Quotes by Poets - Page 87

I like visionaries because they choose to see the best in the worst of situations.
Gift Gugu Mona
I am the master of my fate:I am the captain of my soul.
William Ernest Henley
Best be yourself, imperial, plain, and true.
Robert Browning
You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.
Maya Angelou
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.
William Shakespeare
An easy life does not make men, nor does it build nations. Challenges make men, and it is these men who build nations.
Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum
I have been investigating this modern problem of decline in readership and my conclusion is that it has little to do with bad readership and a whole lot with a difference in information speed. Frankly, the modern brain is much faster than the classical brain was in how it absorbs information and novels do not reflect this development. They are simply not dense enough. Too slow, not the right tempo - bores the shit out of a modern brain! There's the real problem: our brains have developed into different speed levels that authors cant adjust to. It has nothing whatsoever to do with quality: it has rather a whole lot to do with people claiming to be authors who are incapable of concentrating their ideas in the right sort of space, and rather smear out a few already halfbaked ideas over 30 plus pages. Hello! Do you think its weird a facebooktrained mind, capable of digesting enormous amounts of information at quick speeds, is bored shitless with that? The problem is not bad readership but rather bad authorship: authors that cannot adjust to the times. And since there are a zillion books published every day of authors that just cant keep up with the speed of the times, and criticism hardly exists anymore in modern society, it becomes simply very unattractive to read books, unless one keeps to the classics, which are books that are much more dense at essence.
Martijn Benders
You get hit the hardest when trying to run or hide from a problem. Like the defense on a football field, putting all focus on evading only one defender is asking to be blindsided.
Criss Jami
What a moron I was to think you were sweet and innocent, when it turns out you were actually college-educated the whole time!
Margaret Atwood
The last year of her college career was wheeling slowly round. She could see ahead her examination and her departure. She had the ash of disillusion gritting under her teeth. Would the next move turn out the same? Always the shining doorway ahead; and then, upon approach, always the shining doorway was a gate into another ugly yard, dirty and active and dead. Always the crest of the hill gleaming ahead under heaven: and then, from the top of the hill only another sordid valley full of amorphous, squalid activity.
D.H. Lawrence
Being smart and rich are lucky, but being curious and compassionate will save your ass. Being curious and compassionate can take you out of your ego and edge your soul towards wonder.
Mary Karr
Bad things are gonna' happen to you, because they happen to us all. And worrying won't stave the really bad things off. Don't make the mistake of comparing your twisted-up insides to other people's blow-dried outsides. Even the most privileged person in this stadium suffers the torments of the damned just going about the business of being human.
Mary Karr
A university is a city of ideas, and we're grateful you became citizens of our city.
Mary Karr
When the world is at peace, when all things are tranquil and all men obey their superiors in all their courses, then music can be perfected. When desires and passions do not turn into wrongful paths, music can be perfected. Perfect music has its cause. It arises from equilibrium. Equilibrium arises from righteousness, and righteousness arises from the meaning of the cosmos. Therefore one can speak about music only with a man who has perceived the meaning of the cosmos.
Hermann Hesse
A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.
Herman Melville
Try not to pay attention to those who will try to make life miserable for you. There will be a lot of those--in the official capacity as well as the self-appointed. Suffer them if you can’t escape them, but once you have steered clear of them, give them the shortest shrift possible. Above all, try to avoid telling stories about the unjust treatment you received at their hands; avoid it no matter how receptive your audience may be. Tales of this sort extend the existence of your antagonists....
Joseph Brodsky
There are no such enemies So dire as good people, They will rob you, mournfully, And condemn you, weeping, They'll invite you to their home, Welcome you profusely, Ask you all about yourself, To mock and abuse you, Later, mock at you and jeer, To grab you for sure... Without enemies on earth Somehow one can endure.But those good people yet will Everywhere beset you, Even in the other world They will not forget you.
Taras Shevchenko
Relationships with your enemies; you need to cultivate those, because: "Only true enemies stab you in the front.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
You have no enemies, you say? Alas, my friend, the boast is poor. He who has mingled in the fray of duty that the brave endure, must have made foes. If you have none, small is the work that you have done. You’ve hit no traitor on the hip. You’ve dashed no cup from perjured lip. You’ve never turned the wrong to right. You’ve been a coward in the fight.
