Quotes by Poets - Page 312

To combat death you don't need much of a life, just one that isn't yet finished.
Herta Müller
First of all, they came to take the gypsiesand I was happy because they pilfered.Then they came to take the Jews and I said nothing, because they were unpleasant to me.Then they came to take homosexuals,and I was relieved, because they were annoying me.Then they came to take the Communists,and I said nothing because I was not a Communist.One day they came to take me,and there was nobody left to protest.Bertold Brecht, inspired by Emil Gustav Friedrich Martin Niemöller
Bertolt Brecht
No man was ever yet a great poet without at the same time being a profound philosopher.
Hartley Coleridge
deprived of magic, wonder wanes
John J. Geddes
Her romances often seemed like dalliances; she enjoyed male company and blossomed in its presence, but she did not appear to care deeply about any of the men [Steiner]
Elizabeth Winder
As to whether a poem has been written by a great poet or not, this is important only to historians of literature. Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that I have written a beautiful line; let us take this as a working hypothesis. Once I have written it, that linedoes me no good, because, as I’ve already said, that line came to me from the Holy Ghost, from the subliminal self, or perhaps from some other writer. I often find I am merely quoting something I read some time ago, and then that becomes a rediscovering. Perhaps it is better that a poet should be nameless.
Jorge Luis Borges
Show me slowly what I onlyknow the limits ofDance me to the end of love
Leonard Cohen
Always the following wind of historyOf others' wisdom makes a buoyant airTill we come suddenly on pockets where Is nothing loud but us; where voices seemAbrupt, untrained, competing with no lieOur fathers shouted once.
W.H. Auden
The day will comeWhen my body no longer existsBut in the lines of this poemI will never let you be aloneThe day will comeWhen my voice is no longer heardBut within the words of this poemI will continue to watch over youThe day will comeWhen my dreams are no longer knownBut in the spaces found in the letters of this poemI will never tired of looking for you
Sapardi Djoko Damono
People up today and down tomorrow, working this week and fired the next, beaten and baffled, but determined not to be wholly beaten, buying furniture on the installment plan, filling the house with roomers to help pay the rent, hoping to get a new suit for Easter—and pawning that suit before the Fourth of July.
Langston Hughes
Heart, we will forget him!You and I, to-night!You may forget the warmth he gave,I will forget the light.When you have done, pray tell me,That I my thoughts may dim;Haste! lest while you’re lagging,I may remember him!
Emily Dickinson
Blessed is the covenant of love, the covenant of mercy, useless light behind the terror, deathless song in the house of night.
Leonard Cohen
Then it hit me and I just blurted, 'I like people too much or not at all. I've got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them.
Sylvia Plath
It does not matter what you write in English nobody has understood it anyway.
Santosh Kalwar
Never elated while one man's oppress'd Never dejected while another's bless'd.
Alexander Pope
At the round earth's imagined corners blowYour trumpets, angels, and arise, ariseFrom death, you numberless infinitiesOf souls, and to your scattered bodies go ;All whom the flood did, and fire shall o'erthrow,All whom war, dea[r]th, age, agues, tyrannies,Despair, law, chance hath slain, and you, whose eyesShall behold God, and never taste death's woe.But let them sleep, Lord, and me mourn a space ;For, if above all these my sins abound,'Tis late to ask abundance of Thy grace,When we are there. Here on this lowly ground,Teach me how to repent, for that's as goodAs if Thou hadst seal'd my pardon with Thy blood.
John Donne
When I think of the years when I had no faith, what I am struck by, first of all, is how little this lack disrupted my conscious life. I lived not without God, nor wish his absence, but in a mild abeyance of belief, drifting through the days on a tide of tiny vanities — a publication, a flirtation, a strong case made for some weak nihilism — nights all adagios and alcohol as my mind tore luxuriously into itself. I can see now how deeply God’s absence affected my unconscious life, how under me always there was this long fall that pride and fear and self-live at once protected me from and subjected me to. Was the fall into belief or into unbelief? Both. For if grace woke me to God’s presence in the world and in my heart, it also woke me to his absence. I never truly felt the pain of unbelief until I began to believe.
Christian Wiman
There are far too many silent sufferers.  Not because they don't yearn to reach out, but because they've tried and found no one who cares.
Richelle E. Goodrich
I was washing outside in the darkness,the sky burning with rough stars,and the starlight, salt on an axe-blade.The cold overflows the barrel.The gate's locked,the land's grim as its conscience.I don't think they'll find the new weaving,finer than truth, anywhere.Star-salt is melting in the barrel,icy water is blackening,death's growing purer, misfortune saltier,the earth's moving nearer to truth and to dread.
Innokenty Annensky
My soul is a black maelstrom, a great madness spinning about a vacuum, the swirling of a vast ocean around a hole in the void, and in the waters, more like whirlwinds than waters, float images of all I ever saw or heard in the world: houses, faces, books, boxes, snatches of music and fragments of voices, all caught up in a sinister, bottomless whirlpool.
Fernando Pessoa
Who wants to pluck roses must love their thorns.
Sir Kristian Goldmund Aumann
Every new generation believes its own period to be absolutely superior intellectually - greater than all past cultures yet equal among its modern cultures.
