Poetry Quotes - Page 93

Too many poets act like a middle-aged mother trying to get her kids to eat too much cooked meat, and potatoes with drippings (tears). I don't give a damn whether they eat or not. Forced feeding leads to excessive thinness (effete). Nobody should experience anything they don't need to, if they don't need poetry bully for them. I like the movies too. And after all, only Whitman and Crane and Williams, of the American poets, are better than the movies.

Frank O'Hara

I am not a finished poem, and I am not the song you’ve turned me into. I am a detached human being, making my way in a world that is constantly trying to push me aside, and you who send me letters and emails and beautiful gifts wouldn’t even recognise me if you saw me walking down the street where I live tomorrowfor I am not a poem. I am tired and worn out and the eyes you would see would not be painted or inspiredbut empty and weary from drinking too much at all timesand I am not the life of your party who sings and has glorious words to speakfor I don’t speak muchat alland my voice is raspy and unsteady from unhealthy living and not much sleep and I only use it when I sing and I always sing too muchor not at alland never when people are around because they expect poems and symphonies and I am nota poembut an elegyat my bestbut unedited and uncut and not a lot of people want to work with me because there’s only so much you can do with an audio take, with the plug-ins and EQs and I was born distorted, disordered, and I’m pretty fine with that,but others are not.

Charlotte Eriksson

You just go on your nerve.

Frank O'Hara

Amor é um fogo que arde sem se ver, é ferida que dói, e não se sente; é um contentamento descontente, é dor que desatina sem doer.É um não querer mais que bem querer; é um andar solitário entre a gente; é nunca contentar se de contente; é um cuidar que ganha em se perder.É querer estar preso por vontade; é servir a quem vence, o vencedor; é ter com quem nos mata, lealdade.Mas como causar pode seu favor nos corações humanos amizade, se tão contrário a si é o mesmo Amor?

Luís de Camões

I am a free soul, singing my heart out by myself no matter where I go and I call strangers my friends because I learn things and find ways to fit them into my own world. I hear what people say, rearrange it, take away and tear apart until it finds value in my reality and there I make it work. I find spaces in between the cracks and cuts where it feels empty and there I make it work.

Charlotte Eriksson

She dealt her pretty words like Blades --How glittering they shone --And every One unbared a NerveOr wantoned with a Bone --She never deemed -- she hurt --That -- is not Steel's Affair --A vulgar grimace in the Flesh --How ill the Creatures bear --To Ache is human -- not polite --The Film upon the eyeMortality's old Custom --Just locking up -- to Die.

Emily Dickinson

Why love what you will lose?There is nothing else to love.

Louise Glück

There is no poetry where there are no mistakes.

Joy Harjo

One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.

Voltaire

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;Conspiring with him how to load and blessWith fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shellsWith a sweet kernel; to set budding more,And still more, later flowers for the bees,Until they think warm days will never cease,For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

John Keats

You can never rouse Harris. There is no poetry about Harris- no wild yearning for the unattainable. Harris never "weeps, he knows not why." If Harris's eyes fill with tears, you can bet it is because Harris has been eating raw onions, or has put too much Worcester over his chop.If you were to stand at night by the sea-shore with Harris, and say:"Hark! do you not hear? Is it but the mermaids singing deep below the waving waters; or sad spirits, chanting dirges for white corpses held by seaweed?" Harris would take you by the arm, and say:"I know what it is, old man; you've got a chill. Now you come along with me. I know a place round the corner here, where you can get a drop of the finest Scotch whisky you ever tasted- put you right in less than no time."Harris always does know a place round the corner where you can get something brilliant in the drinking line. I believe that if you met Harris up in Paradise (supposing such a thing likely), he would immediately greet you with:"So glad you've come, old fellow; I've found a nice place round the corner here, where you can get some really first-class nectar.

Jerome K. Jerome

Failure: the renewable resource.

Kay Ryan

If you can not be a poet, be the poem.

David Carradine

Tears upon the dry sponge of heartdo not prove I am Promethean.

Adrian C. Louis

But for their cries,The herons would be lostAmidst the morning snow.

Chiyo Ni

On I’ll pass,dragging my huge love behind me.On whatfeverish night, deliria-ridden,by what Goliaths was I begot – I, so bigand by no one needed?

