Quotes by Poets - Page 343

Be different. Be original. Nobody will remember a specific flower in a garden filled with thousands of the same yellow flower, but they will remember the one that managed to change its color to purple.
Suzy Kassem
There should be more or less of a jumble in your head or on your note paper after the first time and even after the second. Much that you will think of in connection will come to nothing and be wasted. But some of it ought to go together under one idea. That idea is the thing to write on and write into the title at the head of your paper… One idea and a few subordinate ideas — [the trick is] to have those happen to you as you read and catch them — not let them escape you… The sidelong glance is what you depend on. You look at your author but you keep the tail of your eye on what is happening over and above your author in your own mind and nature.
Robert Frost
Doubt indulged soon becomes doubt realized.
Frances Ridley Havergal
Both moths and butterflies are drawn to the light. However, they both react differently to alternate shades of it. The moth prefers the moon and detests the sun, while the butterfly loves the sun and detests the moon. If our physical compositions are made to emulate the universe, then it makes sense for some of us to have more light or darkness inside our hearts than others — or that one is drawn closer to the sun versus the moon.
Suzy Kassem
Faith is love taking the form of aspiration.
William Ellery Channing
He is happiest be he king or peasant who finds peace in his home.
Johann von Goethe
Knowing I lov'd my books, he furnish'd me From mine own library with volumes that I prize above my dukedom.
William Shakespeare
There was currant toast squishy with butter, caramel-marshmallow squares, strawberry boats oozing custard, chocolate exclairs that exploded with cream when the cats bit into them with their little white teeth and-- a special treat for Pleasant-- a pie made from thick slices of Bramley apple, with just the right amount of tangy in the tangy-sweet.
Anne Michaels
I wanted to tell her that if only something were wrong with my body it would be fine, I would rather have anything wrong with my body than something wrong with my head, but the idea seemed so involved and wearisome that I didn’t say anything. I only burrowed down further in the bed.
Sylvia Plath
Youths should study,' grumbled the Old Woman, 'and not take the laws apart. And you, dear Youth, before you become acquainted with the Beautiful Woman, take a good look into her Garden through the window tomorrow morning, when everything is clearly and genuinely visible in the light of the sun. You will see that in the Garden there are no flowers which are familiar to anyone here, and only such flowers as none of us in the City know. Just think about this carefully, after all, there is something strange about it. The devil is cunning; is this not his creation for the damnation of people?'("The Poison Garden")
Valery Bryusov
I shed more tears than God could ever have required.
Arthur Rimbaud
Up the still, glistening beaches,Up the creeks we will hie,Over banks of bright seaweedThe ebb-tide leaves dry.We will gaze, from the sand-hills,At the white, sleeping town;At the church on the hill-side—And then come back down.Singing: "There dwells a loved one,But cruel is she!She left lonely for everThe kings of the sea.(from poem 'The Forsaken Merman')
Matthew Arnold
The world exists to end up in a book.
Stéphane Mallarmé
Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form.
Herman Melville
Except in cases of necessity which are rare leave your friend to learn unpleasant things from his enemies they are ready enough to tell him.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
I thought at times that poetry might be an elegant way of screaming.
Kathleen Rooney
The problem, unstated until now, is how to live in a damaged body in a world where pain is meant to be gagged uncured ungrieved over. The problem is to connect, without hysteria, the pain of anyone's body with the pain of the world's body.
Adrienne Rich
The day he moved out was terrible – That evening she went through hell.His absence wasn’t a problemBut the corkscrew had gone as well.
Wendy Cope
Literature was formerly an art and finance a trade: today it is the reverse.
Joseph Roux
Some lessons are learnt the hard way, but worth it.
Gift Gugu Mona
Sometimes it's better for a struggling writer to stay single, than to keep hearing, "Oh, your a writer, and you need to spend time in writing? Then go marry your writing!
Anthony Liccione
The first year was like icing. Then the cake started to show through …
John Ashbery
In one picture, the pool was half hidden by a fringe of mace- weeds, and the dead willow was leaning across it at a prone, despondent angle, as if mysteriously arrested in its fall towards the stagnant waters. Beyond, the alders seemed to strain away from the pool, exposing their knotted roots as if in eternal effort. In the other drawing, the pool formed the main portion of the foreground, with the skeleton tree looming drearily at one side. At the water's farther end, the cat-tails seemed to wave and whisper among themselves in a dying wind; and the steeply barring slope of pine at the meadow's terminus was indicated as a wall of gloomy green that closed in the picture, leaving only a pale of autumnal sky at the top. ("Genius Loci")
Clark Ashton Smith
Each and every words count.Each and every thoughts count.
