Quotes by Poets - Page 121

Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.

Your first druggy relationship is a rite of passage. A learning experience with a curve. After that one, the next one, if there is a next one, will be a decision. You will know just what you are getting into.

Fiona Helmsley

Oh to be in England Now that April's there.

Elizabeth Barrett-Browning

Myself when young did eagerly frequent Doctor and Saint and heard great argument About it and about: but evermore Came out by the same door where in I went.

Omar Khayyám

My devil had been long caged, he came out roaring.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Basketball Rule #5When you stopplayingyour gameyou've alreadylost.

Kwame Alexander

Therefore am I still / A lover of the meadows and the woods, / And mountains; and of all that we behold / From this green earth; of all the mighty world / Of eye and ear, both what they half create / And what perceive; well pleased to recognize / In nature and the language of the sense, / The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse/ The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul / Of all my moral being.

William Wordsworth

A poem is a place where the conditions of beyondness and withinness are made palpable, where to imagine is to feel what it is like to be. It allows us to have the life we are denied because we are too busy living. Even more paradoxically, a poem permits us to live in ourselves as if we were just out of reach of ourselves.

Mark Strand

As a screenwriter - if you are completely honest with yourself - you can’t help but admit that your greatest threat is the audience, where audience is not understood as a demographic category but as a character outside the script to whom the story is addressed. A good part of the drama necessary for uncovering the story resides in the conflict between the storyteller and his/her audience. Audience plays the part of antagonist to the writer’s role as protagonist. The writer drives the action, which is forever complicated, frustrated and undermined by the audience’s needs and sensibilities. Audience wants you to prove it. Audience has a chip on its shoulder, and doesn’t give a damn. Audience has been there and done that in the guise of your mother, your father, your ex-, your worst enemy. Audience laughs at your stupidity and dares you to change its view of you and the story world that you would have it care about. Audience is defiant. It has your number. The only way you can defeat it is by carrying a bigger stick - your only defence is an inspired offence, namely the story.

Billy Marshall-Stoneking

And then it dawned on me that the greatest love stories in the world never have happy endings.

Avijeet Das

She was perfect, pure maddening sex, and she knew it, and she played on it, dripped it, and allowed you to suffer for it.

Charles Bukowski

Keep me away from the wisdom which does not cry, the philosophy which does not laugh and the greatness which does not bow before children.

Kahlil Gibran

Tears are a river that takes you somewhere…Tears lift your boat off the rocks, off dry ground, carrying it downriver to someplace better.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés

But whatever I am, I know that slipperiness isn't all of it. I know now that a studied evasiveness has its own limitations, its own ways of inhibiting certain forms of happiness and pleasure. The pleasure of abiding. The pleasure of insistence, persistence. The pleasure of obligation, the pleasure of dependency. The pleasures of ordinary devotion. The pleasure of recognizing that one may have to undergo the same realizations, write the same notes in the margin, return to the same themes in one's work, relearn the same emotional truths, write the same book over and over again--not because one is stupid or obstinate or incapable of change, but because such revisitations constitute a life.

Maggie Nelson

It was not death, for I stood up,And all the dead lie down;It was not night, for all the bellsPut out their tongues, for noon.It was not frost, for on my fleshI felt siroccos crawl,Nor fire, for just my marble feetCould keep a chancel cool.And yet it tasted like them all;The figures I have seenSet orderly, for burial,Reminded me of mine,As if my life were shavenAnd fitted to a frame,And could not breathe without a key;And I was like midnight, some,When everything that ticked has stopped,And space stares, all around,Or grisly frosts, first autumn morns,Repeal the beating ground.But most like chaos,--stopless, cool,Without a chance or spar,--Or even a report of landTo justify despair.

Emily Dickinson

Gaze into the fire, into the clouds, and as soon as the inner voices begin to speak... surrender to them. Don't ask first whether it's permitted, or would please your teachers or father or some god. You will ruin yourself if you do that.

Hermann Hesse

What is literature but the expression of moods by the vehicle of symbol and incident?

W.B. Yeats

This look of thine will hurl my soul from heaven.

William Shakespeare

Grey rocks, and greyer sea, And surf along the shore -- And in my heart a name My lips shall speak no more.

Charles G.D. Roberts

It’s a fact: black people in this country die more easily, at all ages, across genders. Look at how young black men die, and how middle-aged black men drop dead, and how black women are ravaged by HIV/AIDS. The numbers graft to poverty but they also graph to stresses known and invisible. How did we come here, after all? Not with upturned chins and bright eyes but rather in chains, across a chasm. But what did we do? We built a nation, and we built its art.

Elizabeth Alexander

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

That lady has a piano.It’s nice, but it’s not the running of riversOr the murmuring trees make ..Who needs a piano?It’s better to have earsAnd love Nature.

Alberto Caeiro

Life is painful and disappointing. It is useless, therefore, to write new realistic novels. We generally know where we stand in relation to reality and don’t care to know any more.

Michel Houellebecq

It costs me never a stab nor squirm / To tread by chance upon a worm. / Aha, my little dear, / I say, Your clan will pay me back one day.