Vladimir Mayakovsky

we're lost where the mind can't find usutterly lost

Ikkyu

Poetry is prose in slow motion.

Nicholson Baker

I am inhabited by a cry. Nightly it flaps outLooking, with its hooks, for something to love.

Sylvia Plath

What makes us leave what we love best?What is it inside us that keeps erasing itselfWhen we need it most,That sends us into uncertainty for its own sakeAnd holds us flush there until we begin to love itAnd have to begin again?What is it within our own lives we decline to liveWhenever we find it, making our days unendurable,And nights almost visionless?I still don't know yet, but I do it.

Charles Wright

GATHERING LEAVESSpades take up leavesNo better than spoons,And bags full of leavesAre light as balloons.I make a great noiseOf rustling all dayLike rabbit and deerRunning away.But the mountains I raiseElude my embrace,Flowing over my armsAnd into my face.I may load and unloadAgain and againTill I fill the whole shed,And what have I then?Next to nothing for weight,And since they grew dullerFrom contact with earth,Next to nothing for color.Next to nothing for use.But a crop is a crop,And who's to say whereThe harvest shall stop?

Robert Frost

If my like for you was a football crowd, you’d be deaf ’cause of the roar. And if my like for you was a boxer, there’d be a dead guy lying on the floor. And if my like for you was sugar, you’d lose your teeth before you were twenty. And if my like for you was money, let’s just say you’d be spending plenty.

Cath Crowley

To wake the soul by tender strokes of art,To raise the genius, and to mend the heart

Alexander Pope

Come windless invaderI am a carnival ofStars, a poem of blood.

Sonia Sanchez

The first time I saw her,Everything in my head went quiet.

Neil Hilborn

Soul receives from soul that knowledge, therefore not by book nor from tongue. If knowledge of mysteries come after emptiness of mind, that is illumination of heart.

Jalaluddin Rumi

All days are nights to see till I see thee, And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me.

William Shakespeare

I am solitary as grass. What is it I miss?Shall I ever find it, whatever it is?

Sylvia Plath

True and false fears let us refrain, Let us love nobly, and live, and add again Years and years unto years, till we attain To write threescore: this is the second of our reign.

John Donne

One! two! and through and throughThe vorpal blade went snickersnack!He left it dead, and with its headHe went galumphing back.

Lewis Carroll

I like the posture, but not the yoga. I like the inebriated morning, but not the opium. I like the flower but not the garden, the moment but not the dream. Quiet, my love. Be still. I am sleeping.

Roman Payne

The poet doesn't invent. He listens.

Jean Cocteau

I want my own will, and I wantsimply to be with my will,as it goes toward action.And in the silent, sometimes hardly moving times,when something is coming near,I want to be with those who knowsecret things or else alone...I want to unfold.I don’t want to be folded anywhere,because where I am folded,there I am a lie.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Love's mysteries in souls do grow,But yet the body is his book.

John Donne

A black cat among roses,phlox, lilac-misted under a quarter moon,the sweet smells of heliotrope and night-scented stock. The garden is very still.It is dazed with moonlight,contented with perfume...

Amy Lowell

The inmost spirit of poetry, in other words, is at bottom, in every recorded case, the voice of pain – and the physical body, so to speak, of poetry, is the treatment by which the poet tries to reconcile that pain with the world.

Ted Hughes

You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket.

John Adams

My silence knot is tied up in my hair; as if to keep my love out of my eyes. I cannot speak to one for whom i care. A hatpin serves as part of my disguise. In the play, my role is baticeer; a word which here means "person who trains bats." The audience may feel a prick of fear, as if sharp pins are hidden in thier hats. My co-star lives on what we call a brae. His solitude might not be just an act. A piece of mail fails to arrive one day. This poignant melodrama's based on fact.The curtain falls just as the knot unties; the silence is broken by the one who dies.

Lemony Snicket

you will never catch up.Walk around feeling like a leafknow you could tumble at any second.Then decide what to do with your time.--The Art of Disappearing

Naomi Shihab Nye

But I don't shut up and I don't die.I liveand fight, maddeningthose who rule my country.For if I liveI fight,and if I fightI contribute to the dawn.

Otto René Castillo

Poetry is a life-cherishing force.

Mary Oliver

One must read poetry with one's nerves.

