Quotes by Poets - Page 90

Do good by stealth, and blush to find it fame.
Alexander Pope
Charity . . . is the opium of the privileged.
Chinua Achebe
He’s a young man, my own age or a little older, which is young for a man although not for a woman, as at my age a woman is an old maid but a man is not an old bachelor until he’s fifty, and even then there’s still hope for the ladies, as Mary Whitney used to say.
Margaret Atwood
Black men are not so passive that they must have Black women speak for them. Even my fourteen-year-old son knows that. Black men themselves must examine and articulate their own desires and positions and stand by the conclusions thereof. No point is served by a Black male professional who merely whines at the absence of his viewpoint in Black women's work. Oppressors always expect the oppressed to extend to them the understanding so lacking in themselves.
Audre Lorde
I couldn't stand the idea of a woman having to have a single pure life and a man being able to have a double life, one pure and one not.
Sylvia Plath
There, little girl, don't read,You're fond of your books, I know,But Brother might mopeIf he had no hopeOf getting ahead of you.It's dull for a boy who cannot lead.There, little girl, don't read.
Alice Duer Miller
Sylvia rarely flattered the men in her life- she envied them. She was far more likely to compete with a man than a woman. In her journal she describes this jealousy of which she is painfully aware; "It is an envy born of the desire to be active and doing, not passive and listening." She craved the "double life" of men, who could enjoy career, sex, and family. "I can pretend to forget my envy," she writes, "no matter, it is there, insidious, malignant, latent.
Elizabeth Winder
You may have learned from your mother or any other hunted woman. Smiling at devils is a useful learned thing. Swallowing discomfort down in spades. Holding it tight in your belly. Ageing on the inside only. Keeping it forever sexy.
Yrsa Daley-Ward
Spiritual counselling is helping people find the deep root of stillness in themselves, which is also a connection to everything else.
Jay Woodman
So close that your hand upon my chest is mine,so close that your eyes close with my sleep.
Pablo Neruda
Why was it, do you think, I was able to recognise you and understand you?""Why, Hermine? Tell me!""Because it's the same for me as you because I am alone exactly as you are, because I'm as little fond of life and people and myself as you are and can put up with them as little. There are always a few such people who demand the utmost of life and yet cannot come to terms with its stupidity and crudeness.
Hermann Hesse
Putting words onto paper—when it is done as an honest act of search or connection, rather than as an act of manipulation, performance, self-aggrandizement or self-protection—is a holy act.
Pat Schneider
Love is when you meet someone who tells you something new about yourself.
André Breton
We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.
Herman Melville
God is always in control, even when you lose control of yourself or any situation; nothing changes His position.
Gugu Mona
~Don't forget to cheer for yourself, when you reach the finish line~
Charmaine J.Forde
how cruel i was to myself. giving you credit for my warmth simply because you had felt it. thinking it was you who gave me strength. wit. beauty. simply because you recognized it. as if i was already not those things before i met you. as if i did not remain all these once you left.
Rupi Kaur
You should love yourself to an extent where you can't let anyone take advantage of you, no matter who they are.
Gift Gugu Mona
Every hill becomes a mountain when one has to climb up it.
Anthony Liccione
He who limps is still walking.
Stanisław Jerzy Lec
Deeds of endurance, which seem ordinary in philosophy, are rare in conduct.
Thomas Hardy
Most people die, living their life paycheck to paycheck,trying to stretch out each dollar, as like a roll of toilet paper. Toiling each tissue, never quite wiping away all the shit from their asses, where the world always takes what little they flush, back into its deprived system, always hungry.
Anthony Liccione
History has to live with what was here,clutching and close to fumbling all we had -it is so dull and gruesome how we die,unlike writing, life never finishes.
Robert Lowell
Endurance is more important than truth because without endurance there can't be any truth. And truth means going to the end like you mean it. That way, death itself comes up short when it grabs
Charles Bukowski
Fly (poem from the book Blue Bridge)Delicate, / butterfly winged, / we vainly push against the sky, / each trying to find our place.Yes, we are going to die, / let's not beat about the bush. / Maybe today, maybe tomorrow, / maybe even years from now. Meanwhile, / we have someone who loves us, / someone to love. / Surely there is no need to hesitate.
Jay Woodman
A man dies still if he has done nothing, as one who has done much.
Homer
The fears we keep alive, will be a recurring haunt until it dies, or we do.
Anthony Liccione
Die! Die! Die in this love!If you die in this love,Your soul will be renewed. Die! Die! Don’t fear the death of that which is knownIf you die to the temporal, You will become timeless.
Jalaluddin Rumi
With me, the present is forever, and forever is always shifting, flowing, melting. This second is life. And when it is gone it is dead. But you can’t start over with each new second. You have to judge by what is dead. It’s like quicksand … hopeless from the start. A story, a picture, can renew sensation a little, but not enough, not enough. Nothing is real except the present, and already, I feel the weight of centuries smothering me. Some girl a hundred years ago once lived as I do. And she is dead. I am the present, but I know I, too, will pass. The high moment, the burning flash, come and are gone, continuous quicksand. And I don’t want to die.
Sylvia Plath
Love is poetry plus biology.
Lawrence Durrell
Give me such shows--give me the streets of Manhattan!
Walt Whitman
New York lesson 1 - never look lost. Lesson 2 - forget hallowed silences. It's the right of all Americans to talk at the tops of their voices.
