Quotes by Poets - Page 280

I believe life is an education meant to teach us the need to be better people.  And I believe this learning often takes place through trial and error which may mean being an awful person at times before clearly seeing and grasping the necessity to improve. If you don't agree with me, just ask Mr. Ebenezer Scrooge.  I think Charles Dickens got it quite right.
Richelle E. Goodrich
It would take me the better part of growing up to understand that intimacy, more than sex or even sexual orientation, was the universal battleground, and no easier for straight than gay.
Paul Monette
New York! I say New York, let black blood flow into your blood.Let it wash the rust from your steel joints, like an oil of life Let it give your bridges the curve of hips and supple vines. Now the ancient age returns, unity is restored, The recociliation of the Lion and Bull and Tree Idea links to action, the ear to the heart, sign to meaning. See your rivers stirring with musk alligators And sea cows with mirage eyes. No need to invent the Sirens. Just open your eyes to the April rainbow And your eyes, especially your ears, to God Who in one burst of saxophone laughter Created heaven and earth in six days, And on the seventh slept a deep Negro sleep.
Léopold Sédar Senghor
April Fools' is the only day to take people seriously.
Criss Jami
I fear no fate for you are my fate, my sweet.
E.E. Cummings
He did not consider public opinion to be accurate at long range.
Stephen Crane
But what I knew in my head stayed up there, swirling about the other ten zillion things I had retained. That knowledge informed my actions, what I did and how I did it.What Emma knew filtered from her head down into her heart and informed who she was—what I have since come to call the Infinite Migration. If my wonderings about life were scientific, bent toward examination and physical discovery, Emma’s all leaned toward matters of the heart. While I could understand and explain the physics behind a rainbow, Emma saw the colors. When it came to life, I saw each piece and how they all fit together, and Emma saw the image on the face of the puzzle. And every now and then, she’d walk me through the door into her world and show it to me.
Charles Martin
As for Iago’s jealousy, one cannot believe that a seriously jealous man could behave towards his wife as Iago behaves towards Emilia, for the wife of a jealous husband is the first person to suffer. Not only is the relation of Iago and Emilia, as we see it on stage, without emotional tension, but also Emilia openly refers to a rumor of her infidelity as something already disposed of.Some such squire it wasThat turned your wit, the seamy side withoutAnd made you to suspect me with the Moor.At one point Iago states that, in order to revenge himself on Othello, he will not rest till he is even with him, wife for wife, but, in the play, no attempt at Desdemona’s seduction is made. Iago does not encourage Cassio to make one, and he even prevents Roderigo from getting anywhere near her.Finally, one who seriously desires personal revenge desires to reveal himself. The revenger’s greatest satisfaction is to be able to tell his victim to his face – "You thought you were all-powerful and untouchable and could injure me with impunity. Now you see that you were wrong. Perhaps you have forgotten what you did; let me have the pleasure of reminding you."When at the end of the play, Othello asks Iago in bewilderment why he has thus ensnared his soul and body, if his real motive were revenge for having been cuckolded or unjustly denied promotion, he could have said so, instead of refusing to explain.
W.H. Auden
What a friend we have in Jesus All our sins and griefs to bear! What a privilege to carry Everything to God in Prayer! Have we trials and temptations? Is there trouble anywhere? We should never be discouraged Take it to the Lord in prayer. Are we weak and heavy laden Cumbered with a load of care? Precious Savior still our refuge Take it to the Lord in prayer. O what peace we often forfeit O what needless pain we bear All because we do not carry Everything to God in prayer!
Joseph Scriven
His was not the hatred that arises suddenly like a storm and as suddenly abates. It was, once the initial shock of anger and pain was over, a calculated thing that grew in a bloodless way.
Mervyn Peake
A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace with his pants down. If it is a good book nothing can hurt him. If it is a bad book nothing can help him.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
I just realized that sleep sometimes is the only precious wage for the hard working man.
Akilnathan Logeswaran
So since I'm still here livin',I guess I will live on.I could've died for love--But for livin' I was born.
Langston Hughes
The trauma said, ‘Don’t write these poems.Nobody wants to hear you cry about the grief inside your bones.
Andrea Gibson
Let me have war, say I: it exceeds peace as far as day does night; it's spritely, waking, audible, and full of vent. Peace is a very apoplexy, lethargy; mulled, deaf, sleepy, insensible; a getter of more bastard children than war's a destroyer of men.
William Shakespeare
We were hooked when we woke.We had arms for each other.But I yearned to resumeMy dreams of another.
Roman Payne
Lying is done with words, and also with silence.
