Quotes by Poets - Page 169

That which is impermanent attracts compassion. That which is not provides wisdom. (116)
Stephen Levine
i carry your heart with me(i carry it inmy heart)i am never without it(anywherei go you go,my dear;and whatever is doneby only me is your doing,my darling)
E.E. Cummings
Everything was brighter and more colorful in those years, as if my childhood was ending in an explosion of unreal passion that made my life feel sacred and holy.
Roman Payne
I have been investigating this modern problem of decline in readership and my conclusion is that it has little to do with bad readership and a whole lot with a difference in information speed. Frankly, the modern brain is much faster than the classical brain was in how it absorbs information and novels do not reflect this development. They are simply not dense enough. Too slow, not the right tempo - bores the shit out of a modern brain! There's the real problem: our brains have developed into different speed levels that authors cant adjust to. It has nothing whatsoever to do with quality: it has rather a whole lot to do with people claiming to be authors who are incapable of concentrating their ideas in the right sort of space, and rather smear out a few already halfbaked ideas over 30 plus pages. Hello! Do you think its weird a facebooktrained mind, capable of digesting enormous amounts of information at quick speeds, is bored shitless with that? The problem is not bad readership but rather bad authorship: authors that cannot adjust to the times. And since there are a zillion books published every day of authors that just cant keep up with the speed of the times, and criticism hardly exists anymore in modern society, it becomes simply very unattractive to read books, unless one keeps to the classics, which are books that are much more dense at essence.
Martijn Benders
Dying is a wild night and a new road.
Emily Dickinson
A man only understands what is akin to something already existing in himself.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
I shall not dwell in the past...I shall not dread the present...I shall not fear the Future...For as Long as I live...I shall only think of success.
Oscar Trejo Jr.
count no man happy until he be dead.
Solon
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
Life belongs to the living, and he who lives must be prepared for changes.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
We may revere motherhood, the hazy abstraction, the cream-of-wheat-with-a-halo ideal, but a mother is just a kind of woman, after all, and women are trouble and not so valuable. Low-income mothers drag down the country—why'd they have kids if they couldn't support them? Middle-class mothers are boring frumps. Elite ones are obsessed sanctimommies.
Katha Pollitt
He had made his decision. Later in life Ann would learn that when certain men made decisions no matter how much it might torture them afterwards they would stick with their decision. Men, she learned, would rather suffer than change their minds or their habits. They could develop elaborate systems for containing pain, sometimes so successful they would remain completely unaware of the vastness of the pain they possessed.
Susan Minot
Children are particularly literary, for they say what they feel not what someone has taught them to feel.
Fernando Pessoa
The Black female is assaulted in her tender years by all those common forces of nature at the same time she is caught in the tripartite crossfire of masculine prejudice, white illogical hate and Black lack of power.The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerence. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors and deserves respect if not enthusiastic admiration.
Maya Angelou
Compromise if not the spice of life is its solidity.
Phyllis McGinley
Kiss my foot, sir; my face is for mouths of consequence.
Thomas Hardy
Eiffel Tower" To Robert DelaunayEiffel Tower Guitar of the skyYour wireless telegraphy Attracts words As a rosebush the beesDuring the night The Seine no longer flowsTelescope or bugleEIFFEL TOWERAnd it's a hive of words Or an inkwell of honeyAt the bottom of dawn A spider with barbed-wire legs Was making its web of cloudsMy little boy To climb the Eiffel Tower You climb on a songDo re mi fa sol la ti do We are up on top A bird sings in the telegraph antennae It's the wind Of Europe The electric windOver there The hats fly away They have wings but they don't singJacqueline Daughter of France What do you see up thereThe Seine is asleep Under the shadow of its bridgesI see the Earth turning And I blow my bugleToward all the seasOn the path Of your perfume All the bees and the words go their wayOn the four horizons Who has not heard this song I AM THE QUEEN OF THE DAWN OF THE POLES I AM THE COMPASS THE ROSE OF THE WINDS THAT FADESEVERY FALLAND ALL FULL OF SNOW I DIE FROM THE DEATH OF THAT ROSE IN MY HEAD A BIRD SINGS ALL YEAR LONGThat's the way the Tower spoke to me one dayEiffel Tower Aviary of the world Sing SingChimes of ParisThe giant hanging in the midst of the void Is the poster of FranceThe day of Victory You will tell it to the stars
Vicente Huidobro
True...I hear voices in my head keep talking to me. The good thing for now is...I never answer them back.
Timothy Pina
I love writing poetry because it's pretty. I love writing pretty.
Richelle E. Goodrich
You know you love something if you're willing to die for it, and you know it means nothing if you walk away from that which is dying.
Anthony Liccione
The main misfortune, the root of all the evil to come, was the loss of confidence in the value of one’s own opinion. People imagined that it was out of date to follow their own moral sense, that they must all sing in chorus, and live by other people’s notions, notions that were being crammed down everybody’s throat.
Boris Pasternak
The time approachesThat will with due decision make us knowWhat we shall say we have and what we owe.Thoughts speculative their unsure hopes relate,But certain issue strokes must arbitrate;Towards which, advance th
William Shakespeare
The insolence of office.
William Shakespeare
I see your painas clearly as I feel my own.I will share your burden so you feel it less.Do not hate this world.Do not hate these people.I will share my hopeso you feel it more.I want you to see our loveas clearly as I feel yours.
Kamand Kojouri
Nothing that surrounds us is object, all is subject.
André Breton
The belief in death leads meditating about life; meanwhile, the belief in life leads you thinking about death.
Sorin Cerin
I raised you so high that every other man on earth is now doomed to live in your shadow.
