Quotes by Poets - Page 231

I know nothing, except what everyone knows - if there when Grace dances, I should dance.
W.H. Auden
When rain comes finally, washing away a low sky of muddy ocher, we who could not control the phenomenon are pressed into relief. The near-occult feeling: The face of being witness to the end of the world gives way to tangible things. Even if the succeeding sensations are not common, they are at least not mysterious.
Maya Angelou
Aren't you tired from all that smiling that you do at the camera? Relax and come with me to the mountains. There is more to life than the cameras!
Avijeet Das
I respect kindness in human beings first of all and kindness to animals. I don't respect the law I have a total irreverance for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer the beer stronger the food cheaper and the old men and old women warmer in the winter and happier in the summer.
Brendan Behan
Trying to erase, hide, discredit, degrade, and suppress a writer's work, merit, voice, and influence―is unconstitutional. Censorship only exists to protect corruption.
Suzy Kassem
There are four kinds of readers. The first is like the hourglass; and their reading being as the sand, it runs in and runs out, and leaves not a vestige behind. A second is like the sponge, which imbibes everything, and returns it in nearly the same state, only a little dirtier. A third is like a jelly bag, allowing all that is pure to pass away, and retaining only the refuse and dregs. And the fourth is like the slaves in the diamond mines of Golconda, who, casting aside all that is worthless, retain only pure gems.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
They never sought in vain that sought the Lord aright!
James Drummond Burns
I sit down and say, and I run all my friends and relatives and enemies one by one in this, without entertaining any angers or gratitudes or anything, and I say, like 'Japhy Ryder, equally empty, equally to be loved, equally a coming Buddha,' then I run on, say to 'David O. Selznick, equally empty, equally to be loved, equally a coming Buddha' though I don't use names like David O. Selznick, just people I know because when I say the words 'equally a coming Buddha' I want to be thinking of their eyes, like you take Morley, his blue eyes behind those glasses, when you think 'equally a coming Buddha' you think of those eyes and you really do suddenly see the true secret serenity and the truth of his coming Buddhahood. Then you think of your enemy's eyes.
Jack Kerouac
We give up our backs and allow religious myths to apply the rear naked choke to our minds.
Cameron Conaway
Great leaders do not shift responsibility even if it means acknowledging their own failures.
Gift Gugu Mona
Everyone’s alone—or so it seems to me.They make noises, and think they are talking to each other;They make faces, and think they understand each other,And I’m sure they don’t. Is that delusion?Can we only loveSomething created in our own imaginations?
T.S Eliot
Energy will do anything that can be done in this world.
Johann von Goethe
The boy was twelve, reveling in the strange dust-smelling murk of a New Orleans library, watching motes flash gold in a beam of sun. He loved the ceiling lights on chains and the table lamps with their green glass shades. The room was as beautiful as another world.
Marly Youmans
Being smart and rich are lucky, but being curious and compassionate will save your ass. Being curious and compassionate can take you out of your ego and edge your soul towards wonder.
Mary Karr
They were wrong about the sun.It does not go down into the underworld at night.The sun leaves merelyand the underworld emerges.It can happen at any moment.It can happen in the morning,you in the kitchen going throughyour mild routines.Plate, cup, knife.All at once there’s no blue, no green,no warning.
Margaret Atwood
Once upon a midnight dreary while I pondered weak and weary Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore.
Edgar Allan Poe
We know Jesus taught that if someone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to the left. We know that Mohammed was sacked from his village and stoned at Ta'if, but he quietly left for Medina.If both of these men, beaten, and bloodied—the incarnations of their respective faiths—asked God to forgive their aggressors, then who were today's religious leaders to advocate holy war?
Eliza Griswold
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks within his bending sickle's compass come.
William Shakespeare
This is the very ecstasy of love,Whose violent property fordoes itselfAnd leads the will to desperate undertakingsAs oft as any passion under heavenThat does afflict our natures.
