Quotes by Poets - Page 445

I do not know which to prefer,The beauty of inflectionsOr the beauty of innuendosThe blackbird whistlingOr just after.
Wallace Stevens
We sit and talk,quietly, with long lapses of silenceand I am aware of the streamthat has no language, coursingbeneath the quiet heaven ofyour eyeswhich has no speech
William Carlos Williams
Time present and time pastAre both perhaps present in time futureAnd time future contained in time past.
T.S Eliot
first of all nothing will happen and a little laternothing will happen again
Leonard Cohen
Green was the silence, wet was the light,the month of June trembled like a butterfly.
Pablo Neruda
The way a crowShook down on meThe dust of snowFrom a hemlock treeHas given my heartA change of moodAnd saved some partOf a day I had rued.
Robert Frost
Every angel is terrifying.
Rainer Maria Rilke
You darkness, that I come from,I love you more than all the firesthat fence in the world,for the fire makesa circle of light for everyone,and then no one outside learns of you.But the darkness pulls in everything:shapes and fires, animals and myself,how easily it gathers them! -powers and people -and it is possible a great energyis moving near me.I have faith in nights.
Rainer Maria Rilke
since the thing perhaps isto eat flowers and not to be afraid
E.E. Cummings
when man determined to destroy himself he picked the was of shall and finding only why smashed it into because
E.E. Cummings
Truth can never be told so as to be understood and not be believed.
William Blake
My mouth is a fire escape.The words coming outdon’t care that they are naked.There is something burning in there.
Andrea Gibson
For darkness restores what light cannot repair.
Joseph Brodsky
If you want me again look for me under your boot soles.
Walt Whitman
What though the radiance which was once so brightBe now for ever taken from my sight,Though nothing can bring back the hourOf splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;We will grieve not, rather findStrength in what remains behind;In the primal sympathyWhich having been must ever be;In the soothing thoughts that springOut of human suffering;In the faith that looks through death,In years that bring the philosophic mind.
William Wordsworth
So sweet and delicious do I become,when I am in bed with a manwho, I sense, loves and enjoys me,that the pleasure I bring excels all delight,so the knot of love, however tightit seemed before, is tied tighter still.
Veronica Franco
He that is thy friend indeed,He will help thee in thy need:If thou sorrow, he will weep;If thou wake, he cannot sleep:Thus of every grief in heartHe with thee doth bear a part.These are certain signs to knowFaithful friend from flattering foe.
William Shakespeare
From childhood's hour I have not beenAs others were; I have not seenAs others saw; I could not bringMy passions from a common spring.From the same source I have not takenMy sorrow; I could not awakenMy heart to joy at the same tone;And all I loved, I loved alone.Then- in my childhood, in the dawnOf a most stormy life- was drawnFrom every depth of good and illThe mystery which binds me still:From the torrent, or the fountain,From the red cliff of the mountain,From the sun that round me rolledIn its autumn tint of gold,From the lightning in the skyAs it passed me flying by,From the thunder and the storm,And the cloud that took the form(When the rest of Heaven was blue)Of a demon in my view.
Edgar Allan Poe
i found god in myselfand i loved heri loved her fiercely
Ntozake Shange
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotion know what it means to want to escape from these.
T.S Eliot
We ran as if to meet the moon.
Robert Frost
If we surrenderedto earth's intelligencewe could rise up rooted, like trees.
Rainer Maria Rilke
It is always what I have already said: always the wish that you may find patience enough in yourself to endure, and simplicity enough to believe; that you may acquire more and more confidence in that which is difficult, and in your solitude among others. And for the rest, let life happen to you. Believe me: life is right, in any case.
Rainer Maria Rilke
I live not in dreams but in contemplation of a reality that is perhaps the future.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Lovers find secret placesinside this violent worldwhere they make transactions with beauty.
Jalaluddin Rumi
You have been told that, even like a chain, you are as weak as your weakest link.This is but half the truth.You are also as strong as your strongest link.To measure you by your smallest deed is to reckon the power of the oceanby the frailty of its foam.To judge you by your failures is to cast blame upon the seasons for their inconstancy.
Kahlil Gibran
One need not be a chamber to be haunted.
Emily Dickinson
Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.
Mary Oliver
Turning and turning in the widening gyreThe falcon cannot hear the falconer;Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhereThe ceremony of innocence is drowned;The best lack all conviction, while the worstAre full of passionate intensity.
W.B. Yeats
Poems are a hotline to our hearts, and we forget this emotional power at our peril.
Andrew Motion
You will hear thunder and remember me, And think: she wanted storms. The rim Of the sky will be the colour of hard crimson, And your heart, as it was then, will be on fire.
Anna Akhmatova
Looks like what drives me crazyDon't have no effect on you--But I'm gonna keep on at itTill it drives you crazy, too.
Langston Hughes
Go wisely and slowly. Those who rush stumble and fall.
William Shakespeare
There's an old saying that applies to me: you can't lose a game if you don't play the game. (Act 1, scene 4)
William Shakespeare
It’s the fire in my eyes, And the flash of my teeth, The swing in my waist, And the joy in my feet. I’m a woman Phenomenally.
Maya Angelou
I Am VerticalBut I would rather be horizontal.I am not a tree with my root in the soilSucking up minerals and motherly loveSo that each March I may gleam into leaf,Nor am I the beauty of a garden bedAttracting my share of Ahs and spectacularly painted,Unknowing I must soon unpetal.Compared with me, a tree is immortalAnd a flower-head not tall, but more startling,And I want the one's longevity and the other's daring.Tonight, in the infinitesimal light of the stars,The trees and flowers have been strewing their cool odors.I walk among them, but none of them are noticing.Sometimes I think that when I am sleepingI must most perfectly resemble them--Thoughts gone dim.It is more natural to me, lying down.Then the sky and I are in open conversation,And I shall be useful when I lie down finally:The the trees may touch me for once, and the flowers have time for me."I Am Vertical", 28 March 1961
Sylvia Plath
Listen, real poetry doesn't say anything; it just ticks off the possibilities. Opens all doors. You can walk through anyone that suits you.
