Poetry Quotes - Page 80

If onlyyou could have witnessed howmuch I have changed: sit alonein a disused theatre and feel whatI have felt, see how the world hastransformed me, like the metamorphosisof a caterpillar.

Kiera Woodhull

I do strongly feel that among the greatest pieces of luck for high achievement is ordeal. Certain great artists can make out without it, Titian and others, but mostly you need ordeal. My idea is this: the artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business: Beethoven's deafness, Goya's deafness, Milton's blindness, that kind of thing.

John Berryman

Life is unbearable pain.

Santosh Kalwar

August is dust here. Droughtstuns the road,but juice gathers in the berries.

Robert Hass

It was as important to live poetically as to write poems.

James Broughton

Where is my oasis? Too far fromhere for me to crawl with thesedead legs, refusing to co-operateHands and fingers clawing uselesslythrough the grains of sand...

Kiera Woodhull

Think neither fear nor courage saves us.Unnatural vices are fathered by our heroism. Virtues are forced upon us by our impudent crimes. These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.

T.S Eliot

The moon people do not eat by swallowing food but by smelling it. Their money is poetry - actual poems, written out on pieces of paper whose value is determined by the worth of the poem itself.

Paul Auster

Sun-struck, stuck in mid tropic strut, it sometimes standsas if considering how to cool avian plastic,dive into the mown lagoon of lawn;how take flight on dayglow flap-doodle wings, no matterif it is ball-bald going nowhere fast.

Joyce Thomas

Everyone should be forcibly transplanted to another continent from their family at the age of three.

Philip Larkin

Dear, I can't write, it's all a fantasy: a kind of circling obsession.

Philip Larkin

From love's plectrum arisesthe song of the string of lifeLove is the light of lifelove is the fire of life

Muhammad Iqbal

]Sardisoften turning her thoughts here]you like a goddessand in your song most of all she rejoiced.But now she is conspicuous among Lydian womenas sometimes at sunsetthe rosyfingered moonsurpasses all the stars. And her lightstretches over salt seaequally and flowerdeep fields.And the beautiful dew is poured outand roses bloom and frailchervil and flowering sweetclover.But she goes back and forth rememberinggentle Atthis and in longingshe bites her tender mind

Sappho

I never heard sound and thrill of my painful heart until that very day she touched it.

Santosh Kalwar

]sing to usthe one with violets in her lap]mostly]goes astray

Sappho

Let them shoot us in the head,My blood will grow rootsand will blossom.

Visar Zhiti

And I choose to be aloneRather than wrapped in arms I could never need.

Merrit Malloy

There is bad in all good authors: what a pity the converse isn't true!

Philip Larkin

Come boy, and pour for me a cupOf old Falernian. Fill it upWith wine, strong, sparkling, bright, and clear;Our host decrees no water here.Let dullards drink the Nymph's pale brew,The sluggish thin their blood with dew.For such pale stuff we have no use;For us the purple grape's rich juice.Begone, ye chilling water sprite;Here burning Bacchus rules tonight!

Catullus

Within my reflection I see tears, for what I see is the truth, are my greatest fears.

Atarah L. Poling

Les enfants qui s'aiment s'embrassent deboutContre les portes de la nuitEt les passants qui passent les désignent du doigtMais les enfants qui s'aimentNe sont là pour personneEt c'est seulement leur ombreQui tremble dans la nuitExcitant la rage des passantsLeur rage, leur mépris, leurs rires et leur envieLes enfants qui s'aiment ne sont là pour personneIls sont ailleurs bien plus loin que la nuitBien plus haut que le jourDans l'éblouissante clarté de leur premier amour

Jacques Prévert

Only times and places, only names and ghosts.

Aldous Huxley

I see a bird carrying me and carrying you, with us as its wings, beyond the dream, to a journey that has no end and no beginning, no purpose and no goal. I do not speak to you, and you do not speak to me; we listen only to the music of silence. Silence is the friend's trust of friend, imagination's self-confidence between rain and rainbow. A rainbow is inspiration provoking the poet, uninvited, the infatuation of the poet with the prose of the Quran. Which of your Lord's blessings do you disown? We are absent, you and I; we are present, you and I. And absent. Which of your Lord's blessings do you disown?

Mahmoud Darwish

New York! I say New York, let black blood flow into your blood.Let it wash the rust from your steel joints, like an oil of life Let it give your bridges the curve of hips and supple vines. Now the ancient age returns, unity is restored, The recociliation of the Lion and Bull and Tree Idea links to action, the ear to the heart, sign to meaning. See your rivers stirring with musk alligators And sea cows with mirage eyes. No need to invent the Sirens. Just open your eyes to the April rainbow And your eyes, especially your ears, to God Who in one burst of saxophone laughter Created heaven and earth in six days, And on the seventh slept a deep Negro sleep.

Léopold Sédar Senghor

Saki says that youth is like hors d'oeuvres: you are so busy thinking of the next courses you don't notice it. When you've had them, you wish you'd had more hors d'oeuvres.

