Poetry Quotes - Page 5

There is no happiness like mine.I have been eating poetry.

a generation:the black night gave me black eyesstill I use them to seek the light

Some guys get fifteen years, others get life.So death for Edbut not for everyone.Cos it all depends on who you kill and where you kill them too.Like,don't shoot a white cop in Walker Country, Texas. If that's your plan, do it in Arlington, New York- no needles of electric chairs there.Just doesn't seen fair to me.

Sarah Crossan

So many questionsbut nothing to say,in this current momentwe are still so farfrom the answers.

Liz Newman

We cannot always cry at the right timeand who is to say which time is right?

Madeleine L'Engle

Outside the study hall the next fall, the fall of our senior year, the Nabisco plant baked sweet white bread twice a week. If I sharpened a pencil at the back of the room I could smell the baking bread and the cedar shavings from the pencil.... Pretty soon all twenty of us - our class - would be leaving. A core of my classmates had been together since kindergarten. I'd been there eight years. We twenty knew by bored heart the very weave of each other's socks....The poems I loved were in French, or translated from the Chinese, Portuguese, Arabic, Sanskrit, Greek. I murmured their heartbreaking sylllables. I knew almost nothing of the diverse and energetic city I lived in. The poems whispered in my ear the password phrase, and I memorized it behind enemy lines: There is a world. There is another world. I knew already that I would go to Hollins College in Virginia; our headmistress sent all her problems there, to her alma mater. "For the English department," she told me.... But, "To smooth off her rough edges," she had told my parents. They repeated the phrase to me, vividly. I had hopes for my rough edges. I wanted to use them as a can opener, to cut myself a hole in the world's surface, and exit through it. Would I be ground, instead, to a nub? Would they send me home, an ornament to my breed, in a jewelry bag?

Annie Dillard

And in uttering thatExcellently executed truthYou become an artist too

Maddy Kobar

When Verlaine and Rimbaud were young,” [Snyder] said, they were protesting the iron-grip bourgeois rationality had on all aspects of nineteenth-century French culture— the manners, the view of reality, and the exclusion of ‘the wild’ from public life. Rationality in business and society were dominant values. ‘Deranging the senses’ was one strategy artists like Verlaine and Rimbaud employed to break free of that.“Today,” he continued, “the bourgeoisie is sociopathic, overindulged, distracted, spoiled beyond measure, and unable to restrain its gluttony, even in the face of pending planetary destruction. In the face of such a threat, it has, by necessity, become the responsibility of the artist to model health and sanity.

Peter Coyote

As artists, we create the beautyWe are too afraid to live outAnd search, but always fall just shyOf finding what life is about.

Justin Wetch

I promise permanence. I promise persistence. I promise that falling in love was just the beginning for us.

Liz Newman

Metaphor is a slippery eel, if it wasn't for its shock I'd stick to the easy catch of prose.

David Joseph Cribbin

The familiar song of a night-singing nightingale rises from somewhere in the garden. A nightingale that in this season of cold should not be in the garden, a nightingale that in a thousand verses of Iranian poetry, in the hours of darkness, for the love of a red rose and in sorrow of its separation from it, has forever sung and will forever sing.

Shahriar Mandanipour

There is so much want. I feel it so much that I am water, a river of want, pooled in the shape of a girl named Cassia.

Ally Condie

She lives the poetry she cannot write.

Oscar Wilde

Reading the very best writers—let us say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy—is not going to make us better citizens. Art is perfectly useless, according to the sublime Oscar Wilde, who was right about everything. He also told us that all bad poetry is sincere. Had I the power to do so, I would command that these words be engraved above every gate at every university, so that each student might ponder the splendor of the insight.

Harold Bloom

She lives in the poetry she cannot write.

Oscar Wilde

Now that Karen has been resurrected, I can travel beyond the black mirror. I can discover who I have lost with thefloating hearts and severed heads of my medicine. I must now whisper my other friends back too. I’m sad they’re gone…sad and blue.

Nicholaus Patnaude

A vast field opened like a blossoming tulip, flowers blooming in the rippling airs of spring. High and frothy trees hugged air and sun as they gallantly cast a shade over the earth. On the horizon a florid vessel of mountains trailed to the never-ending, blue as memories distant, poised as statues embroidered into time’s eternal drift.

