Quotes by Poets - Page 204

I have beenhanging hereheadlessfor so longthat the body has forgottenwhyor where or when ithappenedand the toeswalk along in shoesthat do notcareand althoughthe fingersslice things andhold things andmove things andtouchthingssuch asorangesapplesonionsbooksbodiesI am no longerreasonably surewhat these thingsarethey are mostlylikelamplight andfogthen often the hands willgo to thelost headand hold the headlike the hands of achildaround a balla blockair and wood -no teethno thinking partand when a windowblows opento achurchhillwomandogor something singingthe fingers of the handare senseless to vibrationbecause they have noearssenseless to color becausethey have noeyessenseless to smellwithout a nosethey country goes by asnonsensethe continentsthe daylights and eveningsshineon my dirtyfingernailsand in some mirrormy facea block to vanishscuffed part of a child’sballwhile everywheremovesworms and aircraftfires on the landtall violets in sanctitymy hands let go let golet go
Charles Bukowski
I will take your heart.I will take your soul out of your bodyAs though I were God.I will not be satisfiedWith the little words you say to me.I will not be satisfiedWith the touch of your handNor the sweet of your lips alone.I will take your heart for mine.I will take your soul.I will be God when it comes to you.
Langston Hughes
Solo For Ear-Trumpet The carriage brushes through the brightLeaves (violent jets from life to light);Strong polished speed is plunging, heavesBetween the showers of bright hot leavesThe window-glasses glaze our facesAnd jar them to the very basis — But they could never put a polishUpon my manners or abolishMy most distinct disinclinationFor calling on a rich relation!In her house — (bulwark built betweenThe life man lives and visions seen) — The sunlight hiccups white as chalk,Grown drunk with emptiness of talk,And silence hisses like a snake — Invertebrate and rattling ache….Then suddenly EternityDrowns all the houses like a seaAnd down the street the Trump of DoomBlares madly — shakes the drawing-roomWhere raw-edged shadows sting forlornAs dank dark nettles. Down the hornOf her ear-trumpet I conveyThe news that 'It is Judgment Day!''Speak louder: I don't catch, my dear.'I roared: 'It is the Trump we hear!''The What?' 'THE TRUMP!' 'I shall complain!…. the boy-scouts practising again.
Edith Sitwell
Beyond all vanities, fights, and desires, omnipotent silence lies.
Dejan Stojanovic
Your weaknesses may not seem overwhelming, but they will create the biggest problems you face.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Let everyone sweep in front of his own door, and the whole world will be clean.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I could a tale unfold whose lightest wordWould harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,Make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres,Thy knotted and combined locks to part,And each particular hair to stand on endLike quills upon the fretful porpentine.But this eternal blazon must not beTo ears of flesh and blood.List, list, O list!
William Shakespeare
If wrappings of cloth can impart respectability, the most respectable persons are the Egyptian mummies, all wrapped in layers and layers of gauze
Kamala Suraiyya Das
They tried to bury us. They didn't know we were seeds.
Dinos Christianopoulos
Our daily prayer ought to be: Please universe, help me help myself and help me show others how to help themselves.
Kamand Kojouri
Moreover, you can’t stand so much as an hour of your own companyor spend your leisure properly; you avoid yourself like a truantor fugitive, hoping by drink or sleep to elude Angst.But it’s no good, for that dark companion stays on your heels
Horace
What is believed in society is not always the equivalent of what is true; but as regards to a woman's reputation, it amounts to the same thing.
Margaret Atwood
The secret of happiness is freedom but to be totally free you need to earn: courage, persistence and boldness.
Santosh Kalwar
I feel good with my husband: I like his warmth and his bigness and his being-there and his making and his jokes and stories and what he reads and how he likes fishing and walks and pigs and foxes and little animals and is honest and not vain or fame-crazy and how he shows his gladness for what I cook him and joy for when I make him something, a poem or a cake, and how he is troubled when I am unhappy and wants to do anything so I can fight out my soul-battles and grow up with courage and a philosophical ease. I love his good smell and his body that fits with mine as if they were made in the same body-shop to do just that. What is only pieces, doled out here and there to this boy and that boy, that made me like pieces of them, is all jammed together in my husband. So I don't want to look around any more: I don't need to look around for anything.
