Quotes by Poets - Page 5

He tried not to laugh, but he wasn't good at controlling all the laughter that lived inside of him.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Isolation allows me to think more clearly, and I think out loud sometimes.After all, I wouldn't want to accuse anyone of plagiarism.
Charmaine J.Forde
And I realize the unbearable anguish of insanity: how uninformed people can be thinking insane people are "happy," O God, in fact it was Irwin Garden once warned me not to think the madhouses are full of "happy nuts." (p. 200)
Jack Kerouac
People are like water: Many rush pass you, as some will over-flood. Some will drown you, or force you to go their current ways. Some will be cold or hot-tempered, but try to say with the warm ones. Some will come as a raging wave and cause a ripple, or a calm sea, supporting you, quenching your thirst, and flow by your side to where kisses will always stay wet.
Anthony Liccione
It came out sparkling like liquid sky.
Laurie Lee
The half of her that is underwater would like to beunder a desk, the head of her that is underwaterwould like to be fully immersed.
Patricia Lockwood
When a fat person goes in the water naked, would it still be called skinny-dipping?
Anthony Liccione
Sturdy swimmers afloat on water-couch Beneath the heavy bill their treasured pouchFishes pray for them to fly far away Inland lakes toast to the Pelican’s day
Munia Khan
We Pisceans know how to swim without water
Munia Khan
In the universe, there are things that are known, and things that are unknown, and in between them, there are doors.
William Blake
Then the one called Raltariki is really a demon?" asked Tak."Yes—and no," said Yama, "If by 'demon' you mean a malefic, supernatural creature, possessed of great powers, life span and the ability to temporarily assume virtually any shape—then the answer is no. This is the generally accepted definition, but it is untrue in one respect.""Oh? And what may that be?""It is not a supernatural creature.""But it is all those other things?""Yes.""Then I fail to see what difference it makes whether it be supernatural or not—so long as it is malefic, possesses great powers and life span and has the ability to change its shape at will.""Ah, but it makes a great deal of difference, you see. It is the difference between the unknown and the unknowable, between science and fantasy—it is a matter of essence. The four points of the compass be logic, knowledge, wisdom and the unknown. Some do bow in that final direction. Others advance upon it. To bow before the one is to lose sight of the three. I may submit to the unknown, but never to the unknowable.
Roger Zelazny
A 'dreamer' is one possesses the gift of dreaming by day. Sure, many dream at night, but don’t also small babies and animals dream at night? To dream by day and dream aloud: Is this not the reward for all the troubles we humans must face?
Roman Payne
dear samanthai’m sorrywe have to get a divorcei know that seems like an odd way to start a love letter but let me explain:it’s not youit sure as hell isn’t meit’s just human beings don’t love as well as insects doi love you.. far too much to let what we have be ruined by the failings of our speciesi saw the way you looked at the waiter last nighti know you would never DO anything, you never do but..i saw the way you looked at the waiter last nightdid you know that when a female fly accepts the pheromones put off by a male fly, it re-writes her brain, destroys the receptors that receive pheromones, sensing the change, the male fly does the same. when two flies love each other they do it so hard, they will never love anything else ever again. if either one of them dies before procreation can happen both sets of genetic code are lost forever. now that… is dedication.after Elizabeth and i broke up we spent three days dividing everything we had bought togetherlike if i knew what pots were mine like if i knew which drapes were mine somehow the pain would go awaythis is not trueafter two praying mantises mate, the nervous system of the male begins to shut downwhile he still has control over his motor functionshe flops onto his back, exposing his soft underbelly up to his lover like a giftshe then proceeds to lovingly dice him into tiny cubesspooning every morsel into her mouthshe wastes nothingeven the exoskeleton goesshe does this so that once their children are born she has something to regurgitate to feed themnow that.. is selflessnessi could never do that for youso i have a new plani’m gonna leave you nowi’m gonna spend the rest of my life committing petty injusticesi hope you do the samei will jay walk at every opportunity i will steal things i could easily affordi will be rude to strangersi hope you do the samei hope reincarnation is reali hope our petty crimes are enough to cause us to be reborn as lesser creatures i hope we are reborn as fliesso that we can love each other as hard as we were meant to.
