Quotes by Poets - Page 28

When I was at home with papa, he told me his opinion about everything, and so I had the same opinions; and if I differed from him I concealed the fact, because he would not have liked it. He called me his doll-child, and he played with me just as I used to play with my dolls.
Henrik Ibsen
The sea is calm tonight.The tide is full, the moon lies fairUpon the straits;- on the French coast the lightGleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Matthew Arnold
Wanting to change to improve a person's situation means offering him for difficulties in which he is practiced and experienced other difficulties that will find him perhaps even more bewildered.
Rainer Maria Rilke
The path to wisdom leads downward, and anyone who decides to take it had better buckle on armor, remember to bring a sword, and get used to the idea that when and if he gets back everyone he talks to is going to think he's a phony.
Peter Straub
Pearls are congealed oyster spit.
Margaret Atwood
This murdered girl troubles me. After the first shock, nobody at school says much about her. Even Cordelia does not want to talk about her. It’s as if this girl has done something shameful, herself, by being murdered.
Margaret Atwood
Seated here in contemplations lost, my thought discovers vaster space beyond, supernal silence and unfathomed peace
Giacomo Leopardi
If there are to be rules, they must be articulable and defensible, like etiquette. I do not do anything simply because my family did it. I do things because they make sense, and because they are elegant.
Kathleen Rooney
He [the poet] brings out the inner part of things and presents them to men in such a way that they cannot refuse but must accept it. But how the mere choice and rhythm of words should produce so magical an effect no one has yet been able to comprehend, and least of all the poets themselves.
Hilaire Belloc
Reason is God's crowning gift to man, and you are rightTo warn me against losing mine. I cannot say—I hope that I shall never want to say!— that youHave reasoned badly. Yet there are other menWho can reason, too; and their opinions might be helpful.You are not in a position to know everythingThat people say or do, or what they feel:Your temper terrifies them—everyoneWill tell you only what you like to hear.
Sophocles
Conscience does make cowards of us all.
William Shakespeare
When she transformed into a butterfly, the caterpillars spoke not of her beauty, but of her weirdness. They wanted her to change back into what she always had been. But she had wings.
Dean Jackson
Certainty generally is illusion and repose is not the destiny of man.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
I thought that my voyage had come to its end at the last limit of my power, that the path before me was closed, that provisions were exhausted, and the time come to take shelter in a silent obscurity, but I find that thy will knows no end in me, and when old words die out on the tongue, new melodies break forth from the heart, and where the old tracks are lost, new country is revealed with its wonders.
Rabindranath Tagore
These transient “tastes of the wild” come during the mystique of inspiration—ah, there it is; oh, now it has gone. The longing for her comes when one happens across someone who has secured this wildish relationship. The longing comes when one realizes one has given scant time to the mystic cookfire or to the dream- time, too little time to one’s own creative life, one’s life work, or one’s true loves.”Women Who Run With The Wolves - Myths And Storie by the Wild Woman Archetype
Clarissa Pinkola Estés
Gender roles suck," says Swift Fox.Then you should stop playing them, thinks Toby.
Margaret Atwood
To be respected is not my concern. So long as I seek to live in obedience to my Lord, respect will come accordingly from the people He deems it necessary.
Criss Jami
To know how to grow old is the master-work of wisdom and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
La plus grande chute est celle qu'on fait du haut de l'innocence.
Heiner Müller
LSD stands out for learning to slow down.
Santosh Kalwar
Cuando vayamos al maryo te diré mi secreto:Me envuelve, pero no es ola...Me amarga..., pero no es sal...
Dulce María Loynaz
Get up, and wipe your lip, Camille. It seems you are bleeding.
Sai Marie Johnson
Tongue on your words to taste you thereCouldn’t   read what youhad never written therePlayed your message overfeeling badPlayed your message over it was all I hadTo tell me what and whereforethis is what it said:I’m tired of you asking me whyI’m tired of words like the chatter of birdsGive me a pass, let me just get by
Adrienne Rich
I have great faith in fools - self-confidence my friends will call it.
Edgar Allan Poe
I can no longer cry. I groan a few times. Through the slits that are my eyes, I stare at my shoes, at the gray swirls of the concrete floor, at the bright orange lid of my syringe. And I realize—it’s a kind of horror—that this is my life.And I can’t stop. I just can’t stop. I can’t stop anymore.
Luke Davies
What comes, when it comes, will be what it is.
Alberto Caeiro
They had done nothing but wait, and had become poetical. How easy to the smallest building; how impossible to most men.
Thomas Hardy
What some call health, if purchased by perpetual anxiety about diet, isn't much better than tedious disease.