Alison Fell
I believe in New Yorkers. Whether they've ever questioned the dream in which they live, I wouldn't know, because I won't ever dare ask that question.
Dylan Thomas
Life is amazingly simplified,” she wrote in her journal, “now that the recalcitrant forsythia has at last decided to come and blurt out springtime in petalled fountains of yellow. In spite of reams of papers to be written, life has snitched a cocaine sniff of sun-worship and salt air, and all looks promising.” She already adored New York.
Elizabeth Winder
You may discover that the very aspects which make it most unendurable are what gives New York its meaning. Its inconsistencies and anonymity, its seeming indifference to you and every other individual is really what makes it a safe haven for individuals everywhere (Maeve Brennan)
Elizabeth Winder
Meanwhile the temperature is getting hotter and hotter so no one can think clearly. No one perceives. No one cares. Insane madness come out like life is a terrific party.
Kathy Acker
New York is unruly, tangled. The city woos first, then mangles, then pastes back together in a fresh, dazzling mosaic.
Elizabeth Winder
New York City is the place where people come to invent, reinvent, or find the room they need to be who they wish to be.
Siri Hustvedt
The Bronx? No Thonx!
Ogden Nash
Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What do you see?—Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks glasses! of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster— tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are the green fields gone?
Herman Melville
Silence? What can New York-noisy, roaring, rumbling, tumbling, bustling, story, turbulent New York-have to do with silence? Amid the universal clatter, the incessant din of business, the all swallowing vortex of the great money whirlpool-who has any, even distant, idea of the profound repose......of silence?
Walt Whitman
I once started outto walk around the worldbut ended up in Brooklyn,that Bridge was too much for me.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time.
Sylvia Plath
O! how shall summer's honey breath hold out, / Against the wrackful siege of battering days?
William Shakespeare
Summer is the worst time of all to be alone. The earth is warm and lovely, free to go about in; and always somewhere in the distance there is a place where two people might be happy if only they were together. It is in the spring that one dreams of such places; one thinks of the summer which is coming, and the heart dreams of its friend.
Robert Nathan
Summer was a book of hope. That's why I loved and hated summers. Because they made me want to believe.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
summer is in me—clouds and lakes of shadows, rippling under the trees
John J. Geddes
Autumn stomps around outside the houselike an annoying little sister, tappingon all the shutters, kicking up the pilesof leaves you rake, pretending to howllike a wolf. But I'm glad she's here,so we can cuss at Summer together,pretending we don't even remember her name.
Karen Finneyfrock
In June we picked the clover,And sea-shells in July:There was no silence at the door,No word from the sky.A hand came out of AugustAnd flicked his life away:We had not time to bargain, mope,Moralize, or pray.
Cecil Day-Lewis
Cricket to us was more than play,It was a worship in the summer sun.
Edmund Blunden
I don't know how long I kept at it...I felt reasonably safe, streched out on the floor, and lay quite still.It didn't seem to be summer any more
Sylvia Plath
Summer's lease hath all too short a date.
William Shakespeare
Summer was here again. Summer, summer, summer. I loved and hated summers. Summers had a logic all their own and they always brought something out in me. Summer was supposed to be about freedom and youth and no school and possibilities and adventure and exploration. Summer was a book of hope. That's why I loved and hated summers. Because they made me want to believe.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
See, some guys prefer assesSome prefer titsAnd I’m not saying that I don’t like those bitsBut what’s more importantWhat supersedesIs a girl a with passion, wit and dreamsSo I want a girl who reads.
Mark Grist
Girl Without HandsWalking through the ruinson your way to workthat do not look like ruinswith the sunlight pouring overthe seen worldlike hail or meltedsilver, that brightand magnificent, each leafand stone quickened and specific in it,and you can't hold it,you can't hold any of it. Distance surrounds you,marked out by the ends of your armswhen they are stretched to their fullest.You can go no farther than this,you think, walking forward,pushing the distance in front of youlike a metal cart on wheelswith its barriers and horizontals.Appearance melts away from you,the offices and pyramidson the horizon shimmer and cease.No one can enter that circleyou have made, that clean circleof dead space you have madeand stay inside,mourning because it is clean.Then there's the girl, in the white dress,meaning purity, or the failureto be any colour. She has no hands, it's true.The scream that happened to the airwhen they were taken offsurrounds her now like an aureoleof hot sand, of no sound.Everything has bled out of her.Only a girl like thiscan know what's happened to you.If she were here she wouldreach out her arms towardsyou now, and touch youwith her absent handsand you would feel nothing, but you would betouched all the same.
Margaret Atwood
There are easier ways of making sense,the connoisseurship of gesture, for example.You hold a girl's face in your hands like a vase.You lift a gun from the glove compartmentand toss it out the window into the desert heat.
Billy Collins
I'm turning you into a girlchasing a butterfly, a she-wolfon a hilltop, & then back into a woman.
Yusef Komunyakaa
When every dream has turned to dust, and your highest hopes no longer soar.When places you once yearned to see, grow further away on distant shores.When every night you close your eyes, and long inside for something more.Remember this and only this, if nothing else you can recall—There was a life a girl once led, where you were loved the most of all.
Lang Leav
I hate to be what is called a clever girl—there are too many of that sort now!
Thomas Hardy
I'll be the invisible girl,Everyone passing through me,No one touching.
Gary Soto