Sylvia Plath
Literature has become merely a tool for culture studies.
Anuradha Bhattacharyya
I always envisioned myself as traveling the ocean of life in a rowboat where my mother was one oar and my father, the other. Having two good, solid oars made rowing much easier.
Richelle E. Goodrich
2015 - the year of infinity - if you add all the numbers up you get 8 - which on it's side is the sign of infinity - and I think it's going to be one hell of a good year for us.
Jay Woodman
They never taste who always drink They always talk who never think.
Matthew Prior
She always says she dislikes the abnormal it is so obvious. She says the normal is so much more simply complicated and interesting.
Gertrude Stein
The man who sins but wants to purify it is no more a sinner than the man who doesn't sin but wants to sin.
Criss Jami
Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.
Margaret Atwood
To SorrowI bade good morrow,And thought to leave her far away behind;But cheerly, cheerly,She loves me dearly;She is so constant to me, and so kind.
John Keats
Flight is the only true sensation that men have achieved in modern history.
James Dickey
All this, I suspect, has been little more than the operation known as the pilgrimage from the cradle to the grave, but I have had a comfortable feeling that, however ordinary my enterprises may have been, they had at any rate the advantage of containing, for me, an element of sustained unfamiliarity. I am one of those persons who begin life by exclaiming they've "never seen anything like this before" and die in the hope that they may say the same of heaven.
Siegfried Sassoon
Did he who made the lamb make thee?
William Blake
By God, if women had written stories,As clerks had within here oratories,They would have written of men more wickednessThan all the mark of Adam may redress.
Geoffrey Chaucer
To cast in my lot with Jekyll, was to die to those appetites which I had long secretly indulged and had of late begun to pamper. To cast it in with Hyde, was to die to a thousand interests and aspirations, and to become, at a blow and forever, despised and friendless. The bargain might appear unequal; but there was still another consideration in the scales; for while Jekyll would suffer smartingly in the fires of abstinence, Hyde would be not even conscious of all that he had lost. Strange as my circumstances were, the terms of this debate are as old and commonplace as man; much the same inducements and alarms cast the die for any tempted and trembling sinner; and it fell out with me, as it falls with so vast a majority of my fellows, that I chose the better part and was found wanting in the strength to keep to it.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Let him talk," said Dupin, who had not thought it necessary to reply. "Let him discourse; it will ease his conscience, I a satisfied with having defeated him in his own castle.
Edgar Allan Poe
The most difficult character in comedy is that of the fool and he must be no simpleton that plays that part.
Miguel de Cervantes
One thinks of the failure of representation since 9/11, the proliferation of novels, the media glut, the surfeit of images that somehow slide too easily into a banal repertoire, commodified shock.
Maureen N. McLane
Rather a thousand times the county jail than to lie under this marble figure with wings and this granite pedestal bearing the words "pro patria." What do they mean anyway?
Edgar Lee Masters
Do you like me?”No answer.Silence bounced, fell off his tongueand sat between usand clogged my throat.It slaughtered my trust.It tore cigarettes out of my mouth.We exchanged blind words,and I did not cry,I did not beg,but blackness filled my ears,blackness lunged in my heart,and something that had been good,a sort of kindly oxygen,turned into a gas oven.
Anne Sexton
I sleep with thee, and wake with thee,And yet thou are not there;I fill my arms with thoughts of thee,And press the common air.
John Clare
They say the crazies come out at night. I say the crazies come out during election year: Elections have the power to turn once seemingly normal people into certified loonies.
Criss Jami
Oft have I heard that grief softens the mind, And makes it fearful and degenerate; Think therefore on revenge and cease to weep.
William Shakespeare
Oh why should the spirit of mortal be proud? Like a fast-flitting meteor a fast-flying cloud A flash of the lightning a break of the wave He passes from life to his rest in the grave.
