Quotes by Poets - Page 14

It is a difficult thing―if not impossible―to forgive oneself for foolish errors, not for trampling a life or goring another with sharp horns, but for being the fool who opened the gate and let the bull out, blind to potential consequences.
Richelle E. Goodrich
He does it with a better grace, but I do it more natural.
William Shakespeare
The color has faded out of the sky. It is grey, becoming darker as the world turns herself round a little more. The clouds are long and black and ragged, like the wings of stormbattered dragons.
Keri Hulme
Be England what she will With all her faults she is my country still.
Charles Churchill
I think that I shall never seeA poem lovely as a tree.A tree whose hungry mouth is pressedAgainst the earth's sweet flowing breast;A tree that looks at God all dayAnd lifts her leafy arms to pray;A tree that may in summer wearA nest of robins in her hair;Upon whose bosom snow has lain;Who intimately lives with rain.Poems are made by fools like me,But only God can make a tree.
Joyce Kilmer
Fate loves the fearless.
James Russell Lowell
The issue, perhaps, boils down to one of how perceptions or misperceptions of racial difference impact various individuals’, or groups of individuals’, experience of freedom in America. Some would argue that it goes beyond hampering their 'pursuit of happiness' to outright obliterating it.
Aberjhani
Men's lives are short .The hard man and his cruelties will beCursed behind his back and mocked in death.But one whose heart and ways are kind - of himstrangers will bear report to the whole wide world,and distant men will praise him.- Penelope in Robert Fitzgerald trans. THE ODYSSEY (364)
Robert Fitzgerald
From "Wetness and Water"How does a part of the world leave the world?How can wetness leave water?Do not try to put out a fireby throwing on more fire.Do not wash a wound with blood.No matter how fast you run,your shadow more than keeps up.Sometimes it's in front.Only full, overhead sundiminishes your shadow.But that shadow has been serving you.What hurts you blesses you.Darkness is your candle.Your boundaries are your quest.
Jalaluddin Rumi
For thy sake tobacco I Would do anything but die.
Charles Lamb
The pedigree of honey Does not concern the bee A clover anytime to him Is aristocracy.
Emily Dickinson
We all have some taste or other of too ancient a date to admit of our remembering that it was an acquired one.
Charles Lamb
For the to see you shine, you must stay far way, for you are like the sun; when you’re too close, your light make them blind. And when you’re too far, they seek you. So let them seek you. They’re getting your light regardless, but appreciating your presence is different from recognizing your existence. If they don’t appreciate your presence, they may never recognize your absence.
Najwa Zebian
Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.
Derek Walcott
A savage is simply a human organism that has not received enough news from the human race.
John Ciardi
Hence in solitude, or that deserted state when we are surrounded by human beings and yet they sympathize not with us, we love the flowers, the grass, the waters, and the sky. In the motion of the very leaves of spring, in the blue air, there is then found a secret correspondence with our heart.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
You could string a hundred endless days together,My soul would find no comfort from this pain.You laugh at my tale? You may be educatedBut you haven’t learned to love till you’re insane
Jalaluddin Rumi
What are they like, writers, in your mind: it may seem strange, but initially it’s not about writing. A writer is someone who struggles with the angels of solitude and truth. A confused struggle, without any clear conclusion.
Christian Bobin
Dowling Drink to me only with thine eyes And I will pledge with mine Or leave a kiss but in the cup And I'll not look for wine.
Ben Jonson
Oh Lady, let the sad tears fall To speak thy pain, Gently as through the silver dusk The silver rain. Oh, let thy bosom breathe its grief In such soft sigh As hath the wind in gardens where Pale roses die.
Adelaide Crapsey
Only he who attempts the absurd is capable of achieving the impossible.
Miguel de Unamuno
HereI'm here-the snow falling.
