Poetry Quotes - Page 96

Our two souls therefore, which are one, Though I must go, endure not yet A breach, but an expansion, Like gold to aery thinness beat. If they be two, they are two so As stiff twin compasses are two ; Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show To move, but doth, if th' other do. And though it in the centre sit, Yet, when the other far doth roam, It leans, and hearkens after it, And grows erect, as that comes home. Such wilt thou be to me, who must, Like th' other foot, obliquely run ; Thy firmness makes my circle just, And makes me end where I begun.

John Donne

A fallen blossomreturning to the bough, I thought --But no, a butterfly.

Arakida Moritake

A grain of poetry suffices to season a century.

José Martí

Escóndeme en tus brazospor esta noche sola,mientras la lluvia rompecontra el mar y la tierrasu boca innumerable.

Pablo Neruda

I have been happy, though in a dream.I have been happy-and I love the theme:Dreams! in their vivid colouring of lifeAs in that fleeting, shadowy, misty strife

Edgar Allan Poe

Great poetry needs no interpreter other than a responsive heart.

Helen Keller

And medecine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love: these are what we stay alive for.

Tom Schulman

No man can reveal to you aught but that which already lies half asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.

Kahlil Gibran

All those other girls are cake...I'm Crème brûlée...Tiramisu, if you will. Just a few notches above.

Brandi L. Bates

Dreams, books, are each a world; and books, we know,Are a substantial world, both pure and good:Round these, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood,Our pastime and our happiness will grow.

William Wordsworth

Sometimes, looking at the many books I have at home, I feel I shall die before I come to the end of them, yet I cannot resist the temptation of buying new books. Whenever I walk into a bookstore and find a book on one of my hobbies — for example, Old English or Old Norse poetry — I say to myself, “What a pity I can’t buy that book, for I already have a copy at home.

Jorge Luis Borges

So come to the pond, or the river of your imagination, or the harbor of your longing,and put your lips to the world.And live your life.

Mary Oliver

O stand, stand at the window As the tears scald and start;You shall love your crooked neighbour With your crooked heart.

W.H. Auden

the only thing required to be a woman is to identifyas one.- period, end of story.

Amanda Lovelace

come back so i can say yes this time do it again now that i know what to call what you didthis time i'll be ready i like it rough now and i'm done with romance i never met another man who loved me so much at first sight he had to hurt me to do it

Daphne Gottlieb

Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and falls again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet.

Virginia Woolf

Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies.And be it gash or gold it will not comeAgain in this identical disguise.

Gwendolyn Brooks

My HeartI'm not going to cry all the timenor shall I laugh all the time,I don't prefer one "strain" to another.I'd have the immediacy of a bad movie,not just a sleeper, but also the big,overproduced first-run kind. I want to be at least as alive as the vulgar. And if some aficionado of my mess says "That's not like Frank!," all to the good! I don't wear brown and grey suits all the time, do I? No. I wear workshirts to the opera,often. I want my feet to be bare,I want my face to be shaven, and my heart--you can't plan on the heart, butthe better part of it, my poetry, is open.

Frank O'Hara

If you only write when you’re inspired you may be a fairly decent poet, but you’ll never be a novelist because you’re going to have to make your word count today and those words aren’t going to wait for you whether you’re inspired or not.You have to write when you’re not inspired. And you have to write the scenes that don’t inspire you. And the weird thing is that six months later, a year later, you’ll look back at them and you can’t remember which scenes you wrote when you were inspired and which scenes you just wrote because they had to be written next.The process of writing can be magical. …Mostly it’s a process of putting one word after another.

Neil Gaiman

Anyone who says, “Here’s my address,write me a poem,” deserves something in reply.So I’ll tell a secret instead:poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes,they are sleeping. They are the shadowsdrifting across our ceilings the moment before we wake up. What we have to dois live in a way that lets us find them.

Naomi Shihab Nye

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:The sun-comprehending glass,And beyond it, the deep blue air, that showsNothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

Philip Larkin

That's not a run in your stocking, it's a hand on your leg.

