Quotes by Poets - Page 92

So I draw because I feel like it might be my only real chance to escape the reservation.
Sherman Alexie
Or because they hope these walls of books will deaden the drumming of the demon in their ears
Louis MacNeice
the idea that we are so capable of love but still choose to be toxic
Rupi Kaur
Mistakes are a fact of life: It is the response to the error that counts.
Nikki Giovanni
When a man hath no freedom to fight for at home,Let him combat for that of his neighbours;Let him think of the glories of Greece and of Rome,And get knocked on the head for his labours.To do good to Mankind is the chivalrous plan,And is always as nobly requited;Then battle fro Freedom wherever you can,And, if not shot or hanged, you'll get knighted.
George Gordon Byron
The day of battle dawned pink as the fresh-bitten thigh of a maiden.
Roger Zelazny
Meantime the clang of the bows and the shouts of the combatants mixed fearfully with the sound of the trumpets, and drowned the groans of those who fell, and lay rolling defenceless beneath the feet of the horses. The splendid armour of the combatants was now defaced with dust and blood, and gave way at every stroke of the sword and battle-axe. The gay plumage, shorn from the crests, drifted upon the breeze like snowflakes. All that was beautiful in the martial array had disappeared, and what was now visibke was only calculated to awaken terror or compassion.
Walter Scott
If nothing lasts forever, then I am forever nothing.
Anthony Liccione
I have you fast in my fortress,And will not let you depart,But put you down into the dungeonIn the round-tower of my heart.And there will I keep you forever,Yes, forever and a day,Till the walls shall crumble to ruin,And moulder in dust away.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
a long time ago when cataclysms were commonas sneezes and land masses slidaround the globe looking for placesto settle down and become continents,someone introduced us at a party.
Billy Collins
I invited him over and he stayed forever. I feed him all my bread, the old peppers turned to mush & fluorescent mold, the chicken thighs unthawed & boneless. He ask for more so I give him my left leg. He ask for more & I give him my lungs & lips. More still, and there goes my bladder. He eats it all, all of me, eats the whole damn house, & I live forever in him or maybe it's the other way around. I swallowed. I swallowed him whole & didn't even notice him thrashing inside me.
Danez Smith
I want the fever to grab me forever and want you to be my fever.
Suman Pokhrel
Like the coffin was settling down for a long, long nap, for a forever nap.
Sherman Alexie
It can't last forever. Others have thought such things, in bad times before this, and they were always right, they did get out one way or another, and it didn't last forever. Although for them it may have lasted all the forever they had.
Margaret Atwood
It can’t last forever. Others have thought suchthings, in bad times before this, and they were always right, they did get out one way or another, and it didn’tlast forever. Although for them it may have lasted all the forever they had.
Margaret Atwood
your life can change in an instant. that instant can last forever.
Laura Kasischke
Science fiction, to me, has not only things that wouldn't happen, but other planets.
Margaret Atwood
Love means to commit yourself without guarantee.
Anne Campbell
As once I loved you in my mortal flesh, without it now I love you still.
Dante Alighieri
Chance is your godThough you're falling free you will land hard
Criss Jami
I believe the stars are the headlights of angels driving from heaven to save usto save us...Won't you look at the sky?They're driving from heaven into our eyes. And though final words are so hard to devise, I promise that I'll always remember your pretty eyes.
David Berman
a lesson must be livedin order to be learnedand the clarity to see and stop this nowthat is what i've earned
Ani DiFranco
There is a place where the sidewalk endsAnd before the street begins,And there the grass grows soft and white,And there the sun burns crimson bright,And there the moon-bird rests from his flightTo cool in the peppermint wind.Let us leave this place where the smoke blows blackAnd the dark street winds and bends.Past the pits where the asphalt flowers growWe shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow,And watch where the chalk-white arrows goTo the place where the sidewalk ends.Yes we'll walk with a walk that is measured and slow,And we'll go where the chalk-white arrows go,For the children, they mark, and the children, they knowThe place where the sidewalk ends.
Shel Silverstein
The past is a pebble in my shoe.
Poe
Remember when I moved in you and the holy dove was moving too, and every breath we drew was, "Hallelujah.
Leonard Cohen
The world's supply of heartache is secure. There's love and hate and mayhem everywhere.
Thomas Lynch
I look into my glass,And view my wasting skin,And say, 'Would God it came to passMy heart had shrunk as thin!
Thomas Hardy
Sadness flies away on the wings of time.
Jean de La Fontaine
I have so much health problems, but I believe I could still make it through.
