lethargic, waiting upon me,waiting for the fire and Iattendant upon you, shaken by your beautyShaken by your beauty Shaken.
William Carlos Williams
Your thighs are appletrees. Your knees are a southern breeze.
William Carlos Williams
It is at the edge of the petal that love waits
William Carlos Williams
Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.
William Wordsworth
You see how I tryTo reach with wordsWhat matters mostAnd how I fail.
Czesław Miłosz
creativity keeps the world alive, yet, everyday we are asked to be ashamed of honoring it, wanting to live our lives as artists. i’ve carried the shame of being a ‘creative’ since i came to the planet; have been asked to be something different, more, less my whole life. thank spirit, my wisdom is deeper than my shame, and i listened to who i was. i want to say to all the creatives who have been taught to believe who you are is not enough for this world, taught that a life of art will amount to nothing, know that who we are, and what we do is life. when we create, we are creating the world. remember this, and commit.
Nayyirah Waheed
We have calcium in our bones, iron in our veins, carbon in our souls, and nitrogen in our brains. 93 percent stardust, with souls made of flames, we are all just stars that have people names.
Nikita Gill
I don't think all writers are sad, she said.I think it's the other way around—all sad people write.
Lang Leav
Love is a clash of lightnings
Pablo Neruda
Poetry is an act of peace. Peace goes into the making of a poet as flour goes into the making of bread.
Pablo Neruda
Each in the most hidden sack keptthe lost jewels of memory,intense love, secret nights and permanent kisses,the fragment of public or private happiness.A few, the wolves, collected thighs,other men loved the dawn scratchingmountain ranges or ice floes, locomotives, numbers.For me happiness was to share singing,praising, cursing, crying with a thousand eyes.I ask forgiveness for my bad ways:my life had no use on earth.
Pablo Neruda
I am God, la de dah.
Anne Sexton
They say that I am a poetI wonder what they would say if they saw me from the inside I bottleemotions and place them into the sea for others to unbottle ondistant shores I am unsure as to whether they ever reach and forthat matter as to whether I ever get my point acrossor my love
Saul Williams
Such sweet compulsion doth in music lie.
John Milton
Our state cannot be severed, we are one,One flesh; to lose thee were to lose myself.
John Milton
But my heart is an old house(the kind my mothergrew up in)hell to heat and cooland faulty in the wiringand though it’s nice to look atI have no businessinviting lovers in.
Clementine von Radics
I live not in myself, but I becomePortion of that around me: and to meHigh mountains are a feeling, but the humof human cities torture.
George Gordon Byron
Licence my roving hands, and let them go Before, behind, between, above, below.
John Donne
Love is a fire that burns unseen,a wound that aches yet isn’t felt,an always discontent contentment,a pain that rages without hurting,a longing for nothing but to long,a loneliness in the midst of people,a never feeling pleased when pleased,a passion that gains when lost in thought.It’s being enslaved of your own free will;it’s counting your defeat a victory;it’s staying loyal to your killer.But if it’s so self-contradictory,how can Love, when Love chooses,bring human hearts into sympathy?
Luís de Camões
A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Don't tell me you're not beautiful. You're the kind of beautiful the blind would see if we could figure out some way to give them three seconds of sight.
Shane L. Koyczan
Is it the sea you hear in me,Its dissatisfactions?Or the voice of nothing, that was you madness?
Sylvia Plath
Who is the third who walks always beside you?When I count, there are only you and I togetherBut when I look ahead up the white roadThere is always another one walking beside youGliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hoodedI do not know whether a man or a woman-But who is that on the other side of you?
T.S Eliot
So runs my dream, but what am I?An infant crying in the nightAn infant crying for the lightAnd with no language but a cry.
Alfred Tennyson
It is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed: it is shyness before any sort of new, unforeseeable experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope. But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical will live the relation to another as something alive.
Rainer Maria Rilke
A billion stars go spinning through the night,glittering above your head,But in you is the presence that will bewhen all the stars are dead.
Rainer Maria Rilke
You dance inside my chest,where no one sees you,but sometimes I do, and thatsight becomes this art.
Jalaluddin Rumi
If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be. We are not wise, and not very often kind. And much can never be redeemed. Still life has some possibility left. Perhaps this is its way of fighting back, that sometimes something happened better than all the riches or power in the world. It could be anything, but very likely you notice it in the instant when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb. (Don't Hesitate)
Mary Oliver
We pull our boots on with both handsbut we can't punch ourselves awake and all I can do is stand on the curb and say Sorryabout the blood in your mouth. I wish it was mine.I couldn't get the boy to kill me, but I wore his jacket for the longest time.
Richard Siken
When you are old and grey and full of sleep And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep
W.B. Yeats
I am not yours, not lost in you,Not lost, although I long to beLost as a candle lit at noon,Lost as a snowflake in the sea.You love me, and I find you stillA spirit beautiful and bright,Yet I am I, who long to beLost as a light is lost in light.
Sara Teasdale
Safety isn't always safe. You can find one on every gun.
Andrea Gibson
Pity me that the heart is slow to learnWhat the swift mind beholds at every turn.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
So many things I had thought forgottenReturn to my mind with stranger pain:Like letters that arrive addressed to someoneWho left the house so many years ago.
Philip Larkin
their heart grew coldthey let their wings down
Sappho
Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,You shall possess the good of the earth and sun.... there are millions of suns left,You shall no longer take things at second or third hand.... nor look through the eyes of the dead.... nor feed on the spectres in books,You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself.
Walt Whitman
I've triedto become someone else for a while,only to discover that he, too, was me.
Stephen Dunn
Take this kiss upon the brow!And, in parting from you now,Thus much let me avow-You are not wrong, who deemThat my days have been a dream;Yet if hope has flown awayIn a night, or in a day,In a vision, or in none,? that we see or seemIs but a dream within a dream.
Edgar Allan Poe
I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another til I drop.
Jack Kerouac
To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.
Gaston Bachelard
I don't want to go on being a root in the dark,vacillating, stretched out, shivering with sleep,downward, in the soaked guts of the earth,absorbing and thinking, eating each day.
Pablo Neruda
the stars began to burnthrough the sheets of clouds,and there was a new voicewhich you slowlyrecognized as your own
Mary Oliver
And so sepúlchred in such pomp dost lie,That kings for such a tomb would wish to die.
John Milton
I never dreamed the sea so deep,The earth so dark; so long my sleep,I have become another child.I wake to see the world go wild.
Allen Ginsberg