William Knox
There is nothing to be found in human eyes, and that is their terrifying and dolorous enigma, their abominable and delusive charm. There is nothing but that which we put there ourselves. That is why honest gazes are only to be found in portraits.The faded and weary eyes of martyrs, expressions tortured by ecstasy, imploring and suffering eyes, some resigned, others desperate... the gazes of saints, mendicants and princesses in exile, with pardoning smiles... the gazes of the possessed, the chosen and the hysterical... and sometimes of little girls, the eyes of Ophelia and Canidia, the eyes of virgins and witches... as you live in the museums, what eternal life, dolorous and intense, shines out of you! Like precious stones enshrined between the painted eyelids of masterpieces, you disturb us across time and across space, receivers of the dream which created you!You have souls, but they are those of the artists who wished you into being, and I am delivered to despair and mortification because I have drunk the draught of poison congealed in the irises of your eyes.The eyes of portraits ought to be plucked out.
Jean Lorrain
It was a pity thoughts always ran the easiest way, like water in old ditches.
Walter de la Mare
Like yeast, it’s impressive how considerably an ounce of determination can make one’s efforts grow and expand.
Richelle E. Goodrich
of one hundred movies there's one that is fair, one that's good and ninety eight that are very bad. most movies start badly and steadily get worse
Charles Bukowski
A poem is about something the way a cat is about the house.
Allen Grossman
We awaken by asking the right questions. We awaken when we see knowledge being spread that goes against our own personal experiences. We awaken when we see popular opinion being wrong but accepted as being right, and what is right being pushed as being wrong. We awaken by seeking answers in corners that are not popular. And we awaken by turning on the light inside when everything outside feels dark.
Suzy Kassem
Were it possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches, and yet a little way beyond the outworks of our divinings, perhaps we would endure our sadnesses with greater confidence than our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered into us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy perplexity, everything in us withdraws, a stillness comes, and the new, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it and is silent.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Revolutionary law number one," someone said. "Capitalism has cheated us. Books are not to be bought, they are to be repossessed.""This is robbery," I said. "Let's not kid ourselves. And don't do that to me again. You scared me to death.""It's not robbery. Books are ideas. They should be able to circulate freely within society. At no price at all, or for pennies. Knowledge is universal. It belongs to all of us.
Gioconda Belli
According to Adam One, the Fall of Man was multidimensional. The ancestral primates fell out of the trees; then they fell from vegetarianism into meat-eating. Then they fell from instinct into reason, and thus into technology; from simple signals into complex grammar, and thus into humanity; from firelessness into fire, and thence into weaponry; and from seasonal mating into an incessant sexual twitching. Then they fell from a joyous life in the moment into the anxious contemplation of the vanished past and the distant future.
Margaret Atwood
Sweet and low sweet and low Wind of the western sea Low low breathe and blow Wind of the western sea! Over the rolling waters go Come from the dying moon and blow Blow him again to me While my little one while my pretty one sleeps.
Lord Alfred Tennyson
since some people had told me that I was ugly, I always preferred shade to the sun, darkness to light
Charles Bukowski
The whole problem of life is this: how to break out of one's own solitude, how to communicate with others.
Cesare Pavese
Do not trap yourself into an owl's hooting soundwhere sad nights linger through the blackness of a hound
Munia Khan
For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun? And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.
Kahlil Gibran
The land is always there...it is you who has to return
Munia Khan
Tis best to weigh the enemy more mighty than he seems.
William Shakespeare
Life is but a day at most.
James Drummond Burns
Gratitude is a grinning attitude.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Naomi Wolf dares to explode the myth of 'victim feminism' and pleads for allowing women to be as full of good and bad desires as men, as avid for sexual fulfilment and power as men, but held back by the twin myths of good-girlism and sentimental sisterhood. Though she is perhaps too sanguine about women quickly overcoming their fear of power, Wolf fills me with hope because I see her analysis as having shattered the false categories that imprisoned my generation. Women do not have to agree about everything to join in alliance with each other to promote female power. Women do not have to cast out their inner bad girl to assert their right to power. Women do not have to cast out their sexuality to be 'good sisters'.
Erica Jong
Do not ever go out of yourself because you will get lost even from your life.
Sorin Cerin
To understand possible means to understand impossible.
Dejan Stojanovic
In the wide pile, by others heeded not,Hers was one sacred solitary spot,Whose gloomy aisles and bending shelves containFor moral hunger food, and cures for moral pain.
Walter Scott
Growing old is mandatory. Growing up is optional.
Carroll Bryant
We dance round in a ring and suppose,But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.
Robert Frost