Philip Larkin

Sexual intercourse began in nineteen sixty-three (Which was rather late for me) between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles' first LP.

Philip Larkin

…wisely mingled poetry and prose.

Louisa May Alcott

The first fact of the world is that it repeats itself. I had been taught to believe that the freshness of children lay in their capacity for wonder at the vividness and strangeness of the particular, but what is fresh in them is that they still experience the power of repetition, from which our first sense of the power of mastery comes. Though predictable is an ugly little world in daily life, in our first experience of it we are clued to the hope of a shapeliness in things. To see that power working on adults, you have to catch them out: the look of foolish happiness on the faces of people who have just sat down to dinner is their knowledge that dinner will be served. Probably, that is the psychological basis for the power and the necessity of artistic form...Maybe our first experience of form is the experience of our own formation...And I am not thinking mainly of poems about form; I’m thinking of the form of a poem, the shape of its understanding. The presence of that shaping constitutes the presence of poetry.

Robert Hass

someone's senta loving notein lines of returning geeseand as the moon fillsmy western chamberas petals danceover the flowing streamagain I think of youthe two of usliving a sadnessaparta hurt that can't be removedyet when my gaze comes downmy heart stays up

Orson Scott Card

anyone who has no feelings for animals has a dead heart.

Raegan Butcher

You cannot devote your life to an abstraction. Indeed, life shatters all abstractions in one way or another, including words such as "faith" or "belief". If God is not in the very fabric of existence for you, if you do not find Him (or miss Him!) in the details of your daily life, then religion is just one more way to commit spiritual suicide.

Christian Wiman

We didn’t deny the obvious,but we didn’t entirely accept it either.I mean, we said hello to it each morningin the foyer. We patted its little headas it made a mess in the backyard,but we never nurtured it. Many nights the obvious showed upat our bedroom door, in its pajamas,unable to sleep, in need of a hug,and we just stared at it like an Armenian,or even worse— hid beneath the coversand pretended not to hear its tiny sobs.

Jeffrey McDaniel

Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light. Human words have no main switch. But all those little kidnaps in the dark. And then the luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of them that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate...

Anne Carson

On No Work of WordsOn no work of words now for three lean months in the bloodyBelly of the rich year and the big purse of my bodyI bitterly take to task my poverty and craft:To take to give is all, return what is hungrily givenPuffing the pounds of manna up through the dew to heaven,The lovely gift of the gab bangs back on a blind shaft.To lift to leave from the treasures of man is pleasing deathThat will rake at last all currencies of the marked breathAnd count the taken, forsaken mysteries in a bad dark.To surrender now is to pay the expensive ogre twice.Ancient woods of my blood, dash down to the nut of the seasIf I take to burn or return this world which is each man's work.

Dylan Thomas

I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same,slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones,icily free above the stones,above the stones and then the world.If you should dip your hand in,your wrist would ache immediately,your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burnas if the water were a transmutation of firethat feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,then briny, then surely burn your tongue.It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,drawn form the cold hard mouthof the world, derived from the rocky breastsforever, flowing and drawn, and sinceour knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

Elizabeth Bishop

I surrendered my identity in your eyes.Now I'm just like everybody else, and it's so funny, the way monogamy is funny, the waysomeone falling down in the street is funny.I entered a revolving door and emergedas a human being. When you think of meis my face electronically blurred? I remember your collarbone, forming the tiniestsatellite dish in the universe, your smileas the place where parallel lines inevitably crossed.Now dinosaurs freeze to death on your shoulder.I remember your eyes: fifty attack dogs on a single leash, how I once held the soft audience of your hand.I've been ignored by prettier women than you, but none who carried the heavy pitchers of silenceso far, without spilling a drop.

Jeffrey McDaniel

you’re already naked in this worldin this timein this lifebeacause your next loveyour next hungeryou next laughterand even your next tearmay never come

Baharak Sedigh

The mimicry of passion is the most intolerable of all poses.

Oscar Wilde

Remember BarbaraIt rained all day on Brest that dayAnd you walked smilingFlushed enraptured streaming-wetIn the rainRemember BarbaraIt rained all day on Brest that dayAnd I ran into you in Siam StreetYou were smilingAnd I smiled tooRemember BarbaraYou whom I didn't knowYou who didn't know meRememberRemember that day stillDon't forgetA man was taking cover on a porchAnd he cried your nameBarbaraAnd you ran to him in the rainStreaming-wet enraptured flushedAnd you threw yourself in his armsRemember that BarbaraAnd don't be mad if I speak familiarlyI speak familiarly to everyone I loveEven if I've seen them only onceI speak familiarly to all who are in loveEven if I don't know themRemember BarbaraDon't forgetThat good and happy rainOn your happy faceOn that happy townThat rain upon the seaUpon the arsenalUpon the Ushant boatOh BarbaraWhat shitstupidity the warNow what's become of youUnder this iron rainOf fire and steel and bloodAnd he who held you in his armsAmorouslyIs he dead and gone or still so much aliveOh BarbaraIt's rained all day on Brest todayAs it was raining beforeBut it isn't the same anymoreAnd everything is wreckedIt's a rain of mourning terrible and desolateNor is it still a stormOf iron and steel and bloodBut simply cloudsThat die like dogsDogs that disappearIn the downpour drowning BrestAnd float away to rotA long way offA long long way from BrestOf which there's nothing left.