Adrienne Rich
...the sole test of music is its power to exalt the soul.
Aleister Crowley
Smile wide to receive many smiles in return. But if you want a good laugh, smirk like a wicked, little imp and watch the range of expressions you're flashed.
Richelle E. Goodrich
I hate writing, I love having written.
Dorothy Parker
The rain is falling all around,It falls on field and tree,It rains on the umbrellas here,And on the ships at sea.
Robert Louis Stevenson
It is not perhaps a question of truthfulness; it is rather a natural incapacity to think for herself, to take cognizance of herself in her own brain, and not in the eyes and in the lips of others; even when the ingenuously write into little secret diaries, women think of the unknown god reading--perhaps--over their shoulders. With a similar nature, a woman, to be placed in the first ranks of men, would require even higher genius than that of the highest man; that is why, if the conspicuous works of men themselves, the finest works of women are always inferior to the worth of the women who produced them.
Rémy de Gourmont
I watched her—the way her shoulders moved with the tilt of her head, how her smile lit up the six people around her, how her hair, tucked behind her ears, framed her face like baby’s breath. I thought about how the sound of her heart beating sounded the rhythm for our dance atop the magnolia floor. I wanted to tell her all this, but didn’t know how. Just because something is broken doesn’t mean it’s no good. Doesn’t mean you throw it away. It just means it’s broken, and broken is okay. I wanted to tell her that broken is still beautiful, still works, still wakes me in the morning, and at the end of every day past and those to come, I can love broken.
Charles Martin
Turn your attentions to it. Try to raise up the sunken feelings of this enormous past; your personality will grow stronger, your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes by, far in the distance.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Parting is such sweet sorrow
William Shakespeare
There are three types of friends: those like food without which you can't live those like medicine which you need occasionally and those like an illness which you never want.
Solomon ibn Gabirol
All around us, birds woke up the sky.
Lauren Wolk
You may not understand issues that do not pertain to the heart, but be a master in areas that do. Nobody knows everything, and nobody can be a master of everything. Nobody was created perfect, and nobody should be measured according to perfection. It is the weight of your heart that matters the most in the end. All else is irrelevant.
Suzy Kassem
To avoid an occasion for our virtues is a worse degree of failure than to push forward pluckily and make a fall.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Knowing sorrow well I learn to succor the distressed.
Virgil
Be good at the depth of you, and you will discover that those who surround you will be good even to the same depths. Nothing responds more infallibly to the secret cry of goodness than the secret cry of goodness that is near. While you are actively good in the invisible, all those who approach you will unconsciously do things that they could not do by the side of any other man.
Maurice Maeterlinck
No one rejoices more in revenge than women, wrote Juvenal. Women do most delight in revenge, wrote Sir Thomas Browne. Sweet is revenge, especially to women, wrote Lord Byron. And I say, I wonder why, boys. I wonder why.
Siri Hustvedt
As for the belief that humanity is mostly good, Secular humanism, when in that alignment, always presumes the existence of a higher power, or some god-like influence on man. Because it then becomes the belief that people are generally good and should be protected from the wiles of religion, as though this dark, vague and ignorant force once fell from the heavens, latched onto the purer hearts and minds of men and women, and, in all its forms, controlled and polluted the whole of human history. He says, 'When we defeat religion, humanity will be free.' But, if he were duly consistent, if he were really at all as secular as he claims, he might as well admit to what is actually an underlying brand of nihilistic cynicism: 'When we defeat humans, humanity will be free.
Criss Jami
Can there be anything more sad than a girl dying on the day of her first communion, in her new dress. A little bride of death...
Georges Rodenbach
Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.
Wallace Stevens
The way of the consumerist culture is to spend so much energy chasing happiness that it has none left to be happy.
Criss Jami
Move thy tongue,For silence is a sign of discontent.
Elizabeth Cary
Unless a man has trained himself for his chance the chance will only make him ridiculous.
William Matthews
Luck affects everything. Let your hook be always cast. In the stream where you least expect it there will be a fish.
Ovid
He who knows most grieves most for wasted time.
Dante Alighieri
This last night we tear into each other, as if to wound, as if to find the key to everything before morning.
Michael Ondaatje
To persons standing alone on a hill during a clear midnight such as this, the roll of the world is almost a palpable movement. To enjoy the epic form of that gratification it is necessary to stand on a hill at a small hour of the night, and, having first expanded with a sense of difference from the mass of civilized mankind, who are diregardful of all such proceedings at this time, long and quietly watch your stately progress through the stars.
Thomas Hardy
I know it does not matter that I do not understand.