Jared Singer
Show me slowly what I onlyknow the limits ofDance me to the end of love
Leonard Cohen
They dined on mince, and slices of quinceWhich they ate with a runcible spoon;And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,They danced by the light of the moon.
Edward Lear
Ceux qui revent eveilles ont conscience de 1000 choses qui echapent a ceux qui ne revent qu'endormis.The one who has day dream are aware of 1000 things that the one who dreams only when he sleeps will never understand.(it sounds better in french, I do what I can with my translation...)
Edgar Allan Poe
...we have no right to decide off-hand that it is an unnatural pleasure to eat sawdust. A man might be constituted so that he liked it. And so long as his peculiarity doesn't damage or interfere with other people, there's no reason why he shouldn't be left alone.But if it is the man's fixed belief that sawdust eating is essential to human happiness; if he attributes almost everything that happens either to the effects of eating it or not eating it; if he imagines that most of the people he meets are also sawdust-eaters, and above all, if he thinks that the salvation of the world depends entirely upon making laws to compel people to eat sawdust, whether they like it or not, then it is fair to say that his mind is unbalanced on the subject; and that, further, the practice itself, however innocent it may appear, is in that particular case perverse. Sanity consists in the proper equilibrium of ideas in general. That is the only sense in which it is true that genius is connected with insanity.
Aleister Crowley
To acquire the full consciousness of self is to know oneself so different from others that no longer feels allied with men except by purely animal contacts: nevertheless, among souls of this degree, there is an ideal fraternity based on differences,--while society fraternity is based on resemblances.The full consciousness of self can be called originality of soul, -and all this is said only to point out the group of rare beings to which Andre Gide belongs.The misfortune of these beings, when they express themselves, is that they do it with such odd gestures that men fear to approach them; their life of social contacts must often revolve in the brief circle of ideal fraternities; or, when the mob consents to admit such souls, it is as curiosities or museum objects. Their glory is, finally, to be loved from afar & almost understood, as parchments are seen & read above sealed cases.
Rémy de Gourmont
If you knew how much work went into it, you wouldn't call it genius.
Michelangelo Buonarroti
The Pond"August of another summer, and once again I am drinking the sunand the lilies again are spread across the water. I know now what they want is to touch each other. I have not been here for many yearsduring which time I kept living my life. Like the heron, who can only croak, who wishes he could sing, I wish I could sing. A little thanks from every throat would be appropriate. This is how it has been, and this is how it is: All my life I have been able to feel happiness, except whatever was not happiness, which I also remember. Each of us wears a shadow. But just now it is summer againand I am watching the lilies bow to each other, then slide on the wind and the tug of desire, close, close to one another, Soon now, I'll turn and start for home. And who knows, maybe I'll be singing.
Mary Oliver
It did not last: the Devil howling 'Ho, Let Einstein be,' restored the status quo.
John Collings Squire
I am his Highness' dog at Kew;Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?
Alexander Pope
God will hear your cry even when your voice can't shout out loud unto him. He will see your tears even when can no longer shed any.
Gugu Mona
The pessimist reason that things just happen, where the optimist believe that things happen for a reason.
Anthony Liccione
Who ever thought to put the word "hero" in heroin?
Anthony Liccione
to ask them to legalize pot is something like asking them to put butter on the handcuffs before they place them on you, something else is hurting you - that's why you need pot or whiskey, or whips and rubber suits, or screaming music turned so fucking loud you can't think, or madhouses or mechanical cunts or 162 baseball games in a season. or vietnam or israel or the fear of spiders. your love washing her yellow false teeth in the sink before you screw.
Charles Bukowski
O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains!" - Cassio (Act II, Scene iii)
William Shakespeare
People are strange . . .
Jim Morrison
The purpose of life is life.
Dejan Stojanovic
A successful person expects a clapping hand, an ailing person expects an open hand.
Anthony Liccione
Only those who will love longer than they expected to can truly love pecan pie, which doesn't explain its status as death rows most requested last dessert, or why chopped pecans, corn syrup, directions from the Karo bottle's cherry-red side are what mercy taste like to some. But there you have it.