Frank O'Hara

Ask him why there are hypocrites in the world.''Because it is hard to bear the happiness of others.''When are we happy?''When we desire nothing and realize that possession is only momentary, and so are forever playing.''What is regret?''To realize that one has spent one's life worrying about the future.''What is sorrow?''To long for the past.''What is the highest pleasure?''To hear a good story.

Vikram Chandra

When soul meets soul on lovers' lips.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

The Children's HourBetween the dark and the daylight,When the night is beginning to lower,Comes a pause in the day's occupations,That is known as the Children's Hour.I hear in the chamber above meThe patter of little feet,The sound of a door that is opened,And voices soft and sweet.From my study I see in the lamplight,Descending the broad hall stair,Grave Alice, and laughing Allegra,And Edith with golden hair.A whisper, and then a silence:Yet I know by their merry eyesThey are plotting and planning togetherTo take me by surprise.A sudden rush from the stairway,A sudden raid from the hall!By three doors left unguardedThey enter my castle wall!They climb up into my turretO'er the arms and back of my chair;If I try to escape, they surround me;They seem to be everywhere.They almost devour me with kisses,Their arms about me entwine,Till I think of the Bishop of BingenIn his Mouse-Tower on the Rhine!Do you think, o blue-eyed banditti,Because you have scaled the wall,Such an old mustache as I amIs not a match for you all!I have you fast in my fortress,And will not let you depart,But put you down into the dungeonIn the round-tower of my heart.And there will I keep you forever,Yes, forever and a day,Till the walls shall crumble to ruin,And moulder in dust away!

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!As tho’ to breathe were life!

Alfred Tennyson

Those ancients who in poetry presented the golden age, who sang its happy state,perhaps, in their Parnassus, dreamt this place. Here, mankind's root was innocent; and herewere every fruit and never-ending spring; these streams--the nectar of which poets sing.

Dante Alighieri

In my darkest night,when the moon was coveredand I roamed through wreckage,a nimbus-clouded voicedirected me:“Live in the layers,not on the litter.”Though I lack the artto decipher it,no doubt the next chapterin my book of transformationsis already written.I am not done with my changes.

Stanley Kunitz

Beauties in vain their pretty eyes may roll; Charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul.

Alexander Pope

When from our better selves we have too longBeen parted by the hurrying world, and droop,Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired,How gracious, how benign, is Solitude

William Wordsworth

Out of love,No regrets--Though the goodnessBe wasted forever.Out of love,No regrets--Though the returnBe never.

Langston Hughes

A book of verses underneath the boughA flask of wine, a loaf of bread and thouBeside me singing in the wildernessAnd wilderness is paradise now.

Omar Khayyám

Being human means throwing your whole life on the scales of destiny when need be, all the while rejoicing in every sunny day and every beautiful cloud.

Rosa Luxemburg

I choose to love this time for oncewith all my intelligence-from "Splittings

Adrienne Rich

Alone, alone, all, all alone, Alone on a wide wide sea! And never a saint took pity on My soul in agony.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

part memory part distance remainingmine in the ways that I learn to miss you

W.S. Merwin

Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Nobody reads poetry, we are told at every inopportune moment. I read poetry. I am somebody. I am the people, too. It can be allowed that an industrious quantity of contemporary American poetry is consciously written for a hermetic constituency; the bulk is written for the bourgeoisie, leaving a lean cut for labor. Only the hermetically aimed has a snowball's chance in hell of reaching its intended ears. One proceeds from this realization. A staggering figure of vibrant, intelligent people can and do live without poetry, especially without the poetry of their time. This figure includes the unemployed, the rank and file, the union brass, banker, scientist, lawyer, doctor, architect, pilot, and priest. It also includes most academics, most of the faculty of the humanities, most allegedly literary editors and most allegedly literary critics. They do so--go forward in their lives, toward their great reward, in an engulfing absence of poetry--without being perceived or perceiving themselves as hobbled or deficient in any significant way. It is nearly true, though I am often reminded of a Transtromer broadside I saw in a crummy office building in San Francisco:We got dressed and showed the houseYou live well the visitor saidThe slum must be inside you.If I wanted to understand a culture, my own for instance, and if I thought such an understanding were the basis for a lifelong inquiry, I would turn to poetry first. For it is my confirmed bias that the poets remain the most 'stunned by existence,' the most determined to redeem the world in words..

