Quotes by Poets - Page 299

To make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.
T.S Eliot
Christmas is like candy; it slowly melts in your mouth sweetening every taste bud, making you wish it could last forever.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Such subtle covenants shall be made, Till peace itself is war in masquerade.
John Dryden
Who bides his time tastes the sweet Of honey in the saltiest tear And though he fares with slowest feet Joy runs to meet him drawing near.
James Whitcomb Riley
. . . for meaning is never in the event but in the motion through event. Otherwise we could isolate an instant in the event and say that this is the event itself. The meaning. But we cannot do that. For it is the motion which is important.
Robert Penn Warren
This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.
William Shakespeare
I'm not afraid of you!' The wombat yelled. 'I saw you get stuck in the washing machine once. Round and round you went! Who's afraid of something that can't defeat a rinse cycle?
Catherynne M. Valente
Sometimes it’s great, and sometimes it’s shit.These are the things all the great philosophersjust won’t tell you flat out about life. You keep moving, keep living, keep breathingAnd you keep writing-creating because that’s what you doAnd that’s who you are. There are no magical voices to guideYou except your own. Make it count.~ R.M. ENGELHARDT
R.M. Engelhardt (TALON)
Life should play background music just as in the movies.
Avijeet Das
CodaPerhaps to love is to learnto walk through this world.To learn to be silentlike the oak and the linden of the fable.To learn to see.Your glance scattered seeds.It planted a tree. I talkbecause you shake its leaves.
Octavio Paz
Christmas, when observed with the right spirit, still has the power to call miracles from Heaven to Earth.
Richelle E. Goodrich
He had entered the rough world of men, where a man's acts follow him wherever he goes in the form of story.
David Malouf
But neither Europe nor Africa can show any such desolation as America. The proudest, stubbornest, bitterest peasant of deserted Spain, the most primitive and superstitious Arab of the remotest oases, are a little more than kin and never less than kind at their worst; whereas in the United States one is almost always conscious of an instinctive lack of sympathy and understanding with even the most charming and cultured people.
Aleister Crowley
Mother is water.
Suzy Kassem
All human things are subject to decay And when fate summons monarchs must obey.
John Dryden
I wonder where it all comes from--this need to go to the place where the body has been laid to rest. It's the need to reconfirm how precious someone was and how irreplaceable, and the desire to reconnect with them on a different plane.
Takashi Hiraide
These people you used to see every day, friends or acquaintances, after a while they become as distant as any stranger, people you suddenly recall late at night--you remember something they said or something silly that someone once did. For a few moments they completely occupy your mind; then you forget them again.
Stephen Dobyns
Theory-the seeing of patterns, showing the forest as well as the trees
Adrienne Rich
Tír gan teanga, tír gan anam. A country without a language is a country without a soul.
Pádraic Pearse
The number of those who have nothing to recommend them and of those in whom nothing but good can be found is probably equal
Murasaki Shikibu
She's beautiful, and therefore to be wooed; She is a woman, therefore to be won.
William Shakespeare
Beneath my dress is a ladder of desire,that I climb tonight and each night after that.
Zoë Brigley
I love to move like a mouse inside this puzzle for the body, balancing the wish to be lost with the need to be found.
Billy Collins
There are objects made up of two sense elements, one visual, the other auditory—the colour of a sunrise and the distant call of a bird. Other objects are made up of many elements—the sun, the water against the swimmer's chest, the vague quivering pink which one sees when the eyes are closed, the feeling of being swept away by a river or by sleep. These second degree objects can be combined with others; using certain abbreviations, the process is practically an infinite one. There are famous poems made up of one enormous word, a word which in truth forms a poetic object, the creation of the writer. The fact that no one believes that nouns refer to an actual reality means, paradoxically enough, that there is no limit to the numbers of them.
Jorge Luis Borges
People are crying up the rich and variegated plumage of the peacock, and he is himself blushing at the sight of his ugly feet.
Saadi
Those who would like to become writers attend courses on writing poetry and prose and analyze their own work and that of other writers in development. Teachers teach them that talent is not required and that anyone, who wants to be a writer, can do it if they only master the technique of writing and master the formulas of the genre that they choose. With a little brain storming ideas written on cards, as well as designs and plans on the table, one can even write a novel in a month. There is no secret; the whole secret is in the technique, a little research, and the rest is solved by form, according to a formula, in which it is all nicely wrapped up and packaged. And so, a bestseller is born.
Dejan Stojanovic
Rebuke without love is abuse. But, a love that would never rebuke? I dare to admit that that, too, would be a kind of abuse.
Criss Jami
They will not let you have peace, they don't want you to have anything they don't have themselves.
Margaret Atwood
When it comes, you’ll be dreamingthat you don’t need to breathe;that breathless silence isthe music of the darkand it’s part of the rhythmto vanish like a spark.
Wisława Szymborska
I am a solitary wave in the dark and desolate sea: and the sparkling glass I drank was drugged with misery.
Adelbert von Chamisso
What common people call beauty is essentially nature. The moment nature abandons you, your beauty is lost forever.
Anuradha Bhattacharyya
Who told you it was too late? And more importantly, why did you choose to believe them?
Richelle E. Goodrich
We wait for the rains to cease, the clouds to part, and the sun to shine before saying life is good. Ironically, it is because we endure the storms that life seems so wonderfully bright at their passing.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Unreal City, Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,I had not thought death had undone so many.Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,To where St Mary Woolnoth kept the hours With a dead sound on the final stock of nine.There I saw one I knew, and stopped him crying: 'Stetson!You, who were with me in the ships at Mylae!That corpse you planted last year in your garden,Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?Oh keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men,Or with his nails he'll dig it up again!You! hypocrite lecteur!-mon semblable,-mon frere!
