Quotes by Poets - Page 286

The fly lands on the swatter.The movie runs backwardsand catches fire in the projector.This species apes us wellby talking only about itself
Billy Collins
The brave man carves out his fortune, and every man is the sum of his own works.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Oh dire, dreadful death, you drag your heels.Why dawdle and draw back? You drown my heart.
Simon Armitage
Music resembles poetry, in eachAre nameless graces which no methods teach,And which a master hand alone can reach.
Alexander Pope
The night shall be filled with music And the cares that infest the day Shall fold their tents like the Arabs And as silently steal away.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Take a winter as you find him and he turns out to be a thoroughly honest fellow with no nonsense in him: and tolerating none in you which is a great comfort in the long run.
James Russell Lowell
The word bollocks seems strong, punk rock, and imposing, but in reality, bollocks is always too tame to make much of an impact.
Jennifer Harrison
She lived a good deal by herself, to herself, working, passing on from day to day, and always thinking, trying to lay hold on life, to grasp it in her own understanding. Her active living was suspended, but underneath, in the darkness, something was coming to pass. If only she could break through the last integuments!
D.H. Lawrence
Nothing good ever comes of love. What comes of love is always something better
Roberto Bolaño
beware those quick to praise for they need praise in return beware those who are quick to censor they are afraid of what they do not know beware those who seek constant crowds for they are nothing alone
Charles Bukowski
God is not a God of confusion, although at times one's judgment, for a period, may become clouded in the mi(d)st of one's growth process. I stopped fooling myself into thinking that Christ is always for the cool kids and never for those upright and uptight religious people everybody hates.
Criss Jami
I was born anew, owner of my own darkness.
Pablo Neruda
If your inner silence begins to wear a silk fruit; only then, the day will reveal to you its hidden secret.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
Do you love me?" I ask.In your hesitation I found my answer.
Lang Leav
The best self help book I've ever read was, The little Engine that Could.
Stanley Victor Paskavich
Practical jokes are a demonstration that the distinction between seriousness and play is not a law of nature but a social convention which can be broken, and that a man does not always require a serious motive for deceiving another.Two men, dressed as city employees, block off a busy street and start digging it up. The traffic cop, motorists and pedestrians assume that this familiar scene has a practical explanation – a water main or an electric cable is being repaired – and make no attempt to use the street. In fact, however, the two diggers are private citizens in disguise who have no business there.All practical jokes are anti-social acts, but this does not necessarily mean that all practical jokes are immoral. A moral practical joke exposes some flaw of society which is hindrance to a real community or brotherhood. That it should be possible for two private individuals to dig up a street without being stopped is a just criticism of the impersonal life of a large city where most people are strangers to each other, not brothers; in a village where all inhabitants know each other personally, the deception would be impossible.
W.H. Auden
A man or a woman can inspire such deep fantasy and emotion that through the lovemaking embrace of a partners body we make break through the limits of the human condition to touch upon another level of reality.
Thomas Moore
When I was last in Paris I was dirt poor, hiding from the Vietnam War. One night, in an old church, I considered taking my life. I didn't know how to be so young and not belong anywhere, stuck among so many perplexing melodies.
Philip Schultz
In the ghetto of Genre, anything goes, man. When you live in the gutter it doesn’t matter if you’re filthy. In theory anyway.
Hal Duncan
they say we’re losing centimetresevery year; as if we werea beach that’s losingground with every salt advancethe night is overcastbut why not try, at least,to touch the things our orbitscannot hold, while there’s timewhile we can.
Andrew McMillan
We speak for those who cannot speak. We have a duty to tell the stories for those who do not have the advantages that we have to tell stories. We must not speak falsely. The stories that we are entrusted to tell are stories of our tribes, or the tribes into which we have been initiated.
Billy Marshall-Stoneking
It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no farther.
Sylvia Plath
Purity is obscurity.
Ogden Nash
Home they brought her warrior dead.
Lord Alfred Tennyson
Every day is a journey filled with twists and turns. Every day, if you smile, you will feel alive, my son.
Santosh Kalwar
I’ll follow thee and make a heaven of hell,To die upon the hand I love so well.
William Shakespeare
Perhaps his tragedy is that he is the only normal writer left on earth -- and it is this that adds to his isolation and so too his so sense of guilt.
Malcolm Lowry
With favoring winds, o'er sunlit seas,We sailed for the Hesperides,The land where golden apples grow;But that, ah! that was long ago.How far, since then, the ocean streamsHave swept us from that land of dreams,That land of fiction and of truth,The lost Atlantis of our youth!Whither, ah, whither? Are not theseThe tempest-haunted Orcades,Where sea-gulls scream, and breakers roar,And wreck and sea-weed line the shore?Ultima Thule! Utmost Isle!Here in thy harbors for a whileWe lower our sails; a while we restFrom the unending, endless quest.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Man is what he reads.
Joseph Brodsky
Big Brown MooseI'm a big brown moose,I'm a rascally moose,I'm a moose with a tough, shaggy hide;and I kick and I prancein a long-legged dancewith my moose-mama close by my side.I shrug off the coldand I sneeze at the windand I swivel my ears in the snow;and I tramp and I trompover forest and swamp,'cause there's nowhere a moose cannot go.I'm a big brown moose, I'm a ravenous mooseas I hunt for the willow and yew;with a snort and a crunch,I rip off each bunch,and I chew and I chew and I chew.When together we slumpin a comfortable clump --my mountainous mama and I --I give her a nuzzleof velvety muzzle.Our frosty breath drifts to the sky.I'm a big brown moose,I'm a slumberous moose,I'm a moose with a warm, snuggly hide;and I bask in the moonas the coyotes croon,with my moose-mama close by my side.