Kate Lebo
Let us not, in the pride of our superior knowledge, turn with contempt from the follies of our predecessors. The study of the errors into which great minds have fallen in the pursuit of truth can never be uninstructive. As the man looks back to the days of his childhood and his youth, and recalls to his mind the strange notions and false opinions that swayed his actions at the time, that he may wonder at them; so should society, for its edification, look back to the opinions which governed ages that fled.
Charles Mackay
Wolves in shells are crueler than stray ones.
Gaston Bachelard
Saving and pinching to get married, you're losing the best time of your life.
Muriel Spark
Astrology has no more useful function than this, to discover the inmost nature of a man and to bring it out into his consciousness, that he may fulfil it according to the law of light.
Aleister Crowley
we not only wish to be pleased, but to be pleased in that particularway in which we have been accustomed to be pleased.
William Wordsworth
Somewhere I’d heard, or invented perhaps, that the only pleasures found during a waning moon are misfortunes in disguise. Superstition aside, I avoid pleasure during the waning or absent moon out of respect for the bounty this world offers me. I profit from great harvests in life and believe in the importance of seasons.
Roman Payne
Writing is about allowing yourself to become a vessel of creativity. Writers are avatars of creation. We have tender hearts, and strong emotions. It's hard not to when you have a million different people's personalities playing out in your head.
Sai Marie Johnson
CREEPOther people have written about war. About how one plane sweeps over and the whole place is ablaze in minutes. About how a young man may kill another young many with perfect legality. I prefer to write about less sudden things. About how we inch further away without even noticing. And then it's too late. Or is it? No it's not too late to say sorry, we were wrong, let's try again to get along. No, it's not too late to quit lying, halt the greed, stop polluting air earth and seas. I prefer to write about less noisy things. About change happening so gradually that one day you just accept the world as different. And you don't question because you're old, and you don't feel like making waves, and anyway, they'd say you were insane.......
Jay Woodman
Words are dead, until action brings them life.
Anthony Liccione
I think the best shaped box ever on earth is a coffin which can be handmade to escort the forever numb-hands.
Munia Khan
Men walk through tragedy, quietly, calm and precise on the outside, tearing themselves to shreds inside.
Steven Herrick
I profess myself an enemy to all other joys, which the most precious square of sense possesses, and find I am alone felicitate in your dear highness love.
William Shakespeare
OEDIPUS:O, O, O, they will all come,all come out clearly! Light of the sun, let melook upon you no more after today!I who first saw the light bred of a matchaccursed, and accursed in my livingwith them I lived with, cursed in my killing.
Sophocles
Young men's love then lies not truly in their hearts, but in their eyes.
William Shakespeare
A lion does not flinch at laughter coming from a hyena. A gorilla does not budge from a banana thrown at it by a monkey. A nightingale does not stop singing its beautiful song at the intrusion of an annoying woodpecker.
Suzy Kassem
It's a struggle but you have to keep going.
Jonathan Anthony Burkett
What a face this girl possessed!—could I not gaze at it every day I would need to recreate it through painting, sculpture, or fatherhood until a second such face is born.
Roman Payne
A girl without braidsis like a city without bridges.
Roman Payne
I see you go bare-shod. This is most likely extremely sensible. Shoes are no end of trouble for girls. . . . How many have danced to death in slippers of silk and glass and fur and wood? Too many to count—the graveyards, they are so full these days. You are very wise to let your soles become grubby with mud, to let them grow their own slippers of moss and clay and calluses. This is far preferable to shoes which may become wicked at any moment.
Catherynne M. Valente
[Alexander von] Humboldt showers us with true treasures.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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
It is only the rooms of the present I wish to inhabit.
Regina O'Melveny
[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
Survivors are often good at both resolving and generating crisis. While this capacity to handle crisis can make you a good emergency room worker or ambulance driver, it can also be a way for you to keep yourself from feeling. If you are addicted to intensity and drama...you may be running from yourself.
Ellen Bass
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
I would forget it fain,But oh, it presses to my memory,Like damnèd guilty deeds to sinners' minds.
William Shakespeare