George Denison Prentice
Because When you write about people, you inevitably offend--but if you write about animals, the evil do not recognize themselves but the good understand immediately.
Erica Jong
He who loses wealth loses much he who loses a friend loses more but he who loses his courage loses all.
Miguel de Cervantes
The warmly cool, clear, ringing, perfumed, overflowing, redundant days, were as crystal goblets of Persian sherbet, heaped up—flaked up, with rose-water snow.
Herman Melville
You meet somebody at the seashore on a vacation and have a wonderful time together. Or in a corner at a party, while the glasses clink and somebody beats on a piano, you talk with a stranger whose mind seems to whet and sharpen your own and with whom a wonderful new vista of ideas is spied. Or you share some intense or painful experience with somebody, and discover a deep communion. Then afterward you are sure that when you meet again, the gay companion will give you the old gaiety, the brilliant stranger will stir your mind from its torpor, the sympathetic friend will solace you with the old communion of spirit. But something happens, or almost always happens, to the gaiety, the brilliance, the communion. You remember the individual words from the old language you spoke together , but you have forgotten the grammar. You remember the steps of the dance, but the music isn’t playing any more. So there you are.
Robert Penn Warren
I do believe you think what now you speak,But what we do determine oft we break.Purpose is but the slave to memory,Of violent birth, but poor validity,Which now, like fruit unripe, sticks on the tree,But fall, unshaken, when they mellow be.Most necessary ’tis that we forgetTo pay ourselves what to ourselves is debt.What to ourselves in passion we propose,The passion ending, doth the purpose lose.
William Shakespeare
A good author is he who isn’t afraid to speak his mind; he who dictates the art of the verse. A scribbler who merely keeps quiet and enjoys being lauded is nothing but a reader with nothing of importance to do. He whose written word trickles from his wounds into the world and onto paper is not afraid to both praise and criticize, this is what he strives towards.
Leila Samarrai
Failure is in a sense the highway to success inasmuch as every discovery of what is false leads us to seek earnestly after what is true and very fresh experience points out some form of error which we shall afterward carefully avoid.
John Keats
The story of a life can be as long or as short as the teller wishes. Whether the life is tragic or enlightened, the classic gravestone inscription marking simply the dates of birth and death has, in its brevity, much to recommend it.
Michel Houellebecq
th' unconquerable will,/ And study of revenge, immortal hate,/ And courage never to submit or yield/ And what is else not to be overcome?
John Milton
My mouth is a fire escape.The words coming outdon’t care that they are naked.There is something burning in there.
Andrea Gibson
You'll may not have all the things you'll want in the world, but the true love that you'll have for each other should be enough for you two to be thankful in life still.
Jonathan Anthony Burkett
the impossibility of being humanall too humanthis breathingin and outout and inthese punksthese cowardsthese championsthese mad dogs of glorymoving this little bit of light towardusimpossibly.
Charles Bukowski
LoreleiIt is no night to drown in:A full moon, river lapsingBlack beneath bland mirror-sheen,The blue water-mists droppingScrim after scrim like fishnetsThough fishermen are sleeping,The massive castle turretsDoubling themselves in a glassAll stillness. Yet these shapes floatUp toward me, troubling the faceOf quiet. From the nadirThey rise, their limbs ponderousWith richness, hair heavierThan sculptured marble. They singOf a world more full and clearThan can be. Sisters, your songBears a burden too weightyFor the whorled ear's listeningHere, in a well-steered country,Under a balanced ruler.Deranging by harmonyBeyond the mundane order,Your voices lay siege. You lodgeOn the pitched reefs of nightmare,Promising sure harborage;By day, descant from bordersOf hebetude, from the ledgeAlso of high windows. WorseEven than your maddeningSong, your silence. At the sourceOf your ice-hearted calling-Drunkenness of the great depths.O river, I see driftingDeep in your flux of silverThose great goddesses of peace.Stone, stone, ferry me down there.
Sylvia Plath
Read a lot. But read as a writer, to see how other writers are doing it. And make your knowledge of literature in English as deep and broad as you can. In workshops, writers are often told to read what is being written now, but if that is all you read, you are limiting yourself. You need to get a good overall sense of English literary history, so you can write out of that knowledge.
Theodora Goss
It may be a movement towards becoming like little children to admit that we are generally nothing else.
Charles Williams
This feeling of guilt is your conscience calling your attention to the higher road, and your heart wishing you had taken it.
Richelle E. Goodrich
He started to sing as he tackled the thing That couldn't be done and he did it.