Brendan Kennelly
To be pleasant, gentle, calm and self-possessed: this is the basis of good taste and charm in a woman. No matter how amorous or passionate you may be, as long as you are straightforward and refrain from causing others embarrassment, no one will mind. But women who are too vain and act pretentiously, to the extent that they make others feel uncomfortable, will themselves become the object of attention; and once that happens, people will find fault with whatever they say or do; whether it be how they enter a room, how they sit down, how they stand up or how they take their leave. Those who end up contradicting themselves and those who disparage their companions are also carefully watched and listened to all the more. As long as you are free from such faults, people will surely refrain from listening to tittle-tattle and will want to show you sympathy, if only for the sake of politeness. I am of the opinion that when you intentionally cause hurt to another, or indeed if you do ill through mere thoughtless behavior, you fully deserve to be censured in public. Some people are so good-natured that they can still care for those who despise them, but I myself find it very difficult. Did the Buddha himself in all his compassion ever preach that one should simply ignore those who slander the Three Treasures? How in this sullied world of ours can those who are hard done by be expected to reciprocate in kind?
Murasaki Shikibu
We take pictures with peopleso they could remember usand leave memories behindso they don’t forget us.And the differencebetween the two are the same.We leave these momentsin the air,hoping that somewheresomeone will find themand make sense of everythingwe chose to ignore.
Robert M. Drake
When two men are together, one of them may see some opportunity which the other has not caught sight of; if a man is alone he is less full of resource, and his wit is weaker.
Homer
The future is uncertain but the end is always near.
Jim Morrison
Like crying wolf, if you keep looking for sympathy as a justification for your actions, you will someday be left standing alone when you really need help.
Criss Jami
As I child, I came to this idea with a horrified fascination. Once upon a time, I wasn’t here. Before that, my parents weren’t here. And before that…
John Burnside
When Scythrop grew up, he was sent, as usual, to a public school, where a little learning was painfully beaten into him, and from thence to the university, where it was carefully taken out of him; and he was sent home like a well-threshed ear of corn, with nothing in his head.
Thomas Love Peacock
OtherwiseI got out of bed on two strong legs. It might have been otherwise. I ate cereal, sweet milk, ripe, flawless peach. It might have been otherwise. I took the dog uphill to the birch wood. All morning I did the work I love.At noon I lay down with my mate. It might have been otherwise. We ate dinner together at a table with silver candlesticks. It might have been otherwise. I slept in a bed in a room with paintings on the walls, and planned another day just like this day. But one day, I know, it will be otherwise.
Jane Kenyon
Eternity is the stopped heart of Time.
Sorin Cerin
It is never just disagreement but always intellectual dishonesty that is the apologist's worst enemy. And its apprentice is ignorance.
Criss Jami
As a beauty I am not a star There are others more handsome by far But my face - I don't mind it For I am behind it. It's the people in front get the jar.
Anthony Euwer
leaving is not enough; you muststay gone. train your heart like a dog. change the lockseven on the house he’s nevervisited. you lucky, lucky girl. you have an apartment just your size. a bathtubfull of tea. a heart the size of Arizona, but not nearlyso arid. don’t wish away your cracked past, your crooked toes, your problemsare papier mache puppetsyou made or bought because the vendorat the market was so compelling you justhad to have them. you had to have him.and you did. and now you pull down the bridge between your houses,you make him call before he visits, you take a loverfor granted, you take a lover who looks at youlike maybe you are magic. makethe first bottle you consumein this place a relic. place it on whatever altar you fashionwith a knife and five cranberries.don’t lose too much weight.stupid girls are always trying to disappear as revenge. and you are not stupid. you loved a manwith more hands than a parade of beggars, and here you stand. heartlike a four-poster bed. heart like a canvas. heart leaking something so strong they can smell it in the street.
Marty McConnell
Love, built on beauty, soon as beauty, dies.
John Donne
The weather is nature's disruptor of human plans and busybodies. Of all the things on earth, nature's disruption is what we know we can depend on, as it is essentially uncontrolled by men.
Criss Jami
When I should have been producing obscure volumes of verse entitled the Triumph of Humpty Dumpty or the Nose with the Luminous Dong! Or at best, like Clare, "weaving fearful vision" ... A frustrated poet in every man. Though it is perhaps a good idea under the circumstances to pretend at least to be proceeding with one's great work on "Secret Knowledge," then one can always say when it never comes out that the title explains the deficiency.
Malcolm Lowry
The rarest, truest beauty is visible only to the heart.
Richelle E. Goodrich
An idea is a feat of association and the height of it is a good metaphor.
Robert Frost