Quotes by Poets - Page 275

Then the edge asserts itself. You are not a god. You are not that enlarged self. Indeed, you are not even a whole self, as you now see. Your new knowledge of possibilities is also a knowledge of what is lacking in the actual.
Anne Carson
… the fisherman’s daughter grinding serenity in her coffee grinder.
Yiannis Ritsos
He alone is a man who keeps his word:Not that he has one thing in the heart, and another on the tongue.
Guru Gobind Singh
All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life.
Herman Melville
There is something subversive about this garden of Serena's, a sense of buried things bursting upwards, wordlessly, into the light, as if to point, to say: Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently.
Margaret Atwood
We are not going in circles, we are going upwards. The path is a spiral; we have already climbed many steps.
Hermann Hesse
Whenever they met, the air crackled and sparks flew in the sky.
Avijeet Das
True happiness... arises in the first place from the enjoyment of one's self and in the next from the friendship and conversation of a few select companions.
Joseph Addison
Do not use your energy except for a cause more noble than yourself. Such a cause cannot be found except in Almighty God Himself: to preach the truth, to defend womanhood, to repel humiliation which your Creator has not imposed upon you, to help the oppressed. Anyone who uses his energy for the sake of the vanities of the world is like someone who exchanges gemstones for gravel. There is no nobility in anyone who lacks faith. The wise man knows that the only fitting price for his soul is a place in Paradise...
Ibn Hazm Al-Andalusi
How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true; But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face.
W.B. Yeats
Get it? Gender is a country, a field of signifying roses you can walk through, or wear tucked behind your ear.Eventually the flower wilts & you can pick another, or burn the field, or turn & run back across the tracks.(from "Essay on the Theory of Motion")
Cameron Awkward-Rich
I see you better in music, I hear you better in wind, I feel you more in a flooding moonlight, that understands nothing, but darkness and silence.
Anthony Liccione
Though I adore the idea of Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, Sandman, the Tooth Fairy, and such luminary characters—especially their altruism and devotion—I still don't believe in them.  For I know the truth.  Only one such miracle worker exists who performs magic in my life, seeing to my wants and needs without fail.  That queen is my mother.  With unwavering faith I believe in her.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Doubt is a question mark; faith is an exclamation point. The most compelling, believable, realistic stories have included them both.
Criss Jami
Time went on grey, uncloured, like a long journey where she sat unconscious as the landscape unrolled beside her.
D.H. Lawrence
Messy, isn't it?
Richard Brautigan
Transformations are a part of life. We are constantly being changed by things changing around us.
Suzy Kassem
Another secret of the universe: Sometimes pain was like a storm that came out of nowhere. The clearest summer could end in a downpour. Could end in lightning and thunder.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
I think—the hero observes that nothing is so frightening as a labyrinth with no center.
Jorge Luis Borges
O! how shall summer's honey breath hold out, / Against the wrackful siege of battering days?
William Shakespeare
Walking along past the store windows, into which she peers with her usual eagerness, her usual sense that maybe, today, she will discover behind them something that will truly be worth seeing, she feels as if her feet are not on cement at all but on ice. The blade of the skate floats, she knows, on a thin film of water, which it melts by pressure and which freezes behind it. This is the freedom of the present tense, this sliding edge.
Margaret Atwood
Everything is reflected in both - outside (out there) and inside (in here) - marvel at it, experience, learn. The personal is also the universal, and the universal is also the personal.
Jay Woodman
Our miseries are inseparable, so is our every single blessing.
Munia Khan
To be happy you must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruits of your passion, and learned your place in the world.
George Santayana
God warms his hands at man's heart when he prays.
John Masefield
And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.
Edgar Allan Poe
Ready am I to go, and my eagerness with sails full set awaits the wind.Only another breath will I breathe in this still air, only another loving look cast backward,
Kahlil Gibran
don’t be like so many writers,don’t be like so many thousands ofpeople who call themselves writers,don’t be dull and boring andpretentious, don’t be consumed with self-love.the libraries of the world haveyawned themselves tosleepover your kind.don’t add to that.don’t do it.
Charles Bukowski
We want what's in this world but we also want what ain't.
Ron Rash
...people who don't live at least a little bit in fear, have nothing left to live for.
Dave Matthes
I went to the worst of bars hoping to get killed but all I could do was to get drunk again.
Charles Bukowski
Believe me when I say: 'Out of all those around, she’s the best locksmith in town.' Her stethoscope ears know when the dials of your heart click into place.She’s been cutting keys for years.You don’t stand a chance with that flimsy case.Alas, no matter how you lock your heart— bolt, fixture, and key— she’s got nimble fingersthat pick locks for free.Padlocks and deadboltsare all in vain.Why do you even botherwith that chain?She’s way too smart. Along with ours, she’ll have your heart. And you will see that the best locksmith in town is she.