William Shakespeare
Suddenly, no one, including me, was in Guescheste anymore; they weren't in Miami or Cuba; they weren't in the present, or the future, but floating somewhre in the formless, timeless space of memory.
Richard Blanco
Helmer: I would gladly work night and day for you. Nora- bear sorrow and want for your sake. But no man would sacrifice his honor for the one he loves.Nora: It is a thing hundreds of thousands of women have done.
Henrik Ibsen
When you become a raindrop in your mind Thunder is the closest friend you may find Wind lashed trees, dark clouds, lightning or the dust Everything you will bear once you adjust
Munia Khan
Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone,All just supply, and all relation;Prince, subject, father, son, are things forgot,For every man alone thinks he hath gotTo be a phoenix, and that then can beNone of that kind, of which he is, but he.
John Donne
Passion is a rare flower that grows on the precipice of death. A few snatch it, and the rest are like an ox chewing its cud in a field.
Saunders Lewis
Some people write letters, in the library.
Margaret Atwood
...her own restless coveting of his love and the slow but sure ebullience of her desire for him; then the Nawab's martydom and her spiritual homelessness and physical loneliness; there was so much, so many portraits and landscapes, like the bright pages of an album of words and pictures. They filled her heart overflowing with the tangy, coppery taste of blood that flows from failure, and pricked her soul with nostalgia, for what was and what could have been. She had never thought that happy memories could come accompanied with so much regret, so much pain, so much repining, and discontent. If you plucked a rose without due care, its thorn pricked you to protest the thoughtlessness and the inconsiderateness you had displayed in taking away its crowning glory. Here, it was nothing else but the rose which was the thorn: its each and every petal was saturated with the scents of the past but it stung like the scorpion plant. But was it possible not to touch those memories? For their scents traveled in and out of your being like breath, and their colours were inside every blink of your eye.
Shamsur Rahman Faruqi
Every Sunday behind bibles, virgins,soldiers tight against me, longing,and my pelvis rubbing gods'to the big black woman voices.Soldiers tight against me, longing,all that rising, sitting, kneelingto the big black woman voices,spirits warming, tensing, folding, thenall that rising, sitting, kneelinglike some kind of dance, a mating,spirits warming, tensing, folding andgod went “Shhhhh” between my thighs –
Jalina Mhyana
If art is not to be life-enhancing, what is it to be? Half the world is feminine--why is there resentment at a female-oriented art? Nobody asks The Tale of Genji to be masculine! Women certainly learn a lot from books oriented toward a masculine world. Why is not the reverse also true? Or are men really so afraid of women's creativity (because they are not themselves at the center of creation, cannot bear children) that a woman writer of genius evokes murderous rage, must be brushed aside with a sneer as 'irrelevant'?
May Sarton
What you remember saves you.
W.S. Merwin
Hold fast to dreams for if dreams die life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.
Langston Hughes
Being here to witness the beauty, to learn, to be astonished, to love - is enough. Being able to create in addition is a delightful honour.
Jay Woodman
The time is out of joint.
William Shakespeare
Fiercely guard the passions igniting your heart, so that your flames reach the highest ceilings of success without the eyes of envy.
Suzy Kassem
Wearing all that weight of learning like a flower.
Alfred Tennyson
To undo a Jew is charity and not sin.
Christopher Marlowe
I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.
Walt Whitman
The spirits of children are remote and wise...
Frances Cornford
O Heavenly Children, the stories you have concocted in God's name have angered Him; for he would never instigate war between brothers, or encourage tribes to harbor resentment towards one another. He prefers the man who loves over the one who hates. And the man who spreads kindness, peace and knowledge, over the one who spreads lies, fear and terror — and misuses His name.
Suzy Kassem
If any thing is sacred the human body is sacred.
Walt Whitman
I write poetry, worry, smile,laughsleepcontinue for a whilejust like most of usjust like all of us;sometimes I want to hug allMankind on earthand say,god damn all this that they've brought down on us,we are brave and goodeven though we are selfishand kill each other andkill ourselves,we are the peopleborn to kill and die and weep in dark roomsand love in dark rooms,and wait, andwait and wait and wait.we are the people.we are nothingmore.
