Quotes by Poets - Page 86

My wife is a lovely leathery green, the blue-tongued lizard said;Her eyes are as red as bulldog ants, lurking in holes in her head;Her body is made of the speckled grass, a violet grows on her tongue,And I could watch her for fifty years if nobody blundered along.
Douglas Stewart
When you've made up your mind to marry, take the first respectable body that comes to hand - she's as good as any other; they be all alike in groundwork: 'tis only in the flourishes there's a difference.
Thomas Hardy
I had wanted to get married, but I realized now that I never wanted to be a 'wife.
Jill Bialosky
We treat our stone wives with much more care than they treat their warm ones, anyway. I personally dust mine once a week, and I know Khaamil gives them presents when I am not looking. These are yours - they are in your care, and you must be faithful.
Catherynne M. Valente
RULES OF FAIRYLAND-BELOWBEWARE OF DOGANYTHING IMPORTANT COMES IN THREES AND SIXESDO NOT STEAL QUEENSA GIRL IN THE WILD IS WORTH TWO IN CHAINSNECESSITY IS THE MOTHER OF TEMPTATIONEVERYTHING MUST BE PAID FOR SOONER OR LATERWHAT GOES DOWN MUST COME UP
Catherynne M. Valente
Sometimes breaking the rules is just extending the rules
Mary Oliver
In the world of mulesThere are no rules.
Ogden Nash
If there are to be rules, they must be articulable and defensible, like etiquette. I do not do anything simply because my family did it. I do things because they make sense, and because they are elegant.
Kathleen Rooney
Master, I'm afraid. I am, truly. This place scares me. At home, I know who I am, what to do. I'm the Warden's daughter, I know where I stand. But this is a dangerous place, full of pitfalls. All my life, I've known it was waiting for me, but now I'm not sure I can face it. They'll want to absorb me, make me one of them, and I won't change. I won't! I want to stay me."Jared sighed and she saw his dark gaze was fixed on the veiled window."Claudia, you're the bravest person I know. And no one will change you. You will rule here, though it won't be easy...
Catherine Fisher
But only a brief momentis granted to the braveone breath or two, whose wage isThe long nights of the grave.
Muhammad Iqbal
All my contemporaries—hundred-and-fivers or convicts—will tell you how we livedin barely sentient fear, raisingchildren for the executioner,prison, or the torture chamber.
Anna Akhmatova
This kind of action is a prevalent error among oppressed peoples. It is based upon the false notion that there is only a limited and particular amount of freedom that must be divided up between us, with the largest and juiciest pieces of liberty going as spoils to the victor or the stronger. So instead of joining together to fight for more, we quarrel between ourselves for a larger slice of the one pie. Black women fight between ourselves over men, instead of pursuing and using who we are and our strengths for lasting change; Black women and men fight between ourselves over who has more of a right to freedom, instead of seeing each other's struggles as part of our own and vital to our common goals; Black and white women fight between ourselves over who is the more oppressed, instead of seeing those areas in which our causes are the same. (Of course, this last separation is worsened by the intransigent racism that white women too often fail to, or cannot, address in themselves.)
Audre Lorde
Women in America read 'lifestyle' pages which are really glorifications of shopping. They teach us we must veil ourselves in make-up to be loved. And we willingly take the veil, thinking ourselves freed by it. Make-up is no more optional for us than the veil is for Arab women: it is our Western version of the chador.
Erica Jong
Histories are instruments of oppression.
Catherynne M. Valente
[T]he mothers who had sold their children felt empty and sad. They felt as if this act, done freely by themselves (no one had forced them, no one had threatened them) had not been performed willingly. They felt cheated as well, as if the price had been too low. Why hadn't they demanded more? And yet, the mothers told themselves, they'd had no choice.
Margaret Atwood
If someone asks you why you're oppressing a world and you reply with a lot of poetic crap, no. I guess there can't be a meeting of minds.
Roger Zelazny
No woman is responsible for altering the psyche of her oppressor, even when that psyche is embodied in another woman.
Audre Lorde
Oppressed peoples are always being asked to stretch a little more, to bridge the gap between blindness and humanity.
Audre Lorde
OppressionNow dreamsAre not availableTo the dreamers,Nor songsTo the singers.In some landsDark nightAnd cold steelPrevail--But the dreamWill come back,And the songBreakIts jail.
Langston Hughes
Such is the condition of organic nature! whose first law might be expressed in the words 'Eat or be eaten!' and which would seem to be one great slaughter-house, one universal scene of rapacity and injustice!