Kamand Kojouri
The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
An eye is meant to see things.The soul is here for its own joy.A head has one use: For loving a true love.Feet: To chase after.Love is for vanishing into the sky. The mind,for learning what men have done and tried to do.Mysteries are not to be solved: The eye goes blindwhen it only wants to see why.A lover is always accused of something.But when he finds his love, whatever was lostin the looking comes back completely changed.
Jalaluddin Rumi
the thing you are mostafraid to writewrite that-- advice to young writers
Nayyirah Waheed
I can't think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people's understanding of what's going on in the world.
Seamus Heaney
Things past redress are now with me past care.
William Shakespeare
When a man begins to do that which is assigned to him, it becomes as if he is more endowed and favoured than his fellows.
Ogwo David Emenike
Heart, we will forget him,You and I, tonight!You must forget the warmth he gave,I will forget the light.
Emily Dickinson
The Mind The mind is a hotel with a thousand rooms. When I tilt my head a certain way, I think about certain things. When I tilt my head another way, I think about other things. If I sleep on the right side of my face, for example, I’d dream of a pale rose, the future, or a continental diner in Passaic, New Jersey. When I sleep on the left side of my face, I’d dream that a hand is squeezing my heart, that I’m in prison, or that I’m watching hockey at an airport bar, about to miss a flight.
Linh Dinh
I’m sorry. Oh, what simple words are these!I’m sorry. Lips should breathe them out with ease!But nay, in barring up the way,“I’ll die first” are the words you say.I’m sorry, woe is all pride guarantees.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Censorship is alive and well in America.
Suzy Kassem
Goodness could be found sometimes in the middle of hell.
Charles Bukowski
Night helps us appreciate daylight, while lengthy days make us yearn for a good stretch of night.
Richelle E. Goodrich
I saw the patterns of history and thought that a human might be eighty per cent chemicals, eighteen per cent his past, and two per cent feeling, creatures of habit. Which makes psychiatrists really pharmacists who have to listen longer.
Gerard Donovan
Self love is an oceanand your heart is a vessel. Make it full,and any excess will spill overinto the lives of the peopleyou hold dear. But you must come first.
Beau Taplin
Poetry has its uses for despair. It can carve a shape in which a pain can seem to be; it can give one’s loss a form and dimension so that it might be loss and not simply a hopeless haunting. It can do these things for one person, or it can do them for an entire culture. But poetry is for psychological, spiritual, or emotional pain. For physical pain it is, like everything but drugs, useless.
Christian Wiman
She reads books as one would breathe air,to fill up and live.
Anne Dillard
Only poetry isn't shit.
Roberto Bolaño
It is rather whenWe gloriously forget ourselves, and plungeSoul-forward, headlong, into a book's profound,Impassioned for its beauty and salt of truth--'Tis then we get the right good from a book.
Elizabeth Barrett-Browning
If you can love one person, you can love everyone.
Kamand Kojouri
We must not be too prodigal with our angels; they are the last divinities we harbor, and they might fly away.
Jorge Luis Borges
One reason that cats are happier than people is that they have no newspapers.
Gwendolyn Brooks
When in trouble, run to God. When in pain, dwell in His presence. When you don't know what to say or do, ask God and for every moment praise God. He is always by your side!
Gift Gugu Mona
NexusI wrote stubbornly into the evening.At the window, a giant praying mantisrubbed his monkey wrench head against the glass,begging vacantly with pale eyes;and the commas leapt at me like wormsor miniature scythes blackened with age.the praying mantis screeched louder,his ragged jaws opening into formlessness.I walked outside;the grass hissed at my heels.Up ahead in the lapping darknesshe wobbled, magnified and absurdly green,a brontosaurus, a poet.
Rita Dove
Love’s voice reverberates with forgiveness across the room of our heart
Munia Khan
What else can I do? Once you've gone this far you aren't fit for anything else. Something happens to your mind. You're overqualified, overspecialized, and everybody knows it.
Margaret Atwood
Il faut que l’homme s’évade de cette lice ridicule qu’on lui a faite: le prétendu réel actuel avec la perspective d’un réel futur qui ne vaille guère mieux. Chaque minute pleine porte en elle-même la négation de siècles d’histoire boitillante et cassée. Ceux à qui il appartient de faire virevolter ces huit flamboyants au-dessus de nous ne le pourront qu’avec de la sève pure._ Manifestes du surréalisme
André Breton
Fact is not truth, but a poet who willfully defies fact cannot achieve truth.
Robert Graves
Desire, loneliness, wind in the flowering almond—surely these are the great, the inexhaustible subjectsto which my predecessors apprenticed themselves.I hear them echo in my own heart, disguised as convention.
Louise Glück