Jacques Prévert

no poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it.

W.H. Auden

He'd been let down so oftenHis brow was on the floorBut then they foundA small hole in the groundAnd let him down some more

David Thewlis

I will go to campus alone dressed in antique silk slips and beat-up cowboy boots and gypsy beads, and I will study poetry. I will sit on the edge of the fountain in the plaza and write.

Francesca Lia Block

A poem is a meteor.

Wallace Stevens

IMPROVIDENCEThe other lives I might have ledAll now might as well beDead. Survived by no one.Barren, without issue of any sort:This withered bud, failedIn art and love. With no time leftTo change my course. But time enoughfor infinite remorse.

John Tottenham

Poets, like fighters, both reap the benefits of roadwork.

Cameron Conaway

When words lose their meaning, physical force takes over.

W.H. Auden

…be awake to the Life that is loving you andsing your prayer, laugh your prayer, dance your prayer, runand weep and sweat your prayer,sleep your prayer, eat your prayer, paint, sculpt, hammer, and read your prayer, sweep, dig, rake, drive and hoe your prayer,garden and farm and build and clean your prayer,wash, iron, vacuum, sew, embroider and pickle your prayer,compute, touch, bend and fold but never deleteor mutilate your prayer.Learn and play your prayer, work and rest your prayer,fast and feast your prayer, argue, talk, whisper, listen and shout your prayer,groan and moan and spit and sneeze your prayer,swim and hunt and cook your prayer,digest and become your prayer,release and recover your prayer,breathe your prayer, be your prayer

Alla Renée Bozarth

We must experience certain things in life, even in our childhood, so we can later look back and value the journey.

Tanya R. Liverman

The element of craftsmanship in poetry is obscured by the fact that all men are taught to speak and most to read and write, while very few men are taught to draw or paint or write music.

W.H. Auden

Compañera usted sabe que puede contar conmigo no hasta dos o hasta diez sino contar conmigosi alguna vez advierte que la miro a los ojos y una veta de amor reconoce en los míos no alerte sus fusiles ni piense qué delirio a pesar de la veta o tal vez porque existe usted puede contar conmigosi otras veces me encuentra huraño sin motivo no piense qué flojera igual puede contar conmigopero hagamos un trato yo quisiera contar con usted es tan lindo saber que usted existe uno se siente vivo y cuando digo esto quiero decir contar aunque sea hasta dos aunque sea hasta cinco no ya para que acuda presurosa en mi auxilio sino para saber a ciencia cierta que usted sabe que puede contar conmigo

Mario Benedetti Hagamos un trato

I see what I want of Love... I see horses making the meadow dance, fifty guitars sighing, and a swarm of bees suckling the wild berries, and I close my eyes until I see our shadow behind this dispossessed place... I see what I want of people: their desire to long for anything, their lateness in getting to work and their hurry to return to their folk... and their need to say: Good Morning...

Mahmoud Darwish

Brimming. That's what it is, I want to get to a place where my sentences enact brimming.

Li-Young Lee

No matter the disappointment, you simply cannot divorce your favorite team.

Kevin Walker

Haleine contre haleine, échauffe-moi la vie,Mille et mille baisers donne-moi je te prie,Amour veut tout sans nombre, amour n’a point de loiTranslated: Breath against breath warms my life.A thousand kisses give me I pray thee.Love says it all without number,love knows no law.

Pierre de Ronsard

Blackadder was fifty-four and had come to editing Ash out of pique. He was the son and grandson of Scottish schoolmasters. His grandfather recited poetry on firelight evenings: Marmion, Childe Harold, Ragnarok. His father sent him to Downing College in Cambridge to study under F. R. Leavis. Leavis did to Blackadder what he did to serious students; he showed him the terrible, the magnificent importance and urgency of English literature and simultaneously deprived him of any confidence in his own capacity to contribute to, or change it. The young Blackadder wrote poems, imagined Dr Leavis’s comments on them, and burned them.

A.S. Byatt

In fiction, the characters have their own lives. They may start as a gloss on the author’s life, but they move on from there. In poetry, especially confessional poetry but in other poetry as well, the poet is not writing characters so much as emotional truth wrapped in metaphor. Bam! Pow! A shot to the gut.

Jane Yolen

Hate flows from a broken spirit.

Kevin Walker

I have been used to consider poetry as the food of love

Jane Austen

Foggy nights bring some comfort.He can get lost in the mistand there is no one to stare or question.

Susie Clevenger

Moonlight and high wind.Dark poplars toss, insinuate the sea.

Li-Young Lee

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Poetry Quotes - Page 80

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