Jim Morrison
The days aren't discarded or collected, they are beesthat burned with sweetness or maddenedthe sting: the struggle continues,the journeys go and come between honey and pain.No, the net of years doesn't unweave: there is no net.They don't fall drop by drop from a river: there is no river.Sleep doesn't divide life into halves,or action, or silence, or honor:life is like a stone, a single motion,a lonesome bonfire reflected on the leaves,an arrow, only one, slow or swift, a metalthat climbs or descends burning in your bones.
Pablo Neruda
Once in a golden hour I cast to earth a seed. Up there came a flower, The people said, a weed.
Alfred Tennyson
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals the power of your intense fragility:whose texture compels me with the colour of its countries, rendering death and forever with each breathing (i do not know what it is about you that closes and opens;only something in me understands the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses) nobody,not even the rain, has such small hands-excerpt of #35 from "100 Selected Poems
E.E. Cummings
Like a sculptor, if necessary,carve a friend out of stone.Realize that your inner sight is blindand try to see a treasure in everyone.
Jalaluddin Rumi
We wanderers, ever seeking the lonelier way, begin no day where we have ended another day; and no sunrise finds us where sunset left us. Even while the earth sleeps we travel. We are the seeds of the tenacious plant, and it is in our ripeness and our fullness of heart that we are given to the wind and are scattered.
Kahlil Gibran
There is no Frigate like a Book To take us Lands awayNor any Coursers like a Page Of prancing Poetry – This Traverse may the poorest takeWithout oppress of Toll – How frugal is the Chariot That bears a Human soul.
Emily Dickinson
PHOSPHORESCENCE. Now there's a word to lift your hat to... to find that phosphorescence, that light within, that's the genius behind poetry.
Emily Dickinson
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheardAre sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on.
John Keats
You shall love your crooked neighbour, with your crooked heart.
W.H. Auden
A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
W.H. Auden
What can be explained is not poetry.
W.B. Yeats
All this timeI drank you like the cure when maybeyou were the poison.
Clementine von Radics
I give you this to take with you:Nothing remains as it was. If you know this, you canbegin again, with pure joy in the uprooting.
Judith Minty
What if you slept And what if In your sleep You dreamed And what if In your dream You went to heaven And there plucked a strange and beautiful flower And what if When you awoke You had that flower in you hand Ah, what then?
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Note, to-day, an instructive, curious spectacle and conflict. Science, (twin, in its fields, of Democracy in its)—Science, testing absolutely all thoughts, all works, has already burst well upon the world—a sun, mounting, most illuminating, most glorious—surely never again to set. But against it, deeply entrench'd, holding possession, yet remains, (not only through the churches and schools, but by imaginative literature, and unregenerate poetry,) the fossil theology of the mythic-materialistic, superstitious, untaught and credulous, fable-loving, primitive ages of humanity.
Walt Whitman
To elevate the soul, poetry is necessary.
Edgar Allan Poe
Poetry = Anger x Imagination
Sherman Alexie
Time for you and time for me,tAnd time yet for a hundred indecisions,tAnd for a hundred visions and revisions,tBefore the taking of a toast and tea.
T.S Eliot
I hunger for your sleek laugh and your hands the color of a furious harvest. I want to eat the sunbeams flaring in your beauty.
Pablo Neruda
You who never arrived in my arms, Beloved, who were lost from the start, I don't even know what songs would please you. I have given up trying to recognize you in the surging wave of the next moment. All the immense images in me -- the far-off, deeply-felt landscape, cities, towers, and bridges, and un-suspected turns in the path, and those powerful lands that were once pulsing with the life of the gods-- all rise within me to mean you, who forever elude me. You, Beloved, who are all the gardens I have ever gazed at, longing. An open window in a country house-- , and you almost stepped out, pensive, to meet me. Streets that I chanced upon,-- you had just walked down them and vanished. And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors were still dizzy with your presence and, startled, gave back my too-sudden image. Who knows? Perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us yesterday, separate, in the evening...
Rainer Maria Rilke
I am too alone in the world, and yet not alone enoughto make every moment holy.I am too tiny in this world, and not tiny enoughjust to lie before you like a thing,shrewd and secretive.I want my own will, and I want simply to be with my will,as it goes toward action;and in those quiet, sometimes hardly moving times,when something is coming near,I want to be with those who know secret thingsor else alone.I want to be a mirror for your whole body,and I never want to be blind, or to be too oldto hold up your heavy and swaying picture.I want to unfold.I don’t want to stay folded anywhere,because where I am folded, there I am a lie.and I want my grasp of things to betrue before you. I want to describe myselflike a painting that I looked atclosely for a long time,like a saying that I finally understood,like the pitcher I use every day,like the face of my mother,like a shipthat carried methrough the wildest storm of all.
Rainer Maria Rilke
may my heart always be open to littlebirds who are the secrets of livingwhatever they sing is better than to knowand if men should not hear them men are oldmay my mind stroll about hungryand fearless and thirsty and suppleand even if it's sunday may i be wrongfor whenever men are right they are not youngand may myself do nothing usefullyand love yourself so more than trulythere's never been quite such a fool who could failpulling all the sky over him with one smile
E.E. Cummings
When you part from your friend, you grieve not;For that which you love most in him may be clearer in his absence, asthe mountain to the climber is clearer from the plain.
Kahlil Gibran