Kobayashi Issa
I just want you to know that where ever life takes you, I'll always be happy for you as long as its something that makes you happy because that's all that really makes me happy. Why? I'm just listening to my heart and all it's telling me is to understand. Which in a way I can but then again I can't. I'm use to it all though because not everyone lives a fair life if you know what I mean.
Jonathan Anthony Burkett
Morbidity and Mortality RoundsForgive me, body before me, for this.Forgive me for my bumbling hands, unschooledin how to touch: I meant to understandwhat fever was, not love. Forgive me formy stare, but when I look at you, I seemyself laid bare. Forgive me, body, forwhat seems like calculation when I takea breath before I cut you with my knife,because the cancer has to be removed.Forgive me for not telling you, but I’mno poet. Please forgive me, please. Forgivemy gloves, my callous greeting, my unease—you must not realize I just met deathagain. Forgive me if I say he lookedimpatient. Please, forgive me my despair,which once seemed more like recompense. Forgivemy greed, forgive me for not having moreto give you than this bitter pill. Forgive:for this apology, too late, for thoselike me whose crimes might seem innocuousand yet whose cruelty was obvious.Forgive us for these sins. Forgive me, please,for my confusing heart that sounds so muchlike yours. Forgive me for the night, when Isleep too, beside you under the same moon.Forgive me for my dreams, for my rough knees,for giving up too soon. Forgive me, please,for losing you, unable to forgive.
Rafael Campo
I'll follow this good man, and go with you;And, having sworn truth, ever will be true.
William Shakespeare
Please let me know if I am not hereLet me know if I fail to find you thereFor before the dawn I leave the night behind meAnd before my heart I let you leave me behind.
Munia Khan
Mothers,fathers,our kind,tell me again that death doesn't matter.Tell me it's just a limitation of vision ,a fold of landscape,a deep flax-and-poppy-filled gully hidden on the hill, pleat in our perception a somersault of existence,natural,even beneficent even a gift,the only key to the red-lacquered door at the end of the hall,"water within water," those old stories.
Pattiann Rogers
Early mapmakers kept their backs to the sea
Sarah Hymas
A man over ninety is a great comfort to all his elderly neighbours: he is a picket-guard at the extreme outpost: and the young folks of sixty and seventy feel that the enemy must get by him before he can come near their camp.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
The flea though he kill none he does all the harm he can.
John Donne
I just may be the strangest person you will ever know. I am filled with too many oddities and too few consistencies and I will always lack the spongey filter that should live between brain and mouth. These defining traits these enduring characteristics, and these fingers crossed that in all of it, you will find them irresistible.
Tyler Knott Gregson
Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it's cracked up to be. That's why people are so cynical about it. . . . It really is worth fighting for being brave for risking everything for. And the trouble is if you don't risk everything you risk even more.
Erica Jong
I am larger, better than I thought; I did not know I held so much goodness.All seems beautiful to me.Whoever denies me, it shall not trouble me;tWhoever accepts me, he or she shall be blessed, and shall bless me.
Walt Whitman
In dreams begin responsibilities
W.B. Yeats
No 'tis not so deep as a well nor so wide as a church door but 'tis enough 'twill serve: ask for me tomorrow and you shall find me a grave man. I am peppered I warrant for this world.
William Shakespeare
It's always funny that you can try and try again to steal all your critics' ammo, predict their responses, but no matter what, they'll still have a water gun stashed somewhere.
Criss Jami
Anger should be your servant, not your master
Alok Jagawat
The person who has a firm trust in the Supreme Being is powerful in his power wise by his wisdom happy by his happiness.
Joseph Addison
We had some good times at school. I didn't know how good those times was till I left, but I guess that's the way of it
Ron Rash
By telling you anything at all I'm at least believing in you, I believe you're there, I believe you into being. Because I'm telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are.
Margaret Atwood
History is not a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken, but rather, a glorious tale which I wish to be cast in.
Pietros Maneos
A Christmas gambol oft could cheerThe poor man's heart through half the year.
Walter Scott
Children are the greatest philosophers : the questions that children ask require the deepest of thoughts and the longest of reflections on life!
