Quotes by Poets - Page 99

Truth, like diamond, has many facets.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
The glories of our blood and stateAre shadows, not substantial things;There is no armor against Fate.Death lays his icy hand on kings...
James Shirley
The idiotic industry of an ant building his hill in the path of a glacier, and imagining that he is free.
John Clellon Holmes
No one has yet tested the pencilTo see how many words it can write
Xi Chuan
Re-examine all that you have been told, dismiss that which insults your soul.
Walt Whitman
BAIT GOATThere is a distance where magnets pull, we feel, having held them back. Likewise there is a distance where words attract. Set one out like a bait goat and wait and seven others will approach. But watch out: roving packs can pull your word away. You find your stake yanked and some rough bunch to thank.
Kay Ryan
I suddenly began to realize that everybody in America is a natural-born thief.
Jack Kerouac
Let me breathe You in,Let me taste the meaning of sublime;Let my soul mingle with You,Let me be one with divine!
Neelam Saxena Chandra
The feet and their tappingWrite many a lovely coupletThe body dances to your rhythm O lordAfter all, you are the master and I a puppet
Neelam Saxena Chandra
Not so on Man; him through their malice fall'n,Father of Mercy and Grace, thou didst not doomSo strictly, but much more to pity incline:No sooner did thy dear and only SonPerceive thee purpos'd not to doom frail ManSo strictly, but much more to pity inclin'd,He to appease thy wrath, and end the strifeOf mercy and Justice in thy face discern'd,Regardless of the Bliss wherein hee satSecond to thee, offer'd himself to dieFor man's offence. O unexampl'd love,Love nowhere to be found less than Divine!Hail Son of God, Saviour of Men, thy NameShall be the copious matter of my SongHenceforth, and never shall my Harp thy praiseForget, nor from thy Father's praise disjoin.
John Milton
the dank night is sweeping down from the skyand the setting stars incline our heads to sleep.
Virgil
The signs of the old flame, I know them well.I pray that the earth gape deep enough to take me downor the almighty Father blast me with one bolt to the shades,the pale, glimmering shades in hell, the pit of night,before I dishonor you, my conscience, break your laws.
Virgil
..and why the winter suns so rush to bathe themselves in the seaand what slows down the nights to a long lingering crawl...
Virgil
When Heaven has an earthquake you fall to your knees and feel through the rubble to find the pieces of God. When my eternal, temple-blessed marriage shattered and everything that had been meaningful lay in jumbled shards around me, I had to slowly and carefully pick up every single piece and examine it, turning it over and over, to see if it was worthy to keep and to use in building a new house of meaning. As I gathered the broken pieces of God, I used only my own authority, only my own relationship with the divine, and the good, small voice that speaks inside me, to appraise them. I threw away many, and I kept many, assembling the bright pieces into One Great Thought. I asked only, "Do I see God's fingerprints on this? Does this little piece feel godly? Does it speak of love?" That made it easy. I was forever finished with the insane attempt to love a God who hurts me. When I picked up the little pieces of God-ordained polygamy, I smiled because there was no question. I thanked the God of Love, and threw that piece away.
Carol Lynn Pearson
He loved a lifeless thing and he was utterly and hopelessly wretched.
Ovid
...She nourishes the poison in her veins and is consumed by a secret fire.
Virgil
Sweet Echo, sweetest nymph that liv'st unseenWithin thy airy shellBy slow Meander's margent green,And in the violet-imbroider'd valeWhere the love-lorn nightingaleNightly to thee her sad song mourneth well:Canst thou not tell me of a gentle pairThat likest thy Narcissus are?
John Milton
Neleus...The son of Poseidon!A birth that came from the mate of a god and a mortal woman.Not plain at all!So it was, when the gods love, mate as humans with humans!From such a union two children were born, both boys.Their mother placed them in a small boat, and dropped it into the sea.The sea loved and saved them, children of Neptune were anyway!The river itself is connected with the sea, fresh water with salt, the land and the sea..."The sea herself guided us like legendary heroes into this new place ..".It couldn't be differently.Children of the Gods aren't we, our race? Have similar origin and similar history! Could not abandoned us, prey and exposed, like the two babies?