Jonathan Anthony Burkett
Fairy tales have always been about getting through the worst of everything, the darkest and the deepest and the bloodiest of events. They are about surviving, and what you look like when you emerge from the trial. The reason we keep telling fairy tales over and over, that we need to keep telling them, is that the trials change. So the stories change too, and the heroines and villains and magical objects, to keep them true. Fairy tales are the closets where the world keeps its skeletons.
Catherynne M. Valente
But she never could keep it straight. All the letters, the acronyms, the codes, the colors, changing like musical chairs, every week, every month. Games demons play. It meant nothing to her, except in a charming sort of way, as it had when Naganya wanted to play at interrogation, while the rest of them wanted chess.
Catherynne M. Valente
In Russian fairy tales, the narrative flows a little differently. In those stories, you won’t find a tale for Cinderella, one for Snow White, one for Rapunzel. Instead, a peculiar cast of characters recurs over and over, in nearly every story, performing different acts and suffering different sorrows, but remaining the same. Ivan the Fool. Yelena the Bright. Baba Yaga. Vasilisa the Brave. Koschei the Deathless.
Catherynne M. Valente
OMG. He's a gift shop, a lamb kebab with mint,/a solar panel poetry machine with biceps. He's the path/through the dark woods, the light on the page, a postcard/from the castle and a one-way ticket there. He's the most/astounding arrangement of molecules ever!/Just look at those tights! An honest-to-God prince at last.
Ron Koertge
I tell them: don’t depend on a woodsman in the third act. I tell them: look for sets of three, or seven. I tell them: there’s always a way to survive. I tell them: you can’t force fidelity. I tell them: don’t make bargains that involve major surgery. I tell them: you don’t have to lie still and wait for someone to tell you how to live. I tell them: it’s all right to push her into the oven. She was going to hurt you. I tell them: she couldn’t help it. She just loved her own children more. I tell them: everyone starts out young and brave. It’s what you do with it that matters. I tell them: you can share that bear with your sister. I tell them: no-one can stay silent forever. I tell them: it’s not your fault. I tell them: mirrors lie. I tell them: you can wear those boots, if you want them. You can lift that sword. It was always your sword. I tell them: the apple has two sides. I tell them: just because he woke you up doesn’t mean you owe him anything. I tell them: his name is Rumplestiltskin.
Catherynne M. Valente
Think what you would have been now, if instead of being fed with tales and old wives' fables in childhood, you had been crammed with geography and natural history!
Charles Lamb
I will tell you, too, that every fairy tale has a moral. The moral of my story may be that love is a constraint, as strong as any belt. And this is certainly true, which makes it a good moral. Or it may be that we are all constrained in some way, either in our bodies, or in our hearts or minds, an Empress as well as the woman who does her laundry. ... Perhaps it is that a shoemaker's daughter can bear restraint less easily than an aristocrat, that what he can bear for three years she can endure only for three days. ... Or perhaps my moral is that our desire for freedom is stronger than love or pity. That is a wicked moral, or so the Church has taught us. But I do not know which moral is the correct one. And that is also the way of a fairy tale.
Theodora Goss
The way to read a fairy tale is to throw yourself in.
W.H. Auden
You don't have to have to be rich like Oprah Winfrey or Rihanna to make a difference in somebody's life-To some people ten dollars feels like ten million dollars
Charmaine J.Forde
Birds and periodic blood.Old recapitulations.The fox, panting, fire-eyed,gone to earth in my chest.How beautiful we are,he and I, with our auburnpelts, our trails of blood,our miracle escapes,our whiplash panic flogging us onto new miracles!They’ve supplied us with pillsfor bleeding, pills for panic.Wash them down the sink.This is truth, then:dull needle groping for the spinal fluid,weak acid in the bottom of the cup,foreboding, foreboding.No one tells the truth about truth,that it’s what the fox sees from his scuffled burrow:dull-jawed, onrushingkiller, being thatinanely single-mindedwill have our skins at last.
Adrienne Rich
Sweat seems to bleed / like pride from their bones.