Avijeet Das
Stories set the inner life into motion, and this is particularly important where the inner life is frightened, wedged, or cornered. Story greases the hoists and pulleys, it causes adrenaline to surge, shows us the way out, down, or up, and for our trouble, cuts for us fine wide doors in previously blank walls, openings that lead to the dreamland, that lead to love and learning, that lead us back to our own real lives as knowing wildish women.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés
A lot of people call you a feminist painter.""What indeed," I say. "I hate party lines, I hate ghettos. Anyway. I'm too old to have invented it and you're too young to understand it, so what's the point of discussing it at all?
Margaret Atwood
The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it.
William Blake
For, dear me, why abandon a beliefMerely because it ceases to be true?Cling to it long enough, and not a doubtIt will turn true again, for so it goes.Most of the change we think we see in lifeIs due to truths being in and out of favor.As I sit here, and often times, I wishI could be monarch of a desert landI could devote and dedicate foreverTo the truths we keep coming back and back to.––from "The Black Cottage
Robert Frost
Over and over we lose this sense of feeling we are wholly in our skins by means already named as well as through extended duress. Those who toil too long without respite are also at risk. The soulskin vanishes when we are not paying attention to what we are really doing and particularly the cost to us.""We lose the soulskin by becoming too involved with ego, by being too exacting, perfectionistic, or unnecessarily martyred, or driven by a blind ambition, or by being dissatisfied - about self, family, community, culture, world - and not saying or doing anything about it, or by pretending we are an ending source for others, or by not doing all we can to help ourselves. Oh, there are as many ways to lose the soul skin as there are women in the world.""The only way to hold on to this sensual soulskin is to retain an exquisitely pristine consciousness about its value and uses.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés
The little boy was looking for his voice.(The king of the crickets had it.)In a drop of waterthe little boy was looking for his voice.I do not want it for speaking with;I will make a ring of itso that he may wear my silenceon his little fingerIn a drop of waterthe little boy was looking for his voice.(The captive voice, far away,put on a cricket's clo
Federico García Lorca
It is not that men become too intelligent for God,' says the Apologist, 'but rather they become too arrogant for intelligence.
Criss Jami
Who can say that he is not everything?
Sorin Cerin
Without sound,There would be no music.And without music,There would be no life.And without a life force,There would be no matter.But it does not matter -Because what is matter,If there is no light?
Suzy Kassem
Fairy tales are another kind of Bible, for those who know how to read them.
Theodora Goss
Scholars, I plead with you, Where are your dictionaries of the wind, the grasses?
Norman MacCaig
Chew off a little every day, because it’s hard to swallow a whole pie at once.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Every sickness has an alien quality, a feeling of invasion and loss of control that is evident in the language we use about it.
Siri Hustvedt
My students still don't know what they will never be. Their hope is so bright I can almost see it.I used to value the truth of whether this student or that one would achieve the desired thing. I don't value that truth anymore as much as I value their untested hope. I don't care that one in two hundred of them will ever become what they feel they must become. I care only that I am able to witness their faith in what's coming next.I no longer believe in anything other than the middle, but my students still believe in beginnings. Ask them, and they will tell you that everything is about to start in just a moment, just one more moment.
Sarah Manguso
No DifferenceSmall as a peanut,Big as a giant,We're all the same sizeWhen we turn off the light.Rich as a sultan,Poor as a mite,We're all worth the sameWhen we turn off the light.Red, black or orange,Yellow or white, We all look the sameWhen we turn off the light.So maybe the way, To make everything rightIs for god to just reach outAnd turn off the light!
Shel Silverstein
Man is a passion which brings a will into play which works an intelligence.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
All bleed who fight with the sword. All confront, with greater or lesser difficulty, the worship of their own flesh. The swordmaiden faces particular obstacles in this matter: she will have seen, in the temples and elsewhere, many images of unscarred women.
Sofia Samatar