Quotes by Poets - Page 250

Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.
Seamus Heaney
You can't let the truth bring out the worst and let it get the best of you.
Criss Jami
…of constipation of the brain & diarrhea of the mouth.
Jack Kerouac
Persephone had it right.If you must go, might as welltake all of spring with you—
Cathy Linh Che
When people talk about poetry as a project, they suggest that the road through a poem is a single line. When really the road through a poem is a series of lines, like a constellation, all interconnected. Poems take place in the realm of chance, where the self and the universal combine, where life exist. I can’t suggest to you that going through a line that is more like a constellation than a road is easy—or that the blurring of the self and the universal doesn’t shred a poet a little bit in the process. The terrain of a poem is unmapped (including the shapes of the trees along the constellation-road). A great poet knows never to expect sun or rain or cold or wind in the process of creating a poem. In a great poem all can come to the fore at once. It would be worse yet, if none are there at all.
Dorothea Lasky
The poet is rather one who inspires than one inspired.
Paul Éluard
oxygen Everything needs it: bone, muscles, and even, while it calls the earth its home, the soul. So the merciful, noisy machine stands in our house working away in its lung-like voice. I hear it as I kneel before the fire, stirring with a stick of iron, letting the logs lie more loosely. You, in the upstairs room, are in your usual position, leaning on your right shoulder which aches all day. You are breathing patiently; it is a beautiful sound. It is your life, which is so close to my own that I would not know where to drop the knife of separation. And what does this have to do with love, except everything? Now the fire rises and offers a dozen, singing, deep-red roses of flame. Then it settles to quietude, or maybe gratitude, as it feeds as we all do, as we must, upon the invisible gift: our purest, sweet necessity: the air.
Mary Oliver
All things therefore are charged with love, are charged with God and if we knew how to touch them give off sparks and take fire, yield drops and flow, ring and tell of him.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
When you begin to care too much about what everyone else says, your confidence shrinks and you start to feel like insignificant, little Jack in a strange land of intimidating giants. But when you come to realize that opinions are as diverse and plentiful as dried beans, you might reach the conclusion that your own is of the greatest worth. That's when your confidence grows, and soon you find yourself striding like Gandalf the wondrous wizard among common hobbits in the shire. Respecting your own opinion is the magic that transforms both you and your world.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Part of God's work in his people is synchronizing the heart and the mind thus providing freedom from the deceit of emotion-based beliefs. Emotions are changing while truth is absolute. They don't believe simply because it sounds good, or deep, beautiful, happy, fun, cool, simple, or intelligent to them; but because it's true.
Criss Jami
From childhood's hour I have not been. As others were, I have not seen. As others saw, I could not awaken. My heart to joy at the same tone. And all I loved, I loved alone.
Edgar Allan Poe
Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.
Kahlil Gibran
Lives of great men all remind us We can make our lives sublime, And, departing, leave behind us Footprints on the sand of time; Footprints, that perhaps another, Sailing o'er life's solenm main, A forlorn and shipwrecked brother, Seeing, shall take heart again. Let us then be up and doing, With a heart for any fate; Still achieving, still pursuing, Learn to labor and to wait.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The one thing I was good at was winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an end.
Sylvia Plath
A people are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves. Sick storytellers can make nations sick.
Ben Okri
I cannot go to school today"Said little Peggy Ann McKay."I have the measles and the mumps,A gash, a rash and purple bumps.My mouth is wet, my throat is dry.I'm going blind in my right eye.My tonsils are as big as rocks,I've counted sixteen chicken pox.And there's one more - that's seventeen,And don't you think my face looks green?My leg is cut, my eyes are blue,It might be the instamatic flu.I cough and sneeze and gasp and choke,I'm sure that my left leg is broke.My hip hurts when I move my chin,My belly button's caving in.My back is wrenched, my ankle's sprained,My 'pendix pains each time it rains.My toes are cold, my toes are numb,I have a sliver in my thumb.My neck is stiff, my voice is weak,I hardly whisper when I speak.My tongue is filling up my mouth,I think my hair is falling out.My elbow's bent, my spine ain't straight,My temperature is one-o-eight.My brain is shrunk, I cannot hear,There's a hole inside my ear.I have a hangnail, and my heart is ...What? What's that? What's that you say?You say today is .............. Saturday?G'bye, I'm going out to play!
Shel Silverstein
Try it again," I said. "Kiss me.""No," he said."Kis
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Tears are for happiness.
Marjorie Agosín
God is a book I can no longer read.
Floriano Martins
The real America that Whitman proclaimed and Thoreau decoded.
Allen Ginsberg
I had a lot of hatred, but I realized that kind of hate didn't do much. I had to start fueling myself with pride. We owe the ancestors that. So many of the souls who died in bondage just want us to recognize their struggle.
Marilyn Nelson
There was never yet philosopher That could endure the toothache patiently.
William Shakespeare
Her body begs to be taken away and put into a warm bed with the sheets pulled high, even though nothing can help now.
Steven Herrick
These are the ruinsI mapped onto my body so I might always be lost.
Traci Brimhall
In his autobiography Stravinsky relates that the first music he remembers was made by a peasant, working his hand in his armpit to produce a rhytmic farting.
Craig Raine
Men canreturn to where they have done evil deeds,but men do not return to where they’ve beenabased. On this point God’s design and ourown feeling of abasement coincideso absolutely that we quit: the night,the rotting beast, the exultant mobs, our homes,our hearthfires, Bacchus in a vacant lotembracing Ariadne in the dark.
Joseph Brodsky
Dreams are manifestations of identities.
Kathy Acker
To some people the impossible is impossible.