Pablo Andrés Wunderlich Padilla

Poetry is an awareness of the world, a particular way of relating to reality.

Andrei Tarkovsky

unsignificantlyoff the coastthere wasa splash quite unnoticedthis was Icarus drowning

William Carlos Williams

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

Snow harder! Snow more!Snow blizzards galore!I can’t get enoughOf the fluffy white stuff!Snow! Snow! Snow!Snow a ton! Snow a heap!Snow ten feet deep!I wouldn’t cryIf it snowed til July.Snow! Snow! Snow!

Paul F. Kortepeter

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

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

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

The summer in youcalms the winter in me.

Saiber

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

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

Buds in the snow—the deadly fightbetween two birds

Jack Kerouac

We distance ourselves for protection,Wear scarves when it’s cold. What seems most outlandish in our autobiography Is what really happened.

Steve Abbott

Could any State on Earth Immortall be,Venice by Her rare Goverment is She;Venice Great Neptunes Minion, still a Mayd,Though by the warrlikst Potentats assayed;Yet She retaines Her Virgin-waters pure,Nor any Forren mixtures can endure;Though, Syren-like on Shore and Sea, Her FaceEnchants all those whom once She doth embrace,Nor is ther any can Her bewty prizeBut he who hath beheld her with his Eyes:Those following Leaves display, if well observed,How she long Her Maydenhead preserved,How for sound prudence She still bore the Bell;Whence may be drawn this high-fetchd parallel,Venus and Venice are Great Queens in their degree,Venus is Queen of Love, Venice of Policie.

James Howell

The sea can do craziness, it can do smooth, it can lie down like silk breathing or toss havoc shoreward; it can give gifts or withhold all; it can rise, ebb, froth like an incoming frenzy of fountains, or it can sweet-talk entirely. As I can too, and so, no doubt, can you, and you.

Mary Oliver

Searching my heart for its true sorrow, This is the thing I find to be: That I am weary of words and people, Sick of the city, wanting the sea.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

I will find comfort in the rhythm of the sea.

Charlotte Eriksson

You are the sick prince of my cerise innovations and in your drowning caresses I walk the sea

Frank O'Hara

No non-poetic account of reality can be complete.

John Myhill

The responsibility of any science, any pure pursuit, is ultimately to itself, and on this point physics, philosophy, and poetry unite with Satan in their determination not to serve. Any end is higher than utility, when ends are up.

William H. Gass

Answer Professor Mandell’s letter when you get a chance and the patience. Ask him not to send me any more poetry books. I already have enough for 1 year anyway. I am quite sick of it anyway. A man walks along the beach and unfortunately gets hit in the head by a cocoanut. His head unfortunately cracks open in two halves. Then his wife comes along the beach singing a song and sees the 2 halves and recognizes them and cries heart breakingly. That is exactly where I am tired of poetry. Supposing the lady just picks up the 2 halves and shouts into them very angrily “Stop that!” Do not mention this when you answer his letter, however. It is quite controversial and Mrs. Mandell is a poet besides.

J.D. Salinger

What’s the use of writing poetry for your peers? I don’t think I should sell my poetry to other poets. If that’s who my audience is, I’m dead, I’m not going to make any money.

Harley King

Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don't know you know.

Adrienne Rich

Poets sing our human music for us.

Carol Ann Duffy

He is smitten on the brain, -he reads and writes verses! I caught him in the act! Fools might say he was inspired; but I know it is the first and worst symptom of lunacy. All other maniacs have lucid intervals; some are curable; but the madness of poets, dogs, and musicians, is past hope. Earth possesses no remedy, science no cure.

Edward John Trelawny

Did you know that Bharatiyar used the pen name “Shelley-dasan”? He admired the poems of Shelley so deeply that he wrote under the name “Shelley’s servant”. Wasn’t that a wonderful gesture of humility by someonewho was such a great poet himself? And later, Bharatiyar had his own dasan, the poet Subburathinam, who tookthe pen name Bharathidasan. Subburathinam’s poetry inspired yet another poet who wrote as Surada, short for Subburathina-dasan. And to think this long chain of inspiration spans centuries, going back to the poets who inspired Wordsworth, who inspired Shelley, who inspired our own Bharati.