Charles Bukowski
BELOVED, gaze in thine own heart, The holy tree is growing there; From joy the holy branches start, And all the trembling flowers they bear. The changing colours of its fruit Have dowered the stars with merry light; The surety of its hidden root Has planted quiet in the night; The shaking of its leafy head Has given the waves their melody, And made my lips and music wed, Murmuring a wizard song for thee. There the Loves a circle go, The flaming circle of our days, Gyring, spiring to and fro In those great ignorant leafy ways; Remembering all that shaken hair And how the wingèd sandals dart, Thine eyes grow full of tender care: Beloved, gaze in thine own heart. Gaze no more in the bitter glass The demons, with their subtle guile, Lift up before us when they pass, Or only gaze a little while; For there a fatal image grows That the stormy night receives, Roots half hidden under snows, Broken boughs and blackened leaves. For all things turn to barrenness In the dim glass the demons hold, The glass of outer weariness, Made when God slept in times of old. There, through the broken branches, go The ravens of unresting thought; Flying, crying, to and fro, Cruel claw and hungry throat, Or else they stand and sniff the wind, And shake their ragged wings; alas! Thy tender eyes grow all unkind: Gaze no more in the bitter glass.- The Two Trees
W.B. Yeats
A choice of pains. That's what living was all about.
Audre Lorde
Great is the road I climb but... the garland offered by an easier effort is not worth the gathering.
Propertius
Such a little childTo send to be a priestling...Icy poverty
Shiki
I just kept on doing what everyone starts out doing. The real question is why did other people stop?
William Stafford
The gentleman is a Christian product.
George H. Calvert
I had never seen anything like New York, and its newness held the promise of my future: dense with the experience I craved - romantic, urbane, intellectual. Looking back on that moment, I believe I was saved from disappointment by the nature of my "great expectations." I honestly wasn't burdened with conventional notions of finding security and happiness. At that time of my life, even when I was "happy," it wasn't because I expected it. That was for characters less romantic than myself. I didn't expect to be rich, well fed, and kindly treated by all. I wanted to live deeply and fully, to embrace whatever the city held for me.
Siri Hustvedt
I've recovered my tenderness by long looking;I'm a Socrates of small fury.The waves bends with the fish. I'm taughtAs water teaches stone. Believe me, extremest oriole,I can hear light on a dry day.The world is where we fling it; I'm leaving where I am.
Theodore Roethke
Travellers ne'er did lie,Though fools at home condemn 'em.-Antonio
William Shakespeare
Soprano basso even the contralto Wished him five fathom under the Rialto.
Lord Byron
DESPITE THE INVENTION OF TIME MACHINES, WE KEEP BEING LINEAR.
Amy King
One father is more than 100 schoolmasters.
George Herbert
Living with him is like being told a perpetual story: his mind is the biggest, most imaginative I have ever met. I could live in its growing countries forever.
Sylvia Plath
What we are is not all that we may become.
William Shakespeare
You have two kinds of secrets. The ones only you know. The ones only you don't.
James Richardson
Great was the work of creation, but greater was the work of redemption. Great wisdom was seen in making us—but more miraculous wisdom in saving us. Great power was seen in bringing us out of nothing—but greater power in helping us when we were worse than nothing. (...) In the creation, God gave us ourselves; in the redemption, He gave us Himself.
Thomas Watson
In your life, always be like a driver who runs the car not just a car.
Santosh Kalwar
accept that you deserve more than painful love life is moving the healthiest thing for your heart is to move with it
Rupi Kaur
[I]t is the wine that leads me on,the wild winethat sets the wisest man to singat the top of his lungs,laugh like a fool – it drives theman to dancing... it eventempts him to blurt out storiesbetter never told.
Homer
Half the urge to write is the premonition that later the thought I am having might disappear so I had better write it down while I still have the inclination, however overshadowed this desire is by indolence.
Wayne Koestenbaum