C.D. Wright

Writing, then, was a substitute for myself: if you don't love me, love my writing & love me for my writing. It is also much more: a way of ordering and reordering the chaos of experience.

Sylvia Plath

Used to be hewas my heart's desire.His forthright gaze,his expert hands:I'd lie on the couch with my eyesclosed just thinking about it.Never about the factthat everything changes,that even this,my best passion,would not be immune.No, I would bask on in aneternal daydream of the handsfinding me, the gaze like a windingstair coaxing me down. . . .Until I caught a glimpseof something in the mirror:silly girl in her lingerie,dancing with the furniture--a hot little bundle, flush withcliches. Into that pairof too-bright eyes I lookedand saw myself. And something else: would never look that way.

Deborah Garrison

Unasked, Unsought, Love gives itself but is not bought

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I'd rather be thin than famousbut I'm fatpaste that in your broadway show

Jack Kerouac

Writing poetry and reading books causes brain damage.

Pat Conroy

One need not be a Chamber — to be Haunted — One need not be a House — The Brain has Corridors — surpassing Material Place —

Emily Dickinson

If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it's to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.

Jim Morrison

Times change, as do our wills, What we are - is ever changing; All the world is made of change, And forever attaining new qualities.

Luís de Camões

So the freshness lives onin a lemon,in the sweet-smelling house of the rind,the proportions, arcane and acerb.

Pablo Neruda

The profoundest of all sensualitiesis the sense of truthand the next deepest sensual experienceis the sense of justice.

D.H. Lawrence

I once broke up with a boy because he wrote me an awful poem.

Karen Joy Fowler

Hinged to forgetfulness like a door,she slowly closed out of sight,and she was the woman I loved,but too many times she slept likea mechanical deer in my caresses,and I ached in the metal silenceof her dreams.

Richard Brautigan

Cheap little rhymesA cheap little tuneAre sometimes as dangerousAs a sliver of the moon.

Langston Hughes

A certain person wondered whya big strong girl like mewouldn't keep a jobwhich paid a normal salary.I took my time to lead herand to read her every page.Even minimal peoplecan't survive on minimal wage.A certain person wondered whyI wait all week for you.I didn't have the wordsto describe just what you do.I said you had the motionof the ocean in your walk,and when you solve my riddlesyou don't even have to talk.

Maya Angelou

It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road.

Virginia Woolf

You shall create beauty not to excite the sensesbut to give sustenance to the soul.

Gabriela Mistral

I believe in the flesh and the appetites; Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle. Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touch’d from;The scent of these arm-pits, aroma finer than prayer; This head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds.

Walt Whitman

You must burn. Burn higher. Burn for everything you have ever wanted. For everything you have ever lost, for every crack in your heart and every fraction of every irreplaceable moment. Burn high for love. For fear. For life. Burn as fast and as long as you can. You must burn, burn higher. Because nothing in this world will kill you faster than a dying fire.

Mia Hollow

The war to preserve the privilege of mythmaking

Marvin Bell

MISERABLERelease the toxic and infectious-Spreaders of misery,Souls destroying souls-And poisonous liars.Awaken from the hallucinations-And take back your heart.Reclaim your self-esteem-And leave the toxic be.

Giorge Leedy

Poetry is the language of intensity. Because we are going to die, an expression of intensity is justified.

C.D. Wright

Rocket shipsare excitingbut so are roseson a birthday.

Leonard Nimoy

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Poetry Quotes - Page 96

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