Dorothy Parker

Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee, as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.

Herman Melville

Each day comes bearing its own gifts. Untie the ribbons.

Ruth Ann Schabacker

(after many years) we were still at that first stage, stillpreparing to begin a journey, but we were changed nevertheless;we could see this in one another; we had changed althoughwe never moved, and one said, ah, behold how we have aged, travelingfrom day to night only, neither forward nor sideward, and this seemedin a strange way miraculous. And those who believed we should have a purposebelieved this was the purpose, and those who felt we must remain freein order to encounter truth felt it had been revealed.

Louise Glück

Everything you experience is a blessing and pushes you toward realizing your true self.

Vivian Amis

Entering a cell, penetrating deep as a flying saucer to find a new galaxy would be an honorable task for a new scientist interested more in the inner state of the soul than in outer space.

Dejan Stojanovic

Reason forbade me many things which,Instinctively, my nature was attracted to;And a perpetual loss I feel if, knowing,I believe a falsehood or deny the truth.

Abul 'Ala' Al-Ma'arri

The truth is, there is good and bad in everybody, in every nation, in every race, and in every religion. To hear someone say that all the people that belong to a certain country, race, or religion are bad — is extremely untruthful and makes the person making the statement lose credibility right away. We are all flawed and even nature is flawed. Nobody is perfect, and no country, race or religion is perfect. Duality and polarity are imprinted in everything in nature — in all humans, and even within ourselves. For example, there are those who are ignorant, and those who are wise.

Suzy Kassem

Deep in earth my love is lyingAnd I must weep alone.

Edgar Allan Poe

Knowledge of self ought to be the great project of our lives. Knowing ourselves we will know others. Only by knowing ourselves can we begin to undo the madness we unleash on the world in our wars, our destruction of the environment, our divisions, our desire to dominate others, the poverty we create and exploit. Only through self-knowledge can we reverse the damage we do with all the worldly knowledge we have, which has been only a higher ignorance.

Ben Okri

Scenery is fine -but human nature is finer

John Keats

There ain't no answer. There ain't gonna be any answer. There never has been an answer. That's the answer.

Gertrude Stein

La mayoría de la muerte de la gente es una farsa, no queda en ellos nada que pueda morir

Charles Bukowski

Sometimes it feels like you've set off a spectacular lightning show in my heart, and I wonder if other people can see the flashes through my skin.

John Mark Green

Their doubt is your fuel for dreams. You just have to drive.

Criss Jami

There are no sides in suicide.

Anthony Liccione

Peace ought not be regarded the height of civilization, else like barbarians we forever battle for peace.

Criss Jami

Fell in love first,Fell in love quickly—Like I was pushed.Fell in love next,Fell in love slowly—Like I was strolling.Falling in love now And feeling crazy.Thinking of closing my eyesAnd jumping.

Kamand Kojouri

Give me juicy autumnal fruit, ripe and red from the orc

Walt Whitman

Oh, Death was never enemy of ours!We laughed at him, we leagued with him, old chum.No soldier's paid to kick against His powers.We laughed, — knowing that better men would come,And greater wars: when each proud fighter bragsHe wars on Death, for lives; not men, for flags.

Wilfred Owen

Change is still resented on the Plains, so much so much so that many small-town people cling to the dangerous notion that while the world outside may change drastically, their town does not...... when myth dictates that the town has not really changed, ways of adapting to new social and economic conditions are rejected: not vigorously, but with a strangely resolute inertia...Combatting inertia in a town such as Lemmon can seem like raising the dead. It is painful to watch intelligent business people who are dedicated to the welfare of the town spend most of their energy combatting those more set in their ways. Community spirit can still work wonders here - people raised over $500,000 in the hard times of the late 1980s to keep the Lemmon nursing home open...By the time a town is 75 or 100 years old, it may be filled with those who have come to idealize their isolation. Often these are people who never left at all, or fled back to the safety of the town after a try at college a few hundred miles from home, or returned after college regarding the values of the broader, more pluralistic world they had encountered as something to protect themselves and their families from...More than ever, I've come to see conspiracy theories as the refuge of those who have lost their natural curiosity to cope with change.

Kathleen Norris

The gray sea and the long black land; And the yellow half-moon large and low: And the startled little waves that leap In fiery ringlets from their sleep, As I gain the cove with pushing prow,And quench its speed i’ the slushy sand.

Robert Browning

weren’t you alwaysdistracted by expectation, as if every eventannounced a beloved? (Where can you find a placeto keep her, with all the huge strange thoughts inside yougoing and coming and often staying all night.)…

Rainer Maria Rilke

The quiet sense of something lost

Alfred Tennyson

Good wombs have borne bad sons."-- (Miranda, I:2)

William Shakespeare

Time is an imp—a pesky, little, hellish troll that hastens the clock when I smile but then delays the passing of minutes when I frown.

Richelle E. Goodrich

Art is science made clear.

Jean Cocteau

Man is a complex being: he makes deserts bloom - and lakes die.

Gil Scott-Heron