Wallace Stevens

We aren't suggesting that mental instability or unhappiness makes one a better poet, or a poet at all; and contrary to the romantic notion of the artist suffering for his or her work, we think these writers achieved brilliance in spite of their suffering, not because of it.

Dorianne Laux

I had been hungry all the years-My noon had come, to dine-I, trembling, drew the table nearAnd touched the curious wine. 'Twas this on tables I had seenWhen turning, hungry, lone,I looked in windows, for the wealthI could not hope to own. I did not know the ample bread,'Twas so unlike the crumbThe birds and I had often sharedIn Nature's diningroom. The plenty hurt me, 'twas so new,--Myself felt ill and odd,As berry of a mountain bushTransplanted to the road. Nor was I hungry; so I foundThat hunger was a wayOf persons outside windows,The entering takes away.

Emily Dickinson

Love is like the wild rose-briar;Friendship like the holly-tree.The holly is dark when the rose-briar blooms,But which will bloom most constantly?The wild rose-briar is sweet in spring,Its summer blossoms scent the air;Yet wait till winter comes again,And who will call the wild-briar fair?Then, scorn the silly rose-wreath now,And deck thee with holly's sheen,That, when December blights thy brow,He still may leave thy garland green.

Emily Dickinson

Every poem is a coat of arms. It must be deciphered. How much blood, how many tears in exchange for these axes, these muzzles, these unicorns, these torches, these towers, these martlets, these seedlings of stars and these fields of blue!

Jean Cocteau

This is the city, and I am one of the citizens/Whatever interests the rest interests me

Walt Whitman

It is sweet to think I was a companion in an expedition that never ends

Czesław Miłosz

And to 'scape stormy days, I choose an everlasting night.

John Donne

Wordplay hides a key to reality that the dictionary tries in vain to lock inside every free word.

Julio Cortázar

one day, when tenderness has become the single rule of the morning,/ I will wake in your arms. perhaps your skin will be overly gorgeous./ and the light will include the impossible understanding of love.

José Luís Peixoto

I watched the spinning stars, grateful, sad and proud, as only a man who has outlived his destiny and realizes he might yet forge himself another, can be.

Roger Zelazny

John Keats / John Keats / John / Please put your scarf on.

J.D. Salinger

Robot BoyMr. an Mrs. Smith had a wonderful life.They were a normal, happy husband and wife.One day they got news that made Mr. Smith glad.Mrs. Smith would would be a momwhich would make him the dad!But something was wrong with their bundle of joy.It wasn't human at all,it was a robot boy!He wasn't warm and cuddlyand he didn't have skin.Instead there was a cold, thin layer of tin.There were wires and tubes sticking out of his head.He just lay there and stared,not living or dead.The only time he seemed alive at allwas with a long extension cordplugged into the wall.Mr. Smith yelled at the doctor,"What have you done to my boy?He's not flesh and blood,he's aluminum alloy!"The doctor said gently,"What I'm going to saywill sound pretty wild.But you're not the father of this strange looking child.You see, there still is some questionabout the child's gender,but we think that its fatheris a microwave blender."The Smith's lives were now filledwith misery and strife.Mrs. Smith hated her husband,and he hated his wife.He never forgave her unholy alliance:a sexual encounterwith a kitchen appliance.And Robot Boygrew to be a young man.Though he was often mistakenfor a garbage can.

Tim Burton

I am that last, thatfinal thing, the bodyin a white sheet listening,

Li-Young Lee

Not everything can be felt and not everything will be ever understood.

Santosh Kalwar

So the nymphs they spoke,we kissed and laid.By noontime’s hourour love was made.Like braided chains of crocus stems,we lay entwined, I laid with them.Our breath, one glassy, tideless sea,our bodies draping wearily,we slept, I slept so lucidly,with hopes to stay this memory.

Roman Payne

Songwriting and poetry are so commonly birthed from underdogs because one can make even the ugliest situations admirable, or more beautiful than the beautiful situations - they are the most graceful media in which the lines of society are distorted.

Criss Jami

...but it is good to be several floors up in the dead of night wondering whether you are any good or not and the only decision you can make is that you did it...

Frank O'Hara

Poetry is a rich, full-bodied whistle, cracked ice crunching in pails, the night that numbs the leaf, the duel of two nightingales, the sweet pea that has run wild, Creation's tears in shoulder blades.

Boris Pasternak

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Poetry Quotes - Page 93

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