Charles Mackay
Thou shalt not stir one foot to seek a foe.
William Shakespeare
God's greatest gift to manIn all the bounty He was moved to makeThroughout creation-the one gift the mostClose to his goodness and the one He callsMost precious-is free will.
Dante Alighieri
The most critical risk of all, is not taking the risk if means be dangerous.
Anthony Liccione
Oh, many a shaft at random sentFinds mark the archer little meant!And many a word at random spokenMay soothe, or wound, a heart that's broken!
Walter Scott
But how can I get enough experience if they don't give me a chance to get experience?
Sherman Alexie
I didn't care much what happened to me, so chance didn't matter.
Alice Notley
No one knew what she was doing in Colonia Hidalgo, although it was most likely, according to the police, that she'd been taking a walk and had come upon death purely by chance.
Roberto Bolaño
Love I never associated with the senses, it was not even passion that I wanted; it was a conscious, subtle, elaborate sensuality, which I knew not how to procure.
Arthur Symons
Everyone says,Come to your senses, and I do, of you.Every touch electric, every taste you,every smell, even burning sugar, everycry and laugh. Toothpicked samplesat the farmers’ market, every melon,plum, I come undone, undone.
Dean Young
…I have fallen in love with a painting. Though that phrase doesn’t seem to suffice, not really—rather’s it that I have been drawn into the orbit of a painting, have allowed myself to be pulled into its sphere by casual attraction deepening to something more compelling. I have felt the energy and life of the painting’s will; I have been held there, instructed. And the overall effect, the result of looking and looking into it’s brimming surface as long as I could look, is love, by which I mean a sense of tenderness toward experience, of being held within an intimacy with the things of the world.
Mark Doty
If I die this instant will you be more content with the morning news? Will your coffee taste better? I am not your fate. I am not your government…I am not your mother, not your father or your nightmare or your health. I am not a fence, not a wall. I am not the law or actuarial tables of your insurance broker. I am a woman with my guts loose in my hands, howling and it’s not because I committed hari-kiri. I suggest either you cook me or sew me back up. I suggest you walk into my pain as into the breaking waves of an ocean of blood, and either we will climb out together and walk away.
Marge Piercy
They stood together in a false intimacy, a nervous contact. And he was in love with her.
D.H. Lawrence
We also fought about everything -- like real sisters. We fought about money, bedrooms, whose car to take. Everyone of these fights was actually about something else -- usually abandonment. I wanted to be first on her list and she wanted to be first on mine. I wanted all her attention, all her love, all her care. I wanted her to be my mommy, my daddy, my sister. She wanted the same from me. She wanted to be fed, cared for, nurtured without limit. She wanted backrubs, poems, pastas, and to be left alone when she needed to be left alone. She wanted to come before my writing, my child, my man. And I wanted no less from her.She was sick at first, so I took care of her. Then I was jealous of the attention and she took care of me. We had gone down into the primal cave of our friendship. we had felt loved enough to rage and fight, to show the inside of our naked throats and our bared fags, and the friendship took another leap toward intimacy. Without rage, intimacy can't be.
Erica Jong
O how gently and how lovingly dost thou lie awake in the depth and centre of my soul, where thou in secret and in silence alone, as its sole Lord, abidest, not only as in Thine own house or in Thine own chamber, but also as within my own bosom, in close and intimate union.
San Juan de la Cruz
Intimacy isn’t something men talk about.
Michel Houellebecq
the rain in this room is low and thickand undressing my heart through the air. – intimacy 
Nayyirah Waheed
...intimacy isn't something men talk about. They may talk about politics, literature, stocks, or sports, depending on the man, but about their love lives they keep silent, even to their dying breath.
Michel Houellebecq
This is my skin. This is not your skin, yet you are still under it.
Iain Thomas
the sweet juices of your mouthare like castles bathed in honey.i've never had it done so gently before.you have put a circle of castlesaround my penis and you swirl themlike sunlight on the wings of birds.
Richard Brautigan
We walked back to iDEATH, holding hands. Hands are very nice things, especially after they have travelled back from making love.
Richard Brautigan
Her romances often seemed like dalliances; she enjoyed male company and blossomed in its presence, but she did not appear to care deeply about any of the men [Steiner]
Elizabeth Winder
We’re only here for a short while. And I think it’s such a lucky accident, having been born, that we’re almost obliged to pay attention.