Cameron Conaway
SpleenJe suis comme le roi d'un pays pluvieux,Riche, mais impuissant, jeune et pourtant très vieux,Qui, de ses précepteurs méprisant les courbettes,S'ennuie avec ses chiens comme avec d'autres bêtes.Rien ne peut l'égayer, ni gibier, ni faucon,Ni son peuple mourant en face du balcon.Du bouffon favori la grotesque balladeNe distrait plus le front de ce cruel malade;Son lit fleurdelisé se transforme en tombeau,Et les dames d'atour, pour qui tout prince est beau,Ne savent plus trouver d'impudique toilettePour tirer un souris de ce jeune squelette.Le savant qui lui fait de l'or n'a jamais puDe son être extirper l'élément corrompu,Et dans ces bains de sang qui des Romains nous viennent,Et dont sur leurs vieux jours les puissants se souviennent,II n'a su réchauffer ce cadavre hébétéOù coule au lieu de sang l'eau verte du Léthé //I'm like the king of a rain-country, richbut sterile, young but with an old wolf's itch,one who escapes his tutor's monologues,and kills the day in boredom with his dogs;nothing cheers him, darts, tennis, falconry,his people dying by the balcony;the bawdry of the pet hermaphroditeno longer gets him through a single night;his bed of fleur-de-lys becomes a tomb;even the ladies of the court, for whomall kings are beautiful, cannot put onshameful enough dresses for this skeleton;the scholar who makes his gold cannot inventwashes to cleanse the poisoned element;even in baths of blood, Rome's legacy,our tyrants' solace in senility,he cannot warm up his shot corpse, whose foodis syrup-green Lethean ooze, not blood.— Robert Lowell, from Marthiel & Jackson Matthews, eds., The Flowers of Evil (NY: New Directions, 1963)
Charles Baudelaire
I try to grasp the colour of my blood and all I feel is life slipping through the colourless veins.
Munia Khan
She would roll up her sleeves and dispense with sentimentality, and do whatever blood-soaked, bad-smelling thing had to be done. She would become adept with axes.
Margaret Atwood
And maybe you can’t know me now.   Maybe I’m just blood. Whatever that’s for.
Alice Notley
Each October I walk into the woodslooking for bones: rabbit skulls,a grackle spine, the pelvis of a deerwith the blood bleached out. What diedin the lush of roses and mintshines out from the tangle of twigsthat bind it to the placeof its last leaping. The living lackthat kind of clarity. In late April,when the water spreads out and outtill everything is lilies and seepage,there is only the mystery of tracks,a rustle receding in the many reeds.And so the bones accumulateacross my windowsill: the flightlesswings and exaggerated grins,the silent unmoving remindersof where the glories of April lead.
Charles Rafferty
O, you the goldfish ofthe swamp of my blood.Let your drunkenness be pretty.You are drinking me.
Forough Farrokhzad
Don't be superior. Everyone drinks blood. Blood is a word that means alive. You can do without almost anything: arms, legs, teeth, hope. But you can't do without blood. Lose even a little and you grow slow and stupid and not yourself at all. We are all of us beautiful and complicated vessels for carrying blood the way a bottle carries wine. I suppose you think there's no blood in your roast beef? Life eats life. Blood makes you move, makes you blush, makes the pulse pound in your brow when you see your love walking across a street toward you, makes your very thoughts fly through your brain. Blood is everything and everything is blood.
Catherynne M. Valente
The pig was soon dissected and its blood filled the bucket in the bottom of which a patch of sky was reflected darkly. It had surrendered to the vortex of life and his breathing.
Michel Fardoulis-Lagrange
Blood was flowing – in Bluebeard’s house, in the abattoirs, in the circuses where God had set his seal to whiten the windows. Blood and Milk flowed together.
Arthur Rimbaud
Here, are the stiffening hills, here, the rich cargoCongealed in the dark arteries,Old veinsThat hold Glamorgan's blood.The midnight miner in the secret seams,Limb, life, and
Mervyn Peake
Without labor nothing prospers.
Sophocles
Yet have I oft been beaten in the field, And sometimes hurt," said I, "but scorn'd to yield." He smiled and said: "Alas! thou dost not see, My son, how great a flame's prepared for thee.
Francesco Petrarca
Let Fortune empty her whole quiver on me, I have a soul that, like an ample shield, Can take in all, and verge enough for more; Fate was not mine, nor am I Fate's: Souls know no conquerors.
John Dryden
Investigation after declaration of submission leads astray.
Wasif Ali Wasif
Sleep is a mirror of life in which can be seen the reflection of death.
Wasif Ali Wasif
If a society has no moral foundations then success is a threat. Every successful person thinks everyone else is a failure, and this is the proof of failure. Conquering the world and dying empty-handed on foreign shores is a paradox of such success.
Wasif Ali Wasif
When the eye becomes the heart, the heart becomes the eye.
Wasif Ali Wasif
He who has no light in his heart, what will he gain from the festival of lamps.
Wasif Ali Wasif
When the child is ill, the mother will know how to pray.
Wasif Ali Wasif
In reality, every reality is a veil over reality.
Wasif Ali Wasif