Erasmus Darwin
Hatred of oppression still distorts the features, Anger at injustice still makes voices raised and ugly. Oh we, who wished to lay for the foundations for peace and friendliness,Could never be friendly ourselves.
Bertolt Brecht
It is enough to write a few lines about tanks in the streets in some sad country, about a clear injustice, which requires no description; it is enough to move from one side to another, to satisfy someone’s taste, the need of the moment, the need for “big” games to take a peek into everything and to prove everything with cheap opinions formed almost on command, almost as a recipe of measured pain to resolve the crisis, to extinguish the pain based on a few words that don’t change anything except that they flatter vanity and a misguided interest in all dimensions of life and creation, in the air that is being poisoned by smoke from cars, smoke from the television screens, the smoke curtains of politicians, left and right, the smoke of films and pop culture, smokescreens of intelligence that finds an explanation for all this, makes up theories, finds justification for the schizophrenic decisions of the new rulers, for wars, agreements, contracts; finds justification for obedience, for the sale of beliefs under the disguise of conviction, for several awards, for a few moments of illusion in the hocus-pocus world where the truth does not interest anyone anymore, except for ways for lies to be packaged and sold as the greatest truth with the help of big intellectuals that will find a good argument, a good defense and justification for everything, since everything becomes much easier, if a hoax is supported by “scientific” evidence.
Dejan Stojanovic
I guess the only time most people think about injustice is when it happens to them.
Charles Bukowski
Justice is the very last thing of all wherewith the universe concerns itself. It is equilibrium that absorbs its attention; and what we term justice is truly nothing but this equilibrium transformed, as honey is nothing but a transformation of the sweetness found in the flower. Outside man there is no justice; within him injustice cannot be.
Maurice Maeterlinck
We are not wrong, perhaps, to be heedful of justice in the midst of a universe that heeds not at all; as the bee is not wrong to make honey in a world that itself can make none. But we are wrong to desire an external justice, since we know that it does not exist. Let that which is in us suffice. All is for ever being weighed and judged in our soul. It is we who shall judge ourselves; or rather, our happiness is our judge.
Maurice Maeterlinck
The world was fucked up. It was hard to say how exactly, but we could feel it. There was injustice, lots of it, we saw it as a dull shape coming into focus.
Michelle Tea
Most people will not stand up to injustice unless their comfort of living is severely threatened. This is because today's man does not care for the outside world so long as he has a roof over his head and four walls to contain his own.
Suzy Kassem
She taught me what's important, and what isn't. And I've never forgotten. And that's what mothers do, I say.
Steven Herrick
All mothers are mothers of great people, and it is not their fault that life later disappoints them.
Boris Pasternak
My mother's deathchanged the alchemy of food.Holidays run together nowlike ungrooved rivers. I forgetwhat they are for. I buy bakery goods.They look deadunder the blue lights.I don't do anything the way she taught mebut I get fat.I don't look like her and I don't soundlike her, but I stand like her.
Florence Weinberger
There she was, the mother of me, like a lit plinth,Heavenly, though I was reared to find this kind Of visitation impractical; she was an unbearable detailOf the supreme celestial map,Of which I had been taught that there wasNo such thing.
Lucie Brock-Broido
I will look after you and I will look after anybody you say needs to be looked after, any way you say. I am here. I brought my whole self to you. I am your mother.
Maya Angelou
What thumbsuckers we all are...when it comes to mothers.
Margaret Atwood
Generations of women have sacrificed their lives to become their mothers. But we do not have that luxury any more. The world has changed too much to let us have the lives our mothers had. And we can no longer afford the guilt we feel at not being our mothers. We cannot afford any guilt that pulls us back to the past. We have to grow up, whether we want to or not. We have to stop blaming men and mothers and seize every second of our lives with passion. We can no longer afford to waste our creativity. We cannot afford spiritual laziness.
Erica Jong
Outside in the sun the Holy Mother stood on her pedestal in the garden, sorry but unsympathetic. The usual position of mothers.
Barbara Kingsolver
He who loses his mother loses a pure soul who blesses and guards him constantly.
Kahlil Gibran
She was too honest, too natural for this frightened man; too remote from his tidy laws. She was, after all, a country girl; disordered, hysterical, loving. She was muddled and mischievous as a chimney-jackdaw, she made her nest of rags and jewels, was happy in the sunlight, squawked loudly at danger, pried and was insatiably curious, forgot when to eat or ate all day, and sang when sunsets were red.