Katerina Kostaki
unsignificantlyoff the coastthere wasa splash quite unnoticedthis was Icarus drowning
William Carlos Williams
So by the time the morning came, Odysseus and I were indeed friends, as Odysseus had promised we would be. Or let me put it another way: I myself had developed friendly feelings towards him - more than that, loving and passionate ones - and he behaved as if he reciprocated them. Which is not quite the same thing.
Margaret Atwood
Little did they suspect that the years would end by wearing away the disharmony.Little did they suspect that La Mancha and Montiel and the knight's frail figure would be, for the future, no less poetic than Sinbad's haunts or Ariosto's vast geographies.For myth is at the beginning of literature, and also at its end.
Jorge Luis Borges
There is at least one truth to every myth.
Suzy Kassem
Once again Love, that loosener of limbs,bittersweet and inescapable, crawling thing,seizes me.
Sappho
Anytime one tries to take fragments of one's personal mythology and make them understandable to the whole world, one reaches back to the past. It must be dreamed again.
Assotto Saint
THE UNICORN: The saintly hermit, midway through his prayersstopped suddenly, and raised his eyes to witnessthe unbelievable: for there before him stoodthe legendary creature, startling white, thathad approached, soundlessly, pleading with his eyes.The legs, so delicately shaped, balanced abody wrought of finest ivory. And ashe moved, his coat shone like reflected moonlight.High on his forehead rose the magic horn, the signof his uniqueness: a tower held upright by his alert, yet gentle, timid gait.The mouth of softest tints of rose and grey, whenopened slightly, revealed his gleaming teeth,whiter than snow. The nostrils quivered faintly:he sought to quench his thirst, to rest and find repose.His eyes looked far beyond the saint's enclosure,reflecting vistas and events long vanished,and closed the circle of this ancient mystic legend.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Time, which sees all things, has found you out.
Sophocles
He lived with his mother, father and sister; had a room of his own, with the fourth-floor windows staring on seas of rooftops and the glitter of winter nights when home lights brownly wave beneath the heater whiter blaze of stars--those stars that in the North, in the clear nights, all hang frozen tears by the billions, with January Milky Ways like silver taffy, veils of frost in the stillness, huge blinked, throbbing to the slow beat of time and universal blood.
Jack Kerouac
In winter night Massachusetts Street is dismal, the ground's frozen cold, the ruts and pock holes have ice, thin snow slides over the jagged black cracks. The river is frozen to stolidity, waits; hung on a shore with remnant show-off boughs of June-- Ice skaters, Swedes, Irish girls, yellers and singers--they throng on the white ice beneath the crinkly stars that have no altar moon, no voice, but down heavy tragic space make halyards of Heaven on in deep, to where the figures fantastic amassed by scientists cream in a cold mass; the veil of Heaven on tiaras and diadems of a great Eternity Brunette called night.
Jack Kerouac
It is growing cold. Winter is putting footsteps in the meadow. What whiteness boasts that sun that comes into this wood! One would say milk-colored maidens are dancing on the petals of orchids. How coldly burns our sun! One would say its rays of light are shards of snow, one imagines the sun lives upon a snow crested peak on this day. One would say she is a woman who wears a gown of winter frost that blinds the eyes. Helplessness has weakened me. Wandering has wearied my legs.
Roman Payne
And that was the thing: you couldn't just stand there gawking at the world. A car slipped by. Then another. It was as if she'd stood frozen by the river of the world and gratefully stepped back into it, resuming her place... The world waited, cold, grim, alive, beautiful. There was no saying no to it.