Elizabeth Asquith Bibesco
The first time I ever felt the necessity or inevitableness of verse was in the desire to reproduce the peculiar quality of feeling which is induced by the flat spaces and wide horizons of the virgin prairie of western Canada.
T.E. Hulme
Disappointments in love, even betrayals and losses, serve the soul at the very moment they seem in life to be tragedies. The soul is partly in time and partly in eternity. We might remember the part that resides in eternity when we feel despair over the part that is in life.
Thomas Moore
be the calm eye of the storm where nothing phases you, focus on your centre to remain balanced, let your life flow like a stream of wind
Jay Woodman
The Prayer that is answered is not of many words, but of Oneness.
Vivian Amis
All that is necessary is to accept the impossible do without the indispensable and bear the intolerable.
Kathleen Norris
Clocks were invented to warn us. Tick (time is passing). Tock (time has passed).
Kamand Kojouri
The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men, Gang aft agley.An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain, For promis'
Robert Burns
A wealth you cannot imagineflows through you.Do not consider what strangers say.Be secluded in your secret heart-house,that bowl of silence.
Jalaluddin Rumi
Do not recite words just to prove to yourself and others that you know and love God; for he already put his breath and light inside you. Instead, put truth in your every word and action, and always let your conscience steer and guide you.
Suzy Kassem
Love was a desire to cling to something difficult to get hold of in day-to-day life. It needed more attention and dedication, not always pleasurable, she concluded. Sensuality was by far easy, like food.
Anuradha Bhattacharyya
One of the bigger mistakes of our time, I suppose, was preaching the demonization of all judgment without teaching how to judge righteously. We now live in an age where, apart from the inability to bear even good judgment when it so passes by, still everyone, inevitably, has a viral opinion (judgment) about everything and everyone, but little skill in good judgment as its verification or harness.
Criss Jami
Tis all a Checkerboard of Nights and Days Where Destiny with Men for Pieces plays: Hither and thither moves, and mates, and stays, And one by one back in the Closet lays.
Edward FitzGerald
We are our stories - dozens, hundreds, thousands of them - sprayed across our memories, embedded in our identity. Calling them up for others or for ourselves or for God, can enlighten, crush, amuse, trap, or free us, depending on how we pay attention.
Emma Lou Warner Thayne
Now came still evening on, and twilight grayHad in her sober livery all things clad;Silence accompany'd; for beast and bird,They to their grassy couch, these to their nests,Were slunk, all but the wakeful nightingale;She all night long her amorous descant sung;Silence was pleas'd. Now glow'd the firmamentWith living sapphires; Hesperus, that ledThe starry host, rode brightest, till the moon,Rising in clouded majesty, at lengthApparent queen unveil'd her peerless light,And o'er the dark her silver mantle threw.
John Milton
Jewelry of the clouds on the horizon; Seven circles are intertwined. A voice follows you without words; Soft footsteps, in the water of transience.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
Friendship improves happiness and abates misery by doubling our joy and dividing our grief.
Joseph Addison
I remember, around age ten, beholding the scene in The Shining in which the hot young woman whom Jack Nicholson is lewdly embracing in the haunted hotel bathroom ages rapidly in his arms, screeching from nubile chick to putrefying corpse within seconds. I understood that the scene was supposed to represent some kind of primal horror. This was The Shining, after all. But the image of that decaying, cackling crone, her arms outstretched in desire toward the man who is backing away, has stayed with me for three decades, as a type of friend. She’s part baths-ghost, part mad-Naomi. She didn’t get the memo about being beyond wanting or being wanted. Or perhaps she just means to scare the shit out of him, which she does.
Maggie Nelson
I love you not only for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you. I love you not only for what you have made of yourself, but for what you are making of me. I love you for the part of me that you bring out.
Elizabeth Barrett-Browning
Take my will and make it Thine It shall be no longer mine Take my heart it is Thine own It shall be Thy royal throne.
Frances Ridley Havergal
Hell, I'd even failed with women. Three wives. Nothing really wrong each time. It all got destroyed by petty bickering. Railing about nothing. Getting pissed-off over anything and everything. Day by day, year by year, grinding. Instead of helping each other you just sliced away, picked at this or that. Goading. Endless goading. It became a cheap contest. And once you got into it, it became habitual. You couldn't seem to get out. You almost didn't want to get out. And then you did get out. All the way.
Charles Bukowski
How grudging memory is, and how bitterly she clutches the raw material of her daily work.
Lawrence Durrell
I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad?
Edgar Allan Poe
Your language looks like a treasure map,' she said, 'if you forget all the rest of the letters and focus in on the x, it looks as if you could find out where the treasure is.
Kirmen Uribe
My life goal right now is to die a good man, with a good heart, soul, and mind, with a good family, and a couple Grammys.
Jonathan Anthony Burkett
plantitIt will sproutBut forget about the rustic festivitiesFor the explosive word falls harmlessly eternal throughthe compact generations
Jean Cocteau
It was as if the future were a treacly adhesive fluid that had been spilt all over the present, so that everything he touched made his fingers too sticky to be of the slightest use.
Hope Mirrlees
A person could be immensely happy reading only him or the writers he loved. But that would be too easy.
Roberto Bolaño
Classical music is the best, and cheapest, mind-altering drug in the world.
Kamand Kojouri
Men must endureTheir going hence, even as their coming hither.Ripeness is all.
William Shakespeare
To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation...Love is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world for himself for another's sake, it is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things.
Rainer Maria Rilke
It is the job of the market to turn the base material of our emotions into gold.
Andrei Codrescu
The pride of aiming at more knowledge, and pretending to more perfection, is the cause of Man's error and misery.
Alexander Pope