Santosh Kalwar
Happiness is the good life that is marked by flourishing well-being, joy, prosperity, peace, satisfaction, and pleasure.
Ogwo David Emenike
We could see the children's toys here and there, and we saw a game that the children had made themselves out of dirt, deer antlers and abalone shells, but the game was so strange that only children could tell what it was. Perhaps it wasn't a game at all, only the grave of a game.
Richard Brautigan
I moonlight as the greatest actor. I smile. I choose the comedy mask every time. I tell those who worry that I am fine, that I always will be. There is nothing to gain from these lies. I win no awards, yet I bow. On that stage I tell my life story with the lightest of words, the heaviest of hearts. I bleed for the people who stay and watch. Behold: the comedy, the tragedy. They smile and cheer. They clap for this. And I bow, and I bow, and I bow.
Elijah Noble El
If an evil spirit had to hide from God, it would hide in a diamond. If an angel had to hide from the Devil, it would hide in rose quartz.
Suzy Kassem
I could be living the best and happiest of lives if only I were not a fool.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Stand up for what is just against the unjust.
Suzy Kassem
Like vanishing dew,a passing apparitionor the sudden flashof lightning -- already gone --thus should one regard one's self.
Ikkyu
Mad fearlessness is not courage. The only requirement for courage is a good heart.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Verily all things move within your being in constant half embrace, the desired and the dreaded, the repugnant and the cherished, the pursued and that which you would escape.These things move within you as lights and shadows in pairs that cling.And when the shadow fades and is no more, the light that lingers becomes a shadow to another light.And thus your freedom when it loses its fetters becomes itself the fetter of a greater freedom.
Kahlil Gibran
Why be crying, fearful, lonely, when you have the whole universe? Be still, listen to your heart, breathe, and know you need nothing.
Jay Woodman
The wise only possess ideas the greater part of mankind are possessed by them.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
I live for those who love me, for those who know me true; for the heaven that smiles above me and awaits my spirit too. For the cause that lacks assistance, for the wrong that needs resistance, for the future in the distance, and the good that I can do.
George Linnaeus Banks
Then the one called Raltariki is really a demon?" asked Tak."Yes—and no," said Yama, "If by 'demon' you mean a malefic, supernatural creature, possessed of great powers, life span and the ability to temporarily assume virtually any shape—then the answer is no. This is the generally accepted definition, but it is untrue in one respect.""Oh? And what may that be?""It is not a supernatural creature.""But it is all those other things?""Yes.""Then I fail to see what difference it makes whether it be supernatural or not—so long as it is malefic, possesses great powers and life span and has the ability to change its shape at will.""Ah, but it makes a great deal of difference, you see. It is the difference between the unknown and the unknowable, between science and fantasy—it is a matter of essence. The four points of the compass be logic, knowledge, wisdom and the unknown. Some do bow in that final direction. Others advance upon it. To bow before the one is to lose sight of the three. I may submit to the unknown, but never to the unknowable.
Roger Zelazny
The world is ruled only by consideration of advantages.
Friedrich von Schiller
THE FOUR HEAVENLY FOUNTAINSLaugh, I tell youAnd you will turn backThe hands of time.Smile, I tell youAnd you will reflectThe face of the divine.Sing, I tell youAnd all the angels will sing with you!Cry, I tell youAnd the reflections found in your pool of tears -Will remind you of the lessons of today and yesterdayTo guide you through the fears of tomorrow.
Suzy Kassem
No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons.
Ishmael Reed
A full heart has room for everything and empty heart has room for nothing. Who understands?
Antonio Porchia
Many writers were better before they became famous.
Dejan Stojanovic
I honour the clarity of the present moment, and the stillness at the centre of being (mine & others), even in the midst of so much doing.
Jay Woodman
In love there are two evils: war and peace.
Horace
The lie [of compulsory female heterosexuality] is many-layered. In Western tradition, one layer—the romantic—asserts that women are inevitably, even if rashly and tragically, drawn to men; that even when that attraction is suicidal (e. g, Tristan and Isolde, Kate Chopin’s ‘The Awakening’) it is still an organic imperative. In the tradition of the social sciences it asserts that primary love between the sexes is ‘normal,’ that women need men as social and economic protectors, for adult sexuality, and for psychological completion; that the heterosexually constituted family is the basic social unit; that women who do not attach their primary intensity to men must be, in functional terms, condemned to an even more devastating outsiderhood than their outsiderhood as women.
Adrienne Rich
Our Thoughts Determine Our Happiness High above hate I dwell 0 storms! Farewell.
Louise Imogen Guiney
If suddenly you do not exist,if suddenly you no longer live,I shall live on.I do not dare,I do not dare to write it,if you die.I shall live on.For where a man has no voice,there, my voice.Where blacks are beaten,I cannot be dead.When my brothers go to prisonI shall go with them.When victory,not my victory,but the great victory comes,even though I am mute I must speak;I shall see it come even though I am blind.No, forgive me.If you no longer live,if you, beloved, my love,if you have died,all the leaves will fall in my breast,it will rain on my soul night and day,the snow will burn my heart,I shall walk with frost and fire and death and snow,my feet will want to walk to where you are sleeping, butI shall stay alive,because above all things you wanted me indomitable,and, my love, because you know that I am not only a manbut all mankind.
Pablo Neruda
Children are forced to live very rapidly in order to live at all. They are given only a few years in which to learn hundreds of thousands of things about life and the planet and themselves.
Phyllis McGinley
Always blow your own trumpet, blowing someone else’s is unhygienic
Benny Bellamacina
They blossomed, they did not talk about blossoming.
Dejan Stojanovic
Each day we live is a glass roomUntil we break it with the thrustingOf the spirit and pass throughThe splintered walls to the green pasturesWhere the birds and buds are breakingInto fabulous song and hueBy the still w
Mervyn Peake
He says that woman speaks with nature. That she hears voices from under the earth. That wind blows in her ears and trees whisper to her. That the dead sing through her mouth and the cries of infants are clear to her. But for him this dialogue is over. He says he is not part of this world, that he was set on this world as a stranger. He sets himself apart from woman and nature.And so it is Goldilocks who goes to the home of the three bears, Little Red Riding Hood who converses with the wolf, Dorothy who befriends a lion, Snow White who talks to the birds, Cinderella with mice as her allies, the Mermaid who is half fish, Thumbelina courted by a mole. (And when we hear in the Navaho chant of the mountain that a grown man sits and smokes with bears and follows directions given to him by squirrels, we are surprised. We had thought only little girls spoke with animals.)We are the bird's eggs. Bird's eggs, flowers, butterflies, rabbits, cows, sheep; we are caterpillars; we are leaves of ivy and sprigs of wallflower. We are women. We rise from the wave. We are gazelle and doe, elephant and whale, lilies and roses and peach, we are air, we are flame, we are oyster and pearl, we are girls. We are woman and nature. And he says he cannot hear us speak.But we hear.
Susan Griffin
But then if you lied to a man about his talent just because he was sitting across from you, that was the most unforgivable lie of them all, because that was telling him to go on, to continue which was the worst way for a man without real talent to waste his life, finally. But many people did just that, friends and relatives mostly.
Charles Bukowski
Truth forever on the scaffold wrong forever on the throne.
James Russell Lowell
One who enjoys finding errors will then start creating errors to find.
Criss Jami
Everyone says,Come to your senses, and I do, of you.Every touch electric, every taste you,every smell, even burning sugar, everycry and laugh. Toothpicked samplesat the farmers’ market, every melon,plum, I come undone, undone.
Dean Young
In the corrupted currents of this worldOffence's gilded hand may shove by justice,And oft 'tis seen the wicked prize itselfBuys out the law. . . (Claudius, from Hamlet, Act 3, scene 3)
William Shakespeare
Been living on this earth for so long now and still don't know what a happy life feels like. I'm ready for a change.
Jonathan Anthony Burkett
She: Why do you seek me?He: Because you seek me.She: Where will this take us?He: On the journey called 'life.'She: What will we find in this journey?He: The meaning of life.Conversations, Avijeet Musafir Das
Avijeet Das
Language is still separating us even though technology is bringing us closer together.
Suzy Kassem