Laurie Lee
America—where we hate our fathers, love our mothers, andeveryone is hung up on tryingto be a man
Phil Volatile
Have I been conditioned to believe that if I am not solicitous, if I am not forthcoming, if I am not a never-ending cornicopia of entertaining delights, they will take their collections of milk-bottle tops and their mangy one-eared teddy bears and go away into the woods by themselves to play snipers? Probably. What my mother things was merely cute may have been lethal.
Margaret Atwood
This is the role of the mother. And in that visit I really saw clearly, for the first time, why a mother is really important. Not just because she feeds and also loves and also cuddles... but because in an interesting and and maybe an eerie and other worldly way, she stands in the gap. She stands between the unknown and the known.
Maya Angelou
Sensuality is beautiful, and dominance and submission in the right context is a passionate art. A muse which ignites the flame of femininity, which enraptures both partners in complete euphoria, magnifying both the masculine and the feminine in one tantalizing unit.
Sai Marie Johnson
Oh, was that what you meant? I figured you were speaking of your manner of whoring. I should have known you were wanting to fuck me too.
Sai Marie Johnson
Part of me wants to make this boy bruise, bleed, and sob, and part of me wants to soothe him and care for him. The tipically complex yearnings of the kinkily queer.
Jeff Mann
people see so many movies that when they finally see one not so bad as the others, they think it's great. an Academy Award means that you don't stink quite as much as your cousin.
Charles Bukowski
The traveling salesmen fed me pills that made the lining of my veins feel scraped out, my jaw ached... I knew every raindrop by its name, I sensed everything before it happened. Like I knew a certain oldsmobile would stop even before it slowed, and by the sweet voices of the family inside, I knew we'd have an accident in the rain. I didn't care. They said they'd take me all the way.
Denis Johnson
There is not a passion so strongly rooted in the human heart as envy.
Richard Brinsley Sheridan
Now envy and antipathy, passions irreconcilable in reason, nevertheless in fact may spring conjoined like Chang and Eng in one birth. Is Envy then such a monster? Well, though many an arraigned mortal has in hopes of mitigated penalty pleaded guilty to horrible actions, did anybody ever seriously confess to envy? Something there is in it universally felt to be more shameful than even felonious crime. And not only does everybody disown it, but the better sort are inclined to incredulity when it is in earnest imputed to an intelligent man. But since it's lodgement is in the heart and not the brain, no degree of intellect supplies a guarantee against it.
Herman Melville
Fiercely guard the passions igniting your heart, so that your flames reach the highest ceilings of success without the eyes of envy.
Suzy Kassem
Even envy, wants to even the score.
Anthony Liccione
It's a curious thing that the mental life seems to flourish with its roots in spite, ineffable and fathomless spite. Always has been so! Look at Socrates, in Plato, and his bunch round him! The sheer spite of it all, just sheer joy in pulling somebody else to bits...Protagoras, or whoever it was! And Alcibiades, and all the other little disciple dogs joining in the fray! I must say it makes one prefer Buddha, quietly sitting under a bo-tree, or Jesus, telling his disciples little Sunday stories, peacefully, and without any mental fireworks. No, there's something wrong with the mental life, radically. It's rooted in spite and envy, envy and spite. Ye shall know the tree by its fruit.
D.H. Lawrence
No bird ever looked at a plane in envy
Iain Thomas
And if anyone has trouble understanding that, well, they can kiss my ass.
Isabel Quintero
I was angry at myself for my inclination to vice. I longed for the day when a state of frenzy would lead my mind to sober pasture, just as it had for Saint Augustine. I longed for the day when the love of one woman would be sacred enough to forget all the rest.
Roman Payne
I could feel the hard part of Mom very strongly that time. It was like a stone in her that grew bigger every time my father lost his temper, right under her heart. Feeling the stone in her calmed me down. It told me that she would always be there for me.
Kaimana Wolff
Every family has one living patriarch or matriarch, the final arbiter and repository of ancient family history, and Nicole's Aunt Patti was the last woman standing.
Liz Rosenberg
And the reason he cannot bear her dying is not the loss of her (which is the future) but that dying puts the two of them (now) into this nakedness together that is unforgivable.
Anne Carson
I've learned that regardless of your relationship with your parents, you'll miss them when they're gone from your life.
Maya Angelou
You're given the fruit of one palm tree:Bear it a basin of clear water.Don't trouble with the plight of other palms.
Abu al-Ala al-Ma'arri
Integrity is the best attire to put on because the without integrity one cannot conceal his nakedness.
Gugu Mona
The best people always care their goodness, civility, courtesy, and fairness. But not the bad.
Ehsan Sehgal