Edgar A. Guest
From a distance I finally see, I completely understand, As I move forward to take my second step, Followed by a third step, Oh! You are easy to love like a sponge.
Alon Calinao Dy
Do you know how,sometimes, when you first wake up,your pulse is so thorough, so slow,that you, and the one who is with you, and the room, and the opening light all seem to swelland subside and swell inside your heart?
Jennifer Clarvoe
A weed is but an unloved flower.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
How is it that some celebrities, whom the average person would believe to have all the popularity a human being could want, still admit to feeling lonely? It is quite naive to assume that popularity is the remedy for loneliness. Loneliness does not necessarily equal physical solitude, it is the inability to be oneself and rightfully represented as oneself.
Criss Jami
Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
Kahlil Gibran
You will not know all about the firesimply because you asked.When she speaks of the forestthis is what she is teaching you,you who thought you were her master.
Katie Ford
The diseased, anyway, are more interesting than the healthy. The words of the diseased, even those who can manage only a murmur, carry more weight than those of the healthy. Then, too, all healthy people will in the future know disease. That sense of time, ah, the diseased man’s sense of time, what treasure hidden in a desert cave. Then, too the diseased truly bite, whereas the healthy pretend to bite but really only snap at the air. Then, too, then, too, then, too.
Roberto Bolaño
That night when you kissed me, I left a poem in your mouth, and you can hear some of the lines every time you breathe out.
Andrea Gibson
Change is one of the scariest things in the world and yet it is also one of those variables of human existence that no one can avoid.
Aberjhani
It is wrong to say that schoolmasters lack heart and are dried-up, soulless pedants! No, by no means. When a child's talent which he has sought to kindle suddenly bursts forth, when the boy puts aside his wooden sword, slingshot, bow-and-arrow and other childish games, when he begins to forge ahead, when the seriousness of the work begins to transform the rough-neck into a delicate, serious and an almost ascetic creature, when his face takes on an intelligent, deeper and more purposeful expression - then a teacher's heart laughs with happiness and pride. It is his duty and responsibility to control the raw energies and desires of his charges and replace them with calmer, more moderate ideals. What would many happy citizens and trustworthy officials have become but unruly, stormy innovators and dreamers of useless dreams, if not for the effort of their schools? In young beings there is something wild, ungovernable, uncultured which first has to be tamed. It is like a dangerous flame that has to be controlled or it will destroy. Natural man is unpredictable, opaque, dangerous, like a torrent cascading out of uncharted mountains. At the start, his soul is a jungle without paths or order. And, like a jungle, it must first be cleared and its growth thwarted. Thus it is the school's task to subdue and control man with force and make him a useful member of society, to kindle those qualities in him whose development will bring him to triumphant completion.
Hermann Hesse
But I don't know, in the end, what deserts, chasms, achievements, virtues, and beauties have to do with love. We can love for so many different, and paradoxical, qualities in the object of our love--for strength or for weakness, for beauty or for ugliness, for gaiety or for sadness, for sweetness or for bitterness, for goodness or for wickedness, for need or for impervious independence. Then, if we wonder from what secret springs in ourselves gushes our love, our poor brain goes giddy from speculation, and we wonder what is all meaning and worth. Is it our own need that makes us lean toward and wish to succor need, or is it our strength? What way would our strength, if we had it, incline our heart? Do we give love in order to receive love, and even in the transport or endearment carry the usurer's tight-lipped and secret calculation, unacknowledged even by ourselves? Or do we give with an arrogance after all, a passion for self-definition? Or do we simply want a hand, any hand, a human object, to clutch in the dark on the blanket, and fear lies behind everything? Do we want happiness, or is it pain, pain as the index of reality, that we, in the chamber of our heart, want?Oh, if I knew the answer, perhaps then I could feel free.
Robert Penn Warren
Because of the earth’s roundness, Genghis Khan, in the fever of possession and destruction, hastened his own overthrow by invading lands that he had already razed and conquered. Not only is it impossible to know from where we come, but also from whom we come: nothing in common, in any case, with those who pass for being the “authors of our days” – which days? Better to invent a genealogy based on pure whim and the leanings of our hearts, but what if they don’t agree?
André Breton
I never do enjoy my breaks, long or short...I look forward to them intensely, but as soon as they begin, I can feel them starting to end. I feel the temporariness of my freedom, and find it hard to concentrate on anything other than the sensation of it trickling away.
Sophie Hannah
From out of your heart, you speak."-Emma, When Crickets Cry
Charles Martin
I was on the point of breaking off the conversation, for nothing puts me so completely out of patience as the utterance of a wretched commonplace when I am talking from my inmost heart.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe