Quotes by Poets - Page 369

Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.
Rainer Maria Rilke
INTO MY OWNOne of my wishes is that those dark trees,tSo old and firm they scarcely show the breeze,tWere not, as ’twere, the merest mask of gloom,tBut stretched away unto the edge of doom.tI should not be withheld but that some dayt Into their vastness I should steal away,tFearless of ever finding open land,tOr highway where the slow wheel pours the sand.tI do not see why I should e’er turn back,tOr those should not set forth upon my trackt To overtake me, who should miss me heretAnd long to know if still I held them dear.tThey would not find me changed from him they knew—tOnly more sure of all I thought was true.
Robert Frost
Everyone calls him BlockheadNo one sings his praisesOr takes him to heart...That is the kind of personI want to be
Kenji Miyazawa
These thoughts are depressing I know. They are depressing, I wish I was more cheerful, it is more pleasant,Also it is a duty, we should smile as well as submitting To the purpose of One Above who is experimentingWith various mixtures of human character which goes best, All is interesting for him it is exciting, but not for us. There I go again. Smile, smile, and get some work to doThen you will be practically unconscious without positively having to go.
Stevie Smith
An expert is an ordinary person who consistently sought knowledge in a specific field and applied it.
Gugu Mona
The friendship that like live is warm; a love like friendship, steady.
Thomas Moore
I think the devil will not have me damned, lest the oil that's in me should set hell on fire.
William Shakespeare
You, you insolent brazen bitch—you really dare to shake that monstrous spear in Father’s face?
Homer
I can be changed by what happens to me. But I refuse to be reduced by it.
Maya Angelou
SOME PEOPLE SIMPLY DO NOT EXIST ANYMORE. GET USED TO IT. QUESTION MARK.
Amy King
Can snore upon the flint when resty sloth Finds the down pillow hard.
William Shakespeare
The present is all the ready money Fate can give.
Abraham Cowley
Just above our terror, the stars painted this storyin perfect silver calligraphy. And our souls, too oftenabused by ignorance, covered our eyes with mercy.
Aberjhani
When it comes to mental illness most of the diagnoses are similar or the same yet they can never display how we individually go through our pain.
Stanley Victor Paskavich
Why should their liberty than ours be more?
William Shakespeare
Ohne Hast, aber ohne Rast. - Without haste, but without rest.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Heaven wheels above you, displaying to you her eternal glories, and still your eyes are on the ground
Dante Alighieri
The advice is a call to empathy, the ultimate act of the imagination, and the true ground of all fiction.
Siri Hustvedt
Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing. The rest is mere sheep herding.
Ezra Pound
She says she loves me infinity power infinity power infinity into infinity! And I look at the sky, smile, and 'sigh!
Avijeet Das
I saw an angel in the block of marble and I just chiseled 'til I set him free.
Michelangelo
Yes it’s me, I myself, what I turned out to be, (…) I’m the one here in myself, it’s me. (…) Whatever I was, whatever I wasn’t—it’s all in what I am. Whatever I wanted, whatever I didn’t want—all of this has shaped me. Whatever I loved, or stopped loving—in me it’s the same nostalgia.
Fernando Pessoa
I've yet to find another soul who believes in me with the same fervency as my mother.
Richelle E. Goodrich
I primarily use poetry as a purge, a self-medication device when I’m in the depths of loneliness, anxiety or in the throes of depression. When I’m lost in the darkness of mental illness, I spill forth a deluge of words and prose that are oftentimes grim, dark and depressive. And when my poems are spilled forth into one of my poetry journals, I feel a weight has been indeed been lifted from me, and my mind can rest just a bit easier.
Nicholas Trandahl
Not reading poetry amounts to a national pastime here.
Phyllis McGinley
The heads of strong old age are beautiful / Beyond all grace of youth
Robinson Jeffers
Act-act in the living present!
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Such Polly are your sex - part truth part fiction Some thought much whim and all contradiction.
Richard Savage
He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I like writing that puts the needle right into the vein. I don’t think, when I’m writing, “Tell a good story” or “find a meaning.” I’m thinking phrase by phrase, make it tight, make it good. Get the idea out in language I can bear. I think there’s something musical about being impatient with boring sentences—it’s not that I don’t have boring sentences, God knows I do, but I’m impatient with them.
Maggie Nelson
Writing is beautiful, like putting on a gold suit and going to sleep in it.
Mark Leidner
... an utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward.
Herman Melville
We do not remember days, we remember moments. The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten
Cesare Pavese
It hurts so bad that I cannot save him, protect him, keep him out of harm's way, shield him from pain. What good are fathers if not for these things?
Thomas Lynch
It is more or less a given that nothing is less favorable to clairvoyance than the bright sun: physical light and mental light coexist on very poor terms.
André Breton
End with an image and don't explain.
Stanley Kunitz
For they can conquer who believe they can.
Virgil
It may not be fair that people make judgments so quickly, usually within a few seconds of observation, but it's unrealistic to expect that they won't. So, if you want to be judged in a certain manner, be sure that your look and demeanor give that impression.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Oh! why was I born with a different face? why was I not born like the rest of my race? when I look,each one starts! when I speak, I offend; then Im silent & passive & lose every friend. Then my verse I dishonour, my pictures despise, my person degrade & my temper chastise; and the pen is my terror, the pencil my shame; all my talents I bury, and dead is my fame. Im either too low or too highly prized; when elate I m envy'd, when meek Im despis'd
William Blake
I know only that it is time for me to be something when I am nothing.