Liz Rosenberg
Ah for pittie, wil ranke Winters rage,These bitter blasts neuer ginne tasswage?The keene cold blowes throug my beaten hyde,All as I were through the body gryde.My ragged rontes all shiver and shake,As doen high Towers in an earthquake:They wont in the wind wagge their wrigle tailes,Perke as Peacock: but nowe it auales.
Edmund Spenser
Snow is diamonds for a faery's feet;Blithely and bonnily she trips along,Her lips a-carol with a merry song,And in her eyes the meaning... Life is sweet!
Ruby Archer
I was washing outside in the darkness,the sky burning with rough stars,and the starlight, salt on an axe-blade.The cold overflows the barrel.The gate's locked,the land's grim as its conscience.I don't think they'll find the new weaving,finer than truth, anywhere.Star-salt is melting in the barrel,icy water is blackening,death's growing purer, misfortune saltier,the earth's moving nearer to truth and to dread.
Innokenty Annensky
Dream of the Tundra SwanDusk felland the cold came creeping,cam prickling into our hearts.As we tucked beaksinto feathers and settled for sleep,our wings knew.That night, we dreamed the journey:ice-blue sky and the yodel of flight,the sun's pale wafer,the crisp drink of clouds.We dreamed ourselves so far aloftthat the earth curved beneath usand nothing sang but a whistling vee of light.When we woke, we were covered with snow.We rose in a billow of white.
Joyce Sidman
In the summer heat the reapers say, “We have seen her dancing with the autumn leaves, and we saw a drift of snow in her hair.
Kahlil Gibran
I've lived to see my longings die"I've lived to se my longings die:My dreams and I have grown apart;Now only sorrow haunts my eye,The wages of a bitter heart.Beneath the storms of hostile fate,My flowery wreath has faded fast;I live alone and sadly waitTo see when death will come at last.Just so, when the winds in winter moanAnd snow descends in frigid flakes,Upon a naked branch, alone,The final leaf of summer shakes!
Alexander Pushkin
Isn't it true that a pleasant house makes winter more poetic, and doesn't winter add to the poetry of a house?
Charles Baudelaire
They gathered after mass, sang hymns and read. Everyone had grown even more serene; beneath the sisters' kerchiefs it was as if there were no faces. When they met Daryushka — it was as if they bowed down lower. She was walking in the Spirit.Daryushka was entirely serene. She was thinking of nothing, had turned within herself, peering inside; and inside her all was smiling ever so gently.After the storm clear days came, frosty, crackling, clear days. Snow and sky, snow and sky, and the sky was even brighter, whiter, from the snow — and the snow sparkled with blue fires from the sky.Daryushka went down to the river with buckets, to the ice-hole. She went down to the landing alone... Snow, and sky, and brilliance...("He Has Descended")
Zinaida Gippius
Snake's LullabyBrother, sister, flick your tongueand taste the flakes of autumn sun.Use these last few hours of goldto travel, travel toward the cold.Before your coils grow stiff and dull,your heartbeat slows to winter's lull,seek the sink of sheltered stonesthat safely cradle sleeping bones.Brother, sister, find the waysback to the deep and tranquil bays,and 'round each other twist and foldto weave a heavy cloak of cold.
Joyce Sidman
People make a great deal of the flowers of spring and the leaves of autumn, but for me a night like this, with a clear moon shining on snow, is the best -- and there is not a trace of color in it. I cannot describe the effect it has on me, weird and unearthly somehow. I do not understand people who find a winter evening forbidding.
Murasaki Shikibu
As the trees turned red, then white, then naked as pitchforks, Margot and Xiao Chen immersed themselves in several forests' worth of pages, and I watched, tortured, as brick after brick of a new development was laid on the wasteland of Midtown West like slabs of gold bullion.
Carolyn Jess-Cooke
I'll be your blanket, baby. Wrap yourself up in me. Let me give you shelter, in the winter of this world.
John Mark Green
If we had no winter the spring would not be so pleasant.
Anne Bradstreet
And after winter folweth grene May.