Joyce Sidman
He who desires but acts not breeds pestilence.
William Blake
I will always know the glory of the beautiful and rare, as they will know security from labour and prayer. As they will hear the laughter of the children they gave life, I will know the torments of the song born under knife.And to their girls, they will give,while with their sons they'll share;where I will bear a song—a son! The wife of despair.
Roman Payne
Live every moment.. in an effort to bring a positive difference to the world
Alok Jagawat
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.
John Ciardi
he was so beautiful because when he held her he was not concerned with ‘being a man.’ ‘being a man’ had nothing to do with this. these flowers pouring from his chest. – weightless
Nayyirah Waheed
I'm alone and nobody is in the mirror
Jorge Luis Borges
The higher you rise in the business ladder, the smaller your balls become.
Santosh Kalwar
Prayer is a many fingeredand kaleidoscopic thing—it foldsand unfolds inside of you. It entersthe many rooms you cannot enter.
Cecilia Llompart
What's done, is done
William Shakespeare
Reason is God's gift but so are the passions. Reason is as guilty as passion.
Cardinal Newman
Any fool can do something cool and look cool, but it takes skill to make something uncool cool again.
Criss Jami
Dumbfounded, I stood before the court, trying to figure out if there was a state of being between “guilty” and “innocent.” Why were those my only alternatives? I thought. Why couldn’t I be “neither” or “both”? After a long pause, I finally faced the bench and said, “Your Honor, I plead human.
Paul Beatty
That was all a man needed: hope. It was lack of hope that discouraged a man.
Charles Bukowski
Love” is only a one syllable word but it’s the most powerful one mankind’s ever heard.
Stanley Victor Paskavich
Nothing is more silly than silly laughter.
Catullus
And Clifford the same. All that talk! All that writing! All that wild struggling to push himself forwards! It was just insanity. And it was getting worse, really maniacal.Connie felt washed-out with fear. But at least, Clifford was shifting his grip from her on to Mrs Bolton. He did not know it. Like many insane people, his insanity might be measured by the things he was not aware of, the great desert tracts in his consciousness.
D.H. Lawrence
LearningTo believe you are magnificent. And gradually to discover that you are not magnificent. Enough labor for one human life.
Czesław Miłosz
Pick a leader who will keep jobs in your country by offering companies incentives to hire only within their borders, not one who allows corporations to outsource jobs for cheaper labor when there is a national employment crisis. Choose a leader who will invest in building bridges, not walls. Books, not weapons. Morality, not corruption. Intellectualism and wisdom, not ignorance. Stability, not fear and terror. Peace, not chaos. Love, not hate. Convergence, not segregation. Tolerance, not discrimination. Fairness, not hypocrisy. Substance, not superficiality. Character, not immaturity. Transparency, not secrecy. Justice, not lawlessness. Environmental improvement and preservation, not destruction. Truth, not lies.
Suzy Kassem
Again I see you, But me I don't see!, The magical mirror in which I saw myself has been broken, And only a piece of me I see in each fatal fragment - Only a piece of you and me!...
Fernando Pessoa
When it was all overthe centuries startedto roll by and history was writtenby thosewith no storiesmisery turned into myth and figures of speech played catalyst to happiness
Bänoo Zan
Great pain is repetitive. Grief is repetitive.
Sherman Alexie
It is very sad to see children live like orphans whilst their parents are still alive. After all, children need the constant love of parents.
Gift Gugu Mona
Al is the upside down man. Back home, you work all day and night to learn how to paint, learn linseed and cadmium and badger-hair and perspective, which is just math in art-school drag, you know? And maybe you still can't do anything worth phoning the Met over. But hey, getting a boy to fuck you is just the easiest thing since Sunday naps. Up top, getting drunk at a party is what you do when you're all out of art. But in...Canada? Are we calling it Canada now? Ok! Al's the King of Canada and he says: fuck that for a lark! The world feels like being a bastard-and-a-half this decade, let's play nine-pins on its grave. Down here it's all the same! Kiss a boy and books come out! Ralph up Parthenons into the upstairs toilet! Dance poems, shit showtunes! Art is easy! Pick up genius at the corner shop! Sell your soul and half your shoes for a glass of gin!' He looks up at Zelda Fair and his poor goblin face goes all twisted up and desperate. 'It's all fucked anyway, you see? The end of the world already happened. It's happening all the time. It's gonna happen again. And again after that. Just when you think it's done falling on its face, the world picks itself up and throws itself off a roof. Boom. Pavement. The world's ending forever and ever and we're not even allowed to toast at her funeral. So we gotta do something else or she won't know we ever loved her.
Catherynne M. Valente
The dawn of beauty always comes after night.
Sorin Cerin
O fortune fortune! all men call thee fickle.
William Shakespeare
Blind to all fault, destiny can be ruthless at one's slightest distraction.
Jorge Luis Borges
One of the quainter quirks of life is that we shall never know who dies on the same day as we do ourselves.
Philip Larkin
The voice of the people is the voice of God.
Hesiod
Anything that keeps old words in circulation is to be treasured, the French revolution be damned.
Joseph Bottum
She it is, she, that found meIn the morphia honeymoon;With silk and steel she bound meIn her poisonous milk she drowned me,Even now her arms surround me
Aleister Crowley