T.S Eliot
This is a way to kill a wife with kindness,And thus I'll curb her mad and headstrong humour.He that knows better how to tame a shrew,Now let him speak. 'Tis charity to show.
William Shakespeare
O youcan’t tell someone just how lonely he is
Jeramy Dodds
I'm not sure why it is, but I love food more than just about anything else.
Sylvia Plath
It's amazing to be a woman because even without children of your own, you can still be an excellent mother.
Gift Gugu Mona
If you're not getting happier as you get older, then you're fuckin' up
Ani DiFranco
Christ was born of a virgin, that we might be born of God. He took our flesh, that He might give us His Spirit. He lay in the manger that we might lie in paradise. He came down from heaven, that He might bring us to heaven. And what was all this but love? If our hearts be not rocks, this love of Christ should affect us. Behold, love that surpasses knowledge!
Thomas Watson
Women are extraordinary creatures!
Roman Payne
Quiet Days, they look at you, and you will become one with the holy river - nature forms a symbiotic relationship - absolute infinity, truly found, in harmonious caressing arms.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
For, indeed, this is the great horror, solitude, when the soul can no longer bathe in the ever-changing mind, laugh as its sunlit ripples lap its skin, but, shut up in the castle of a few thoughts, paces its narrow prison, wearing down the stone of time, feeding on its own excrement. There is no star in the blackness of that night, no foam upon the stagnant and putrid sea. Even the glittering health that the desert brings to the body, is like a spear in the soul's throat. The passionate ache to act, to think: this eats into the soul like a cancer. It is the scorpion striking itself in its agony, save that no poison can add to the tortue of the circling fire; no superflux of anguish relieve it by annihilation. But against these paroxisms is an eightfold sedative. The ravings of madness are lost in soundless space; the struggles of the drowning man are not heeded by the sea.
Aleister Crowley
Soul, if you want to learn secrets,
your heart must forget about shame
 and dignity. You are God's lover,
yet you worry what people are saying.
Jalaluddin Rumi
Americans are like a rich father who wishes he knew how to give his sons the hardships that made him rich.
Robert Frost
The world is going to turn upside down in a way that the honest man will live uncomfortably -- while the dishonest man will live very comfortably. Pay attention to the windows of the Four Seasons next time you stroll by their dining room. You will find thugs and hustlers of every creed living like true kings and queens.
Suzy Kassem
The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews.
W.H. Auden
My friend asked me if it had been cathartic, to write my memoir. I looked down at the sculptures—it was cathartic for me to look at them, but I could imagine it might have been hell to make them (I was cheered / when I came first to know / that there were flowers also / in hell). No, I answered—how was it for you to read it? Aristotle, in his Poetics, never promised catharsis for the makers of art, only for the audience.
Nick Flynn
Praise children when they do good, And if they should stumble or fall, Show them how to be humble,Show them how to stand tall
Charmaine J.Forde
Beauty that pleases the eye is a frail, fleeting illusion. But that beauty capable of pleasing the heart can endure endlessly.
Richelle E. Goodrich
God, teach me to be patient, teach me to go slow,Teach me how to wait on You when my way I do not know.Teach me sweet forbearance when things do not go rightSo I remain unruffled when others grow uptight.Teach me how to quiet my racing, rising heartSo I might hear the answer You are trying to impart.Teach me to let go, dear God, and pray undisturbed untilMy heart is filled with inner peace and I learn to know your will.
Helen Steiner Rice
I took a day to search for God And found Him not. But as I trod By rocky ledge through woods untamed Just where one scarlet lily flamed I saw His foot print in the sod.
Bliss Carman
Nothing frustrates people more than a cocky guy who's still winning.
Criss Jami
Mine honor is my life; both grow in one.Take honor from me, and my life is done.
William Shakespeare
What a mother wants is to hold her babies when they’re small and to be held by them once they’ve grown tall. It’s empty arms a mother dreads.
Richelle E. Goodrich
I have met with women who I really think would like to be married to a poem and to be given away by a novel.
John Keats
Thus grief still treads upon the heels of pleasure Marry'd in hast we may repent at leisure.
William Congreve
Touch the stone,' said Beliah, 'and you will touch "reality", or what the ignorant of all ages think "reality" is. That kind of truth will kill you, man. You won't see morning! I have kept you all your life from such things as remorse, terror, pity. Touch the stone, and those same angels will change you into an old poor pathetic deluded dying creature. Hubert, a nurse has to shave you, your hand shakes so much. You know that don't you? You dribble at every orifice, Hubert. You've begun to smell this past year or two...' He suddenly howled as if I had actually touched the stone,'YOU WILL BE RAVAGED IN FIRES OF GRACE!'I heard Nurse McGregor in the next ward. 'Good evening,' came her cheerful voice to the looney who had strangled his sweetheart and then buried her in his garden. 'Is it cocoa tonight, or tea, or milk?"Beliah was weeping. Outside the eaves dripped. The whole earth was drenched with the grief of Beliah. He wept inside me. I felt his marvellous tears on my face.
George Mackay Brown
Almost every truly creative being alienated & expatriated in his own country
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Let us be sure that the lady of our choice possesses certain tangible qualities that we admire; and if in other ways she falls short of our ideal, we must be patient and call to mind those qualities that first induced us to begin our courting.
Murasaki Shikibu