Ranata Suzuki
But man, proud man,Dress'd in a little brief authority,Most ignorant of what he's most assur'd—His glassy essence—like an angry apePlays such fantastic tricks before high heavenAs makes the angels weep; who, with our spleens,Would all themselves laugh mortal.
William Shakespeare
Let there be no love poems writtenUntil love can exist freely andCleanly.
Amiri Baraka
Reason ruling alone is a force confining and passion unattended is a flame that burns to its own destruction.
Kahlil Gibran
Florence Farr once said to me "If we could say to ourselves with sincerity 'this passing moment is as good as any I shall ever know ' we could die upon the instant and be united with God."
William Butler Yeats
He who has lived and thought can't helpdespising people in his soul;him who has felt disturbs the ghost of irrecoverable days;for him there are no more enchantments;him does the snake of memories, him does repentance bite.
Alexander Pushkin
Who shall tell the lady's griefWhen her Cat was past relief?Who shall number the hot tearsShed o'er her, beloved for years?Who shall say the dark dismayWhich her dying caused that day?
Christina Rossetti
Open wide the mind's cage-door,She'll dart forth, and cloudward soar.
John Keats
When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd And the great star early droop'd in the western sky the night I mourn'd - and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
Walt Whitman
Advice is like snow the softer it falls the longer it dwells upon and the deeper it sinks into the mind.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
To be intuitive is to possess a godly characteristic: to be bad at second-guessing the good.
Criss Jami
The longing for certainty ... is in every human mind. But certainty is generally illusion.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
From women's eyes this doctrine I derive:They are the ground, the books, the academes,From whence doth spring the true Promethean fire.
William Shakespeare
Every now and then a man's mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
The women of the South have brought into American literature a unique mixture of domesticity and grotesquerie.
James Dickey
We'd been so sure of ourselves, but now we were lost.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Time will solve all the problems Chinese school graduates face. In our bilingual society, there are no more Chinese school graduates, only English school graduates who can speak Mandarin. These English school graduates probably can also read and write Chinese, but they did not go to a Chinese school, and they act and think differently from us. Drawing a line between us, they would never say they graduated from a Chinese school, because former Chinese school graduates, that is, the vanishing group of people that includes us, are second-class citizens. They, on the other hand, belong to the first class, the Chinese elite, English school graduates who are fluent in Chinese.
Yeng Pway Ngon
Three times Jan had been called to the colours (the army), but each time had been deferred because of his deplorable physical condition..when every male who could stand halfway erect was being shipped to Verdun to undergo a radical change in posture from the vertical to the eternal horizontal
Günter Grass
Great is language . . . . it is the mightiest of the sciences,It is the fulness and color and form and diversity of the earth . . . . and of men and women . . . . and of all qualities and processes;It is greater than wealth . . . . it is greater than buildings or ships or religions or paintings or music.
Walt Whitman
So this talk, or touch if I were there,Should work its effortless gadgetry of love,Like Dante’s heaven, and melt into the air.If it doesn’t, of course, I’ve fallen. So much is chance,So much agility, desire, and feverish care,As bicyclists and harpsicordists proveWho only by moving can balance,Only by balancing move.
Michael Donaghy
If I love a dose of (good) theology or philosophy, I probably also love discipline, improvement, wisdom, and challenges. If I hate it, I am probably too comfortable and proud to try to question myself.
Criss Jami
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval
George Santayana
as long as there arehuman beings aboutthere is never going to beany peacefor any individualupon this earth (oranywhere elsethey mightescape to).all you can dois maybe grabten lucky minuteshereor maybe an hourthere.somethingis working toward youright now, andI mean youand nobody butyou.
Charles Bukowski
One thing's sure and nothing surer. The rich get richer and the poor get- children
Ron Rash
When I composed those verses I was preoccupied less with music than with an experience—an experience in which that beautiful musical allegory had shown its moral side, had become an awakening and a summons to a life vocation. The imperative form of the poem which specially displeases you is not the expression of a command and a will to teach but a command and warning directed towards myself. Even if you were not fully aware of this, my friend, you could have read it in the closing lines. I experienced an insight, you see, a realization and an inner vision, and wished to impress and hammer the moral of this vision into myself. That is the reason why this poem has remained in my memory. Whether the verses are good or bad they have achieved their aim, for the warning has lived on within me and has not been forgotten. It rings anew for me again to-day, and that is a wonderful little experience which your scorn cannot take away from me.
Hermann Hesse
Love has no fear, willing to take on anyone. But how much we fear love!
Anthony Liccione
Good night, good night! parting is such sweet sorrow, That I shall say good night till it be morrow.
William Shakespeare
Love is like quicksilver in the hand. Leave the fingers open and it stays. Clutch it and it darts away.
Dorothy Parker
Oh what a poet I will flay myself into.
Sylvia Plath
But if the cause be not good, the king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all 'We died at such a place;' some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left. I am afeard there are few die well that die in a battle; for how can they charitably dispose of anything, when blood is their argument? Now, if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the king that led them to it; whom to disobey were against all proportion of subjection.[Henry V, Act IV Scene I]
William Shakespeare
Nobody reads poetry anymoreSo who the hell are youI see bent over this book?
Aleksandar Ristović
I don't ever want to make the mistake of needing him as much as or more than he needs me. But there's no denying that sometimes, when we sleep together in the dark cavern of the bottom bunk, his big brother thrashing around on top, the white noise machine grinding out its fake rain, the green digital clock announcing every hour, Iggy's small body holds mine.
Maggie Nelson
Vaguely conscious of that great suspense in which we live, we find our escape from its sterile, annihilating reality in many dreams, in religion, passion, art.
Arthur Symons
I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least, Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself.
Walt Whitman