Poetry Quotes - Page 78

Poetry had always seemed something I could turn to in need - an emergency exit, a lifebuoy, as well as a justification.

Every time your work is read, you die several deaths for every word, and poetry is like being flayed alive.

Man is no star, but a quick coalOf mortal fire:Who blows it not, nor doth controlA faint desire,

As when, O lady mine,With chiselled touchThe stone unhewn and coldBecomes a living mould,The more the marble wastes,The more the statue grows.

Michelangelo Buonarroti

Still must the poet as of old,In barren attic bleak and cold,Starve, freeze, and fashion verses toSuch things as flowers and song and you;Still as of old his being giveIn Beauty's name, while she may live,Beauty that may not die as longAs there are flowers and you and song.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

An orphan's curse would drag to hell A spirit from on high; But oh! more horrible than that Is the curse in a dead man's eye! Seven days, seven nights, I saw that curse, And yet I could not die.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Where were you then?Who else was there?Saying what?Why will the whole of love come on me suddenly when I am sad and feel you are far away?

Pablo Neruda

The computer is incredibly fast, accurate, and stupid.Man is unbelievably slow, inaccurate, and brilliant.The marriage of the two is a force beyond calculation.

Waseem Latif

She was remembering His gaze, those deep pools of blue, crystalline in nature, peering deep into her soul. She remembered the first night she had looked into that darkness – no, into that light in his eyes – they were level and straight, kind and compassionate, without any ado, Her hands in His, offerings of comfort and concern for Her station, the concern she felt for those close to Her, each to their own heaven or hell, and the law of attraction began to build.

Frank L. DeSilva

Then you are a poet?' she asked, fingering the flyer in her pocket.'No not at all,' he waved his hand. 'I am merely a character in a poem.

Karen Tei Yamashita

‘Paradise Lost’ was printed in an edition of no more than 1,500 copies and transformed the English language. Took a while. Wordsworth had new ideas about nature: Thoreau read Wordsworth, Muir read Thoreau, Teddy Roosevelt read Muir, and we got a lot of national parks. Took a century. What poetry gives us is an archive, the fullest existent archive of what human beings have thought and felt by the kind of artists who loved language in a way that allowed them to labor over how you make a music of words to render experience exactly and fully.

Robert Hass

Some plant lips on Mother Earth in a display of gratitude.Meanwhile, she is kissing the soles of your feet, recognizing the one to be worshiped is you.

Taylor Patton

Where are You Now? I was there whilst you cried,I was there to comfort you with smile,I was there to give you a hand,when all faith was lost.I was there to open doors of opportunities,I was there to share my passion for life,I was there to feed you,when you were hungry.I was there to listen to your turmoil,I was there to lift your spiritwhen you were broken.I was there when you were ill and alone.I was there when you were betrayed,lied to and ridiculed.I was there to understand,to care and to share.I was there …to play, to sing, to dance,to write, to love, to create and innovate.I was there …Where are you now? …by Natasha Parker

Luisa Natasha Parker

PRETENDING TO DROWNThe only regret is that I waitedlonger than a breathto scatter the sun's reflectionwith my body.New stars burst upon the waterwhen you pulled me in.On the shore, our clothesbegged us to be good boys again.Every stick our feet toucheda snapping turtle, every shadowa water moccasin.Excuses to swim closer to one another.I sank into the depths to see youas the lake saw you: cut in halfby the surface, taut legs kicking,the rest of you sky.Suddenly still, a clear viewof what you knew I wantedto see.When I resurfaced, slick grin,knowing glance; you pushed meback under.I pretended to drown,then swallowed you whole.

Saeed Jones

Stardust If you came to me with a face I have not seen, with a voice I have never heard, I would still know you. Even if centuries separated us, I would still feel you. Somewhere between the sand and the stardust, through every collapse and creation, there is a pulse that echoes of you and I. When we leave this world, we give up all our possessions and our memories. Love is the only thing we take with us. It is all we carry from one life to the next.

Lang Leav

I fall asleepCall it deep while all is well be-Cause my life seems like a freestyle mean-While asleep on the couch I dream it's a written piece and nowThe symphony's soundingShouting out to these feet whose leaps feel foul but quite loudBut howI'm allowed to live my dreamsMy Chimeran team brings the Siberian breedRiding reality free 'til these tires they freezeIn mires in dire need of wires, fire and heat butI love a dark, hard cold heart in the wintery breeze

Criss Jami

I had embraced you...long before i hugged you.

Sanober Khan

moonlight disappears down the hillsmountains vanish into fogand i vanish into poetry.

Sanober Khan

we must bringour own lightto thedarkness.

Charles Bukowski

Some women marry houses.

Anne Sexton

there is some achingthat will only heal...in the mosque of sleep.

Sanober Khan

Tell me..how do you stand there?filling the doorway....of my life.

Sanober Khan

Live as many lives as you can.

Sanober Khan

i want to stay curled and cosiedand chocolated....foreverin my mother’s arms.

Sanober Khan

To be the other womanis to be a seasonthat is always about to end,when the air is floweredwith jasmine and peach,and the weather day after dayis flawless,and the forecastis hurricane.

Linda Pastan

Now a promise made is a debt unpaid, and the trail has its own stern code.

Robert W. Service

Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.Eagerly I wished the morrow; — vainly I had sought to borrow From my books surcease of sorrow — sorrow for the lost Lenore.

Edgar Allan Poe

I’m happy. But some beauty is nonesuch - The gently sloping path across the wood, The wretched bridge that’s just a little skewed And that, for which, I won’t be waiting much.

Anna Akhmatova

Hill tops like hot iron glitter bright in the sun, And the rivers we're eying burn to gold as they run; Burning hot is the ground, liquid gold is the air; Whoever looks round sees Eternity there.

John Clare

I am talking about the responsibility of the poet, who is irresponsible by definition, an anarchist enamored of a solar order and never of the new order or whatever slogan makes five or six hundred million men march in step in a parody of order.

Julio Cortázar

Like poetry, in times of intense emotion the image returns to me. Like poetry, it stroked my soul and, by turns, lulled and stoked my senses.

Lisa St. Aubin de Terán

Many have referred to [Lewis] Carroll's rhymes as nonsense, but in my childhood world — Los Angeles in the '50s — they made perfect sense.

Wanda Coleman

The yard was a little centre of regeneration. Here, with keen edges and smooth curves, were forms in the exact likeness of those he had seen abraded and time-eaten on the walls. These were the ideas in modern prose which the lichened colleges presented in old poetry. Even some of those antiques might have been called prose when they were new. They had done nothing but wait, and had become poetical. How easy to the smallest building; how impossible to most men.

Thomas Hardy

Poetry is a will to put things right, an imaginary solution, a way of avoiding a catastrophe that already happened. Poetry is an escape, perhaps intelligent, perhaps idiotic, from a senile situation. It is a dialectical movement, it keeps tearing open the wounds while trying to heal them. Here we see the only acceptable path open up towards an existence worthy of human beings. Here the seriousness is unfaltering and absolute. Where it will lead no one knows.

Aase Berg

I placed a jar in Tennessee and round it was upon a hill.

Wallace Stevens

All that we call sacred history attests that the birth of a poet is the principal event in chronology.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I care for you, darling, I love you,the only reason I fucked L. is because you fuckedZ. and then I fucked R. and you fucked N.and because you fucked N. I had to fuckY. But I think of you constantly, I feel youhere in my belly like a baby, love I'd call it,no matter what happens I'd call it love, and soyou fucked C. and then before I could moveyou fucked W., so I had to fuck D. ButI want you to know that I love you, I think of youconstantly, I don't think I've ever loved anybodylike I love you.

Charles Bukowski

I breathe in...the fragranceof love, and moist sandthe onehis roses lefton both my handsI just keep on breathingevery momentas much as I canpreserving it, in my bodyfor the dayit can’t.

Sanober Khan

Author's PrayerIf I speak for the dead, I mustleave this animal of my body,I must write the same poem over and overfor the empty page is a white flag of their surrender.If I speak of them, I must walkon the edge of myself, I must live as a blind manwho runs through the rooms withouttouching the furniture.Yes, I live. I can cross the streets asking "What yearis it?"I can dance in my sleep and laughin front of the mirror.Even sleep is a prayer, Lord,I will praise your madness, andin a language not mine, speakof music that wakes us, musicin which we move. For whatever I sayis a kind of petition and the darkest daysmust I praise.

Ilya Kaminsky

I love to feel the temperature drop and the wind increase just before a thunderstorm. Then I climb in bed with the thunder.

Amanda Mosher

Poetry is the sound of the human animal.

Suniti Namjoshi

Now is History as fast as the mind remembers.

Kirby Wright

Matched with an aged wife, I mete and doleUnequal laws unto a savage race,That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

Alfred Tennyson

If the incision of our words amounts to nothing but a feeling, a slow motion, it will still cut a better swath than the factory model, the corporate model, the penitentiary model, which by my lights are one and the same.

C.D. Wright

moonrisesettle back with muffins and teauntil the window empties

R. Willmott

The inkstand is full of ink, and the paper lies white and unspotted, in the round of light thrown by a candle. Puffs of darkness sweep into the corners, and keep rolling through the room behind his chair. The air is silver and pearl, for the night is liquid with moonlight.See how the roof glitters, like ice!Over there, a slice of yellow cuts into the silver-blue, and beside it stand two geraniums, purple because the light is silver-blue, to-night.

Amy Lowell

Deep feeling doesn't make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.

Thom Gunn

The novel is a formidable mass, and it is so amorphous - no mountain in it to climb, no Parnassus or Helicon, not even a Pisgah. It is most distinctly one of the moister areas of literature - irrigated by a hundred rills and occasionally degenerating into a swamp. I do not wonder that the poets despise it, though they sometimes find themselves in it by accident. And I am not surprised at the annoyance of the historians when by accident it finds itself among them.

E.M. Forster

Up the airy mountain,Down the rushy glen,We daren't go a-huntingFor fear of little men.

William Allingham

it isn't that we're alone or not alonewhose voice do you want mine? yours?

Ikkyu

Freedom is the dream you dreamWhile putting thought in chains again --

Giacomo Leopardi

There’s no money in poetry, but there’s no poetry in money, either

Robert Graves

Each arrow you shoot offcarries its own targetinto the decidedlysecrettangle

Paul Celan

Breath, dreams, silence, invincible calm, you triumph.

Paul Valéry

Amé, fuí amado, el sol acarició mi faz.¡Vida, nada me debes! ¡Vida, estamos en paz!I loved, I was loved, the sun stroked my face.Life, you owe me nothing! Life, we are at peace!

Amado Nervo

rush of pine scent (once upon a time),the unlicensed convictionthere ought to be another wayof sayingthis.

Paul Celan

I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job

Seamus Heaney

Mute in that golden silence hung with green,Come down from heaven and bring me in your eyesRemembrance of all beauty that has been,And stillness from the pools of Paradise.

Siegfried Sassoon

… the fisherman’s daughter grinding serenity in her coffee grinder.

Yiannis Ritsos

How can the confessor teach/ those who are lost and sick at heart,/ when he himself, among the sinners,/ is worst, and most forsaken?/ It is only a game we play/ with other people's sins./ Besides, everyone knows/ that everyone lies confessing.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko

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Poetry Quotes - Page 78

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