Mark Strand
God’s love is God’s attention.
Pat Schneider
All night my heart makes its wayhowever it can over the rough groundof uncertainties, but only until nightmeets and then is overwhelmed bymorning, the light deepening, thewind easing and just waiting, as Itoo wait (and when have I ever beendisappointed?) for redbird to sing
Mary Oliver
And what if there are no damsels in distress?What if I knew that, and I called your bluff?Don't you think every kitten figures out how to get down,whether or not you ever show up?
Ani DiFranco
Your heart plays a song like a broken music box, but nothing ever sounded quite so beautiful to me. Together, in the dance of wounded-wing swans we’ll rise above the ruins, melting into the golden light.
John Mark Green
When we hear the bird sing, it hears only how to love. (Quand on entend l'oiseau chanter, - Lui n'entend que comment aimer.)
Charles de Leusse
If I had the knackI'd sing likeCherry flakes falling
Bashō Matsuo
Things perish. Gods have passed.But song sublimely castShall citadels outlast.
Théophile Gautier
Here is the soundless cypress on the lawn:It listens, listens. Taller trees beyondListen. The moon at the unruffled pondStares. And you sing, you sing.That star-enchanted song falls through the airFrom lawn to lawn down terraces of sound,Darts in white arrows on the shadowed ground;And all the night you sing.My dreams are flowers to which you are a beeAs all night long I listen, and my brainReceives your song, then loses it againIn moonlight on the lawn.Now is your voice a marble high and white,Then like a mist on fields of paradise,Now is a raging fire, then is like ice,Then breaks, and it is dawn.
Harold Monro
He hadn't "abused" alcohol, but had spent almost four years sitting in a chair drinking jug wine around the clock and looking, variously, at the wall, the window blind, and the TV screen.
Gilbert Sorrentino
To heal from child sexual abuse you must believe that you were a victim, that the abuse really did take place. This is often difficult for survivors. When you’ve spent your life denying the reality of your abuse, when you don’t want it to be true, or when your family repeatedly calls you crazy or a liar, it can be hard to remain firm in the knowledge that you were abused.
Ellen Bass
Like Pascal, Nietzsche, and Simone Weil, Kierkegaard is one of those writers whom it is very difficult to estimate justly. When one reads them for the first time, one is bowled over by their originality . . . and by the sharpness of their insights. . . . But with successive readings one’s doubts grow, one begins to react against their overemphasis on one aspect of the truth at the expense of all the others, and one’s first enthusiasm may all too easily turn to an equally exaggerated aversion. Of all such writers, one might say that one cannot imagine them as children. The more we read them, the more we become aware that something has gone badly wrong with their affective life; . . . it is not only impossible to imagine one of them as a happy husband or wife, it is impossible to imagine their having a single intimate friend to whom they could open their hearts.
W.H. Auden
It looks like freedom but it feels like death, it's something in between I guess. It's closing time.
Leonard Cohen
You told me, if something is not used it is meaningless, and took my temperature, which I had thought to save for a more difficult day. In the mirror, every night, the same face, a bit more threadbare, a dress worn too long. The moon was out in the cold, along with the restless, dissatisfied wind that seemed to change the location of the sycamores. I expected reproaches because I had mentioned the word love, but you only accused me of stealing your pencil, and sadness disappeared with sense. You made a ceremony out of holding your head in your hands because, you said, it could not be contained in itself.
Rosmarie Waldrop
And that is how we are. By strength of will we cut off our inner intuitive knowledge from admitted consciousness. This causes a state of dread, or apprehension, which makes the blow ten times worse when it does fall.
D.H. Lawrence
Sometimes we punish our selves the most.
William Shakespeare
Sometimes we punish ourselves the most.
William Shakespeare
If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it they are wrong. I do not say "give them up," for they may be all you have; but conceal them like a vice, lest they should spoil the lives of better and simpler people.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Adults havethe benefit of experience and know the trick will work as long as the technique is correct.When we “grow up” we gain this experience and knowledge, but we lose our innocence andsense of wonder. In other words, the price we pay for growing up is a permanent sense ofloss.
Alberto Alvaro Ríos
and yet a child’s utter innocence is but its blank ignorance, and the innocence more or less wanes as intelligence waxes.
Herman Melville