Geoffrey Chaucer
Buds in the snow—the deadly fightbetween two birds
Jack Kerouac
Winter is icummen in,Lhude sing Goddamm,Raineth drop and staineth slopAnd how the wind doth ramm!Sing: Goddamm.Skiddeth bus and sloppeth us,An ague hath my ham.Freezeth river, turneth liverDamn you, sing: Goddamm.Goddamm, Goddamm, tis why I am,Goddamm.So 'gainst the winter's balmSing Goddamm, damm, sing GoddammSing Goddamm, sing Goddamm,DAMM.
Ezra Pound
We were letting go of October, relinquishing color,readying ourselves for streets lacquered with ice,the town closed like a walnut, locked inside the cold.
Mark Perlberg
It is deep January. The sky is hard.The stalks are firmly rooted in ice.It is in this solitude, a syllable,Out of these gawky flitterings,Intones its single emptiness,The savagest hollow of winter-sound.
Wallace Stevens
I've forgotten about these things all winter, but here they are again, and when I see them I remember them, I know them, I greet them as if they are home.
Margaret Atwood
Winter walks up and down the town swinging his censer, but no smoke or sweetness comes from it, only the sour, metallic frankness of salt and snow.
Mary Oliver
Silence can always be broken by the sound
Of footsteps walking over frozen groundIn winter when the melancholy treesStand abject and let their branches freeze
Merrill Moore
The tunnel of winter had settled over our lives, ushered in by that great official Hoodwink, the end of daylight saving time. Personally I would vote for one more hour of light on winter evenings instead of the sudden, extra-early blackout. Whose idea was it to jilt us this way, leaving us in cold November with our unsaved remnants of daylight petering out before the workday ends? In my childhood, as early as that, I remember observing the same despair every autumn: the feeling that sunshine, summertime, and probably life itself had passed me by before I'd even finished a halfway decent tree fort. But mine is not to question those who command the springing forward and the falling back. I only vow each winter to try harder to live like a potato, with its tacit understanding that time is time, no matter what any clock might say. I get through the hibernation months by hovering as close as possible to the woodstove without actual self-immolation, and catching up on my reading, cheered at regular intervals by the excess of holidays that collect in a festive logjam at the outflow end of our calendar.
Barbara Kingsolver
Song falls silent, music is dumb,But the air burns with their fragrance,And white winter, on its knees,Observes everything with reverent attention.
Anna Akhmatova
Are ye the ghosts of fallen leaves, O flakes of snow, For which, through naked trees, the winds A-mourning go?
John B. Tabb
People say the beach is the great equaliserWho are they kidding?Sit at Bondi and watch the boys flexAnd the girls walk bolt uprightIt looks like a nightmare episode of Baywatch.The true equaliser is the mountain coldAnd stacks of cold flung togetherMaybe then we’d listen to what each other is sayingInstead of checking out the best bods.And as I wrap another layerAround my Size 10I think of Jack’s favourite saying:“today’s tan is tomorrow’s cancer”I walk outsideAnd whistle at the wind.
Steven Herrick
When icicles hang by the wall, And Dick the shepherd blows his nail,And Tom bears logs into the hall, And milk comes frozen home in pail, When blood is nipp'd, and ways be foul,Then nightly sings the staring owl, To-whit! To-who!—a merry note, While greasy Joan doth keel the pot. When all aloud the wind doe blow,And coughing drowns the parson's saw, And birds sit brooding in the snow, And Marian's nose looks red and raw, When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl, Then nightly sings the staring owl,To-whit! To-who!—a merry note, While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.
William Shakespeare
Nothing is as tedious as the limping days,When snowdrifts yearly cover all the ways,And ennui, sour fruit of incurious gloom,Assumes control of fate’s immortal loom
Charles Baudelaire
The heart can get really cold if all you've known is winter.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
To me, every cubic inch of space is a miracle.
Walt Whitman
Intelligence is naked without wisdom. Wisdom dresses interestingly with intelligence.
Santosh Kalwar