Patrick Branwell Brontë
For death is life. It is only living that is lifeless.
Mervyn Peake
Anything awful makes me laugh. I misbehaved once at a funeral.
Charles Lamb
Facts are not truths they are not conclusions they are not even premisses but in the nature and parts of premisses.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
I had this theory. It was based loosely on the unremarkable observation that the old are always looking back with longing while the young, with the same longing, look ahead. One man remembers what the other imagines.
Thomas Lynch
What you can do or dream you can do begin it boldness has genius power and magic in it.
Johann von Goethe
‘Paradise Lost’ was printed in an edition of no more than 1,500 copies and transformed the English language. Took a while. Wordsworth had new ideas about nature: Thoreau read Wordsworth, Muir read Thoreau, Teddy Roosevelt read Muir, and we got a lot of national parks. Took a century. What poetry gives us is an archive, the fullest existent archive of what human beings have thought and felt by the kind of artists who loved language in a way that allowed them to labor over how you make a music of words to render experience exactly and fully.
Robert Hass
Pretense cannot sustain blind power.
Dejan Stojanovic
It is in our collective behavior that we are the most mysterious. We won't be able to construct machines like ourselves until we've understood this, and we're not even close. All we know is the phenomenon: we spend our time sending messages to each other, talking and trying to listen at the same time, exchanging information. This seems to be our most urgent biological function; it is what we do with our lives. By the time we reach the end, each of us has taken in a staggering store, enough to exhaust any computer, much of it incomprehensible, and we generally manage to put out even more than we take in. Information is our source of energy; we are driven by it. It has become a tremendous enterprise, a kind of energy system on its own. All 3 billion of us are being connected by telephones, radios, television sets, airplanes, satellites, harangues on public-address systems, newspapers, magazines, leaflets dropped from great heights, words got in edgewise. We are becoming a grid, a circuitry around the earth.
Lewis Thomas
The Fourth Sign of The Zodiac (Part 3) by Mary OliverI know, you never intended to be in this world.But you’re in it all the same.So why not get started immediately.I mean, belonging to it.There is so much to admire, to weep over.And to write music or poems about.Bless the feet that take you to and fro.Bless the eyes and the listening ears.Bless the tongue, the marvel of taste.Bless touching.You could live a hundred years, it’s happened.Or not.I am speaking from the fortunate platformof many years,none of which, I think, I ever wasted.Do you need a prod?Do you need a little darkness to get you going?Let me be as urgent as a knife, then,and remind you of Keats,so single of purpose and thinking, for a while,he had a lifetime.Mary oliver
Mary Oliver
Hers is a timeless life weaving through other longer lives like a flash of lightning in a clouded evening sky.
Beatriz Fitzgerald Fernandez
Love is a game of tic-tac-toe,constantly waitingfor the next x or o.
Lang Leav
Come Sleep! Oh Sleep the certain knot of peace The baiting-place of wit the balm of woe The poor man's wealth the prisoner's release The indifferent judge between the high and low.
Sir Philip Sidney
And what if I did run my ship aground oh still it was splendid to sail it!
Henrik Ibsen
GATHERING LEAVESSpades take up leavesNo better than spoons,And bags full of leavesAre light as balloons.I make a great noiseOf rustling all dayLike rabbit and deerRunning away.But the mountains I raiseElude my embrace,Flowing over my armsAnd into my face.I may load and unloadAgain and againTill I fill the whole shed,And what have I then?Next to nothing for weight,And since they grew dullerFrom contact with earth,Next to nothing for color.Next to nothing for use.But a crop is a crop,And who's to say whereThe harvest shall stop?
Robert Frost
Fearing the night won’t keep the sun from setting.
Richelle E. Goodrich
PRETENDING TO DROWNThe only regret is that I waitedlonger than a breathto scatter the sun's reflectionwith my body.New stars burst upon the waterwhen you pulled me in.On the shore, our clothesbegged us to be good boys again.Every stick our feet toucheda snapping turtle, every shadowa water moccasin.Excuses to swim closer to one another.I sank into the depths to see youas the lake saw you: cut in halfby the surface, taut legs kicking,the rest of you sky.Suddenly still, a clear viewof what you knew I wantedto see.When I resurfaced, slick grin,knowing glance; you pushed meback under.I pretended to drown,then swallowed you whole.
Saeed Jones
You think you can get rid of things, and people too--leave them behind. You don't know yet about the habit they have, of coming back.
Margaret Atwood
Pride has quite a bit to do with hatred. In many a case in which one hates another, one subconsciously begins patterns of cherry-picking and selective hearing: he continues to look only for things about the other person which he can use to justify his hatred, things which will then make him feel less guilty about hating someone. In this regard, hatred is not so much an emotion as it is a decision.
Criss Jami
You cannot penalize a man for one slip. Then she lay wondering about the word slip. When you slip, you fall, but maybe it is not such a sore fall because you have slipped.
Jackie Kay
Honesty is not the same as truth. That is the obstacle of the notion of relative truths. I would like to put my trust in the lunatic. He is the one least concerned of what I think of him, the mark of an honest man. I can always depend on him to be completely honest in what he thinks and feels, about anything, no matter the consequences laid before him, however with no course of rationale, I cannot necessarily take his word for even the well-being of him in his own reality.
Criss Jami