Criss Jami
Whatever anyone does,/ anyone says, in the/ past, now, everything, let/ it bounce off the rock/ of yr gladness (yr mirror)
Jack Kerouac
To wish a healthy man to die is the wish from a mind of sickness. To wish an ailing man to die is the wish of the ambitious.
Roman Payne
I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.
Herman Melville
I thought she had a good heart, though not much respectability- or maybe it was because of that.
Mary Webb
They can because they think they can.
Virgil
It's okay to be absurd, ridiculous, and downright irrational at times; silliness is sweet syrup that helps us swallow the bitter pills of life.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Theory -the seeing of patterns, showing the forest as well as the trees- theory can be a dew that rises from earth and collects in the rain cloud and returns to earth over and over. But if it doesn't smell of the earth, it isn't good for earth. -Notes Toward a Politics of Location
Adrienne Rich
Love, is sometimes a simpler form of slowly dying, it's like a bullet that ricochets off time's walls of desire, waiting to hit that picture perfect heart of regrets.
Anthony Liccione
At home you could depend on your parents, but in America you are on your own and should make as many friends as you can . . . You don't know who may hold out a helpful hand in your hour of need.
Ha Jin
Every once in a while God allows you to stub your toe as a kind reminder to be grateful for the miraculous body attached to it.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Cats ask plainly for what they want.
Walter Savage Landor
Who you are in public is a test of your conviction; who you are in private, integrity.
Criss Jami
Tears flow and smiles fade to the same rhythm of life, to disappear together in the bottomless abyss.
Rémy de Gourmont
No one can have a higher opinion of him than I have - and I think he's a dirty little beast.
W.S. Gilbert
To take risk and fail is not a failure. Real failure is to fear taking any risk
Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum
Maybe I should just lie quietly inside you while our old selves slip in and out of the back rooms of the soul.
Richard Jackson
That pleasure which is at once the most pure, the most elevating and the most intense, is derived, I maintain, from the contemplation of the beautiful.
Edgar Allan Poe
School children, who have enjoyed reading a romance or a detective thriller or a novel about terror and conquest, make the invariable mistake of studying literature in the college. They make the mistake of learning theory in place of art; they acquire impediments in their own enjoyment of the books by allowing a set of theories to govern their own reading.
Anuradha Bhattacharyya
They say Alexander the Great slept with 'The Iliad' beneath his pillow. Though I have never led an army, I am a wanderer. During the waning moon, I cradle Homer’s 'Odyssey' as if it were the sweet body of a woman.
Roman Payne
The joy of knowing a foreign language is inexpressible. I find it really difficult to express such joy in my mother tongue.
Munia Khan
Poetry is a life-cherishing force.
Mary Oliver
I believe that this war, upon which I entered as a war of defense and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest.
Siegfried Sassoon
What I like most about children is that they are great advisors, yet they don't know it. And what I love about them is that they are vision bearers yet may not realize it.
Gugu Mona
The evenings are meant for deep reflection.
Avijeet Das
Poetry is a connection to a change within you.
Katerina Stoykova-Klemer
Within its gates I heard the soundOf winds in cypress caverns caughtOf huddling tress that moaned, and soughtTo whisper what their roots had found.(“A Dream of Fear”)
George Sterling
A poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
If I can see pain in your eyes then share with me your tears. If I can see joy in your eyes then share with me your smile.
Santosh Kalwar
Life is all about Peace and LOVE
Timothy Pina
We might have coupledIn the bed-ridden monopoly of a momentOr broken flesh with one anotherAt the profane communion tableWhere wine is spill'd on promiscuous lipsWe might have given birth to a butterflyWith the daily-newsPrinted in blood on its wings
Mina Loy
No one can become really educated without having pursued some study in which he took no interest. For it is part of education to interest ourselves in subjects for which we have no aptitude.
T.S Eliot
You can never be lost when you learn to get lost into the blue of the sea..
Munia Khan
Whenever you should doubt your self-worth, remember the lotus flower. Even though it plunges to life from beneath the mud, it does not allow the dirt that surrounds it to affect its growth or beauty.
Suzy Kassem
We understand the ordinary business of living, We know how to work the machine
T.S Eliot
Little did they suspect that the years would end by wearing away the disharmony.Little did they suspect that La Mancha and Montiel and the knight's frail figure would be, for the future, no less poetic than Sinbad's haunts or Ariosto's vast geographies.For myth is at the beginning of literature, and also at its end.
Jorge Luis Borges
I'm no longer a child and I still want to be, to live with the pirates. Because I want to live forever in wonder. The difference between me as a child and me as an adult is this and only this: when I was a child, I longed to travel into, to live in wonder. Now, I know, as much as I can know anything, that to travel into wonder is to be wonder. So it matters little whether I travel by plane, by rowboat, or by book. Or, by dream. I do not see, for there is no I to see. That is what the pirates know. There is only seeing and, in order to go to see, one must be a pirate.
Kathy Acker
You and I were never meant to be together, but we are. Our pairing is not unlike two electrons ignoring natural laws in order to orbit one another. Life now defies reason—quirky but beautiful.
Richelle E. Goodrich
The closest thing to Heaven, is having a peaceful mind, and a beautiful, pure heart.
Anthony Liccione