Indu Muralidharan

For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word or a verse and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem. The men of more delicate ear write down these cadences more faithfully, and these transcripts, though imperfect, become the songs of the nations.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The poet must be more useful than any other member if his tribe.

Comte de Lautréamont

There are good reasons to learn how to read. Poetry isn't one of them... Why can't poets just say what they want to say and then shut up?

Gary D. Schmidt

Nature enhances her beauty, to the eye of loving men, from their belief that the poet is beholding her shows at the same time. He is isolated among his contemporaries by truth and by his art, but with this consolation in his pursuits, that they will draw all men sooner or later. For all men live by truth and stand in need of expression. In love, in art, in avarice, in politics, in labor, in games, we study to utter our painful secret. The man is only half himself, the other half is his expression.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Young poets are too apt to consider themselves “children of the mist” – they must dwell apart from men and contemn their kind, or they fear they shall be only taken for common-place characters. They forget that poetry is the language which speaks to all hearts—and that instead of cherishing the sacred fire as a lonely light, as one that burns in a charnel house, they should bring it forth in its beauty and brightness as a guide to the pleasant places and sparkling waters of earth’s happiness and the radiant messenger of heaven’s exalted hopes. And they should rejoice and be glad that to them the kindling of such high imagination is given. ~ Sarah Josepha Hale Ladies Magazine, November 1830From the Introduction to Cherishing the Sacred Fire

Deborah L. Halliday

This seems to me a philosophical question, and therefore irrelevant, question. A poet's destiny is to love.

Robert Graves

Just look what happens to poets," I used to tell my honors class on the first day of school. "Half the time they go mad. And you know why I think that happens? Too much truth distilled to its essence, all surrounding evidence ignored or discarded. And I'm not faulting them for that.

Steve Yarbrough

A single wire hanger on a nail by itselfIsn't bad though a stack of them on a floorIs too gloomy for words.

Dara Weir

A poet is someone who never forgets they were born naked.

Marty Rubin

I want to tell you why poetry is worth thinking about - from time to time. Not all the time. Sometimes it's a much better idea to think about other things.Most of us have a short period of intense thinking about poetry, when we take a class in college, and then that's about it. And that's really all you need. One intense time, when you master your little heap of names - Andrew Marvel, Muriel Rukeyser, Christina Rosetti, Hardy, Auden, Bishop, Marvin Bell, Ted Hughes, John Hollander, Nicholas Christopher, Deborah Garrison, whoever, James Wright, Selima Hill, Troy Jollimore. Whoever they may be. Every so often you remember them. If you've memorised some poems, the poems will raise a glimmering finger in your memory once in a while, and that's very nice, as long as you keep it to yourself. Never recite. Please! If you recite, your listeners will look down and play with their cuticles. They will not like you. But sometimes if you quote just a phrase in passing, that can work. Like this: "As Selima Hill says: 'A really good fuck makes me feel like custard.

Nicholson Baker

All we’re trying to do is word the world. Detail is one way we do that. We enumerate, notate, name the things seen.

Eamon Grennan

He thinks my hair smells like spring rain. I'm really trying to remain stoic and unaffected. I remind myself that I don't like poetic language. I don't like poetry. I don't even like people who like poetry.But I'm not dead inside either.

Nicola Yoon

A poet is a feeling, sentient being, not a word machine.

Marty Rubin

Whenever I write a dramatic poem I can't understand why the characters should ever want to be anything but poets themselves.

Saul Bellow

The works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for only great poets can read the.

Henry David Thoreau

As to whether a poem has been written by a great poet or not, this is important only to historians of literature. Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that I have written a beautiful line; let us take this as a working hypothesis. Once I have written it, that linedoes me no good, because, as I’ve already said, that line came to me from the Holy Ghost, from the subliminal self, or perhaps from some other writer. I often find I am merely quoting something I read some time ago, and then that becomes a rediscovering. Perhaps it is better that a poet should be nameless.

Jorge Luis Borges

That is why they have poets—to classify all the degrees of love. It is for scientists to classify the maladies arising from the want of it.

Sarah Ruhl

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Poetry Quotes - Page 5

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