Quotes by Poets - Page 444

Where got she her sullen mouthAnd where her swaying form?Would she live on eggs and applesWhen the blood of men is warm?(“The Young Witch”)
George Sterling
Grief and rage--you need to contain that, to put a frame around it, where it can play itself out without you or your kin having to die. There is a theory that watching unbearable stories about other people lost in grief and rage is good for you--may cleanse you of your darkness. Do you want to go down to the pits of yourself all alone? Not much. What if an actor could do it for you? Isn't that why they are called actors? They act for you. You sacrifice them to action. And this sacrifice is a mode of deepest intimacy of you with your own life. Within it you watch [yourself] act out the present or possible organization of your nature. You can be aware of your own awareness of this nature as you never are at the moment of experience. The actor, by reiterating you, sacrifices a moment of his own life in order to give you a story of yours.
Anne Carson
They may talk of a comet, or a burning mountain, or some such bagatelle; but to me a modest woman, dressed out in all her finery, is the most tremendous object of the whole creation.
Oliver Goldsmith
Now I sense the perfume of flowers like seeing a new thing.I know they smell just as well as I know I existed.They’re things known from the outside.But now I know with my breathing from the back of my head.
Alberto Caeiro
I could end this with a moral,as if this were a fable about animals,though no fables are really about animals.
Margaret Atwood
Of all man’s instruments, the most wondrous, no doubt, is the book. The other instruments are extensions of his body. The microscope, the telescope, are extensions of his sight; the telephone is the extension of his voice; then we have the plow and the sword, extensions of the arm. But the book is something else altogether: the book is an extension of memory and imagination.
Jorge Luis Borges
A praiseworthy King is he who doesn't seek the most expensive throne, rather the most effective leadership style.
Gugu Mona
By now you must have guessed: I come from another planet. But I will never say to you, Take me to your leaders. Even I - unused to your ways though I am - would never make that mistake. We ourselves have such beings among us, made of cogs, pieces of paper, small disks of shiny metal, scraps of coloured cloth. I do not need to encounter more of them.Instead I will say, Take me to your trees. Take me to your breakfasts, your sunsets, your bad dreams, your shoes, your nouns. Take me to your fingers; take me to your deaths.These are worth it. These are what I have come for.
Margaret Atwood
We are on a stroll, hand in hand, in a garden, in the moonlight and the sole purpose of such a venture is to come together in love.
Anuradha Bhattacharyya
Thinking he knows can be a trap. An ex-professor once told him he had a diamond-hard intellect and he’d been flattered at the time. Now he considers the nature of diamonds. Although sharp and glittering and useful for cutting glass, they shine with reflected light only. They’re no use at all in the dark
Margaret Atwood
If life is a stage and you are your own agent, then don’t hesitate to play the character you wish to play.
Richelle E. Goodrich
But my grandmother wanted us to forgive her murderer.
Sherman Alexie
darkness falls upon Humanityand faces become terriblethingsthat wanted more than therewas.all our days are marked withunexpectedaffronts - somedisastrous, othersless sobut the process iswearing andcontinuous.attrition rules.most givewayleavingempty spaceswhere people shouldbe.and nowas we ready to self-destructthere is very little left tokillwhich makes the tragedyless and moremuch muchmore.
Charles Bukowski
Then he started his period.One week in bed.Two doctors in.Three painkillers four times a day.And later a letter to the powers-that-bedemanding full-paid menstrual leave twelve weeks per year.
Carol Ann Duffy
The world's a scene of changes and to be constant in nature is inconstancy.
Abraham Cowley
What if it's the thereand not the herethat I long for?The wanderand not the wait,the magicin the lost feetstumbling downthe faraway streetand the way the moonnever hangsquite the same.
Tyler Knott Gregson
I am beginning to believe that we know everything, that all history, including the history of each family, is part of us, such that, when we hear any secret revealed, a secret about a grandfather, or an uncle, or a secret about the battle of Dresden in 1945, our lives are made suddenly clearer to us, as the unnatural heaviness of unspoken truth is dispersed. For perhaps we are like stones; our own history and the history of the world embedded in us, we hold a sorrow deep within and cannot weep until that history is sung.
Susan Griffin
Our children are watching us live, and what we ARE shouts louder than anything we can say.
Wilfred A. Peterson
All these pricks gathering around her body, trying to reach and pierce her rose.
Anthony Liccione
For this gloomy beast within my breast - A heart. But the thing is,We've all had to learn not to sleep for three years.In the morning we shall find outWho has died in the night.
Anna Akhmatova
Love is a word, another kind of open.As the diamond comesinto a knot of flameI am Blackbecause I come from the earth's insidetake my word for jewelin the open light.
Audre Lorde
Farsi Couplet: Agar firdaus bar roo-e zameen ast, Hameen ast-o hameen ast-o hameen ast. English Translation: If there is a paradise on earth, It is this, it is this, it is this
Amir Khusrau
My love for you reaches beyond the borders of continents, so vast in scope that I would cross oceans to be with you.Yes, but does that same love penetrate so deep as to dare thee to sink to the oceans' depths to fin
Richelle E. Goodrich
As for sex, the last of the great words, it was just a cocktail term for an excitement that bucked you up for a while, then left you more raggy than ever
David Herbert Lawrence
I carry my roots with me all the time rolled up, I use them as my pilllow.
Francisco X. Alarcón
I’ll affect you slowlyas if you were having a picnic in a dream. There will be no ants.It won’t rain.
Richard Brautigan
Absence makes the heart grow fonder.
Thomas Haynes Bayly
A woman is like your shadow follow her she flies fly from her she follows.
Sebastien Chamfort
We do not remember days, we remember moments.
Cesare Pavese
All the great words, it seemed to Connie were cancelled, for her generation: love, joy, happiness, home, mother, father, husband, all these great, dynamic words were half dead now and dying from day to day.
D.H. Lawrence
What happens when I love, you ask, does the world start making sense? No, my dear, it does not. But it won’t matter to you then.
Kamand Kojouri
Granting our wish is one of Fate's saddest jokes.
James Russell Lowell
Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;This sensible warm motion to becomeA kneaded clod; and the delighted spiritTo bathe in fiery floods, or to resideIn thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;To be imprison'd in the viewless winds,And blown with restless violence round aboutThe pendent world; or to be worse than worstOf those that lawless and incertain thoughtImagine howling: 'tis too horrible!The weariest and most loathed worldly lifeThat age, ache, penury and imprisonmentCan lay on nature is a paradiseTo what we fear of death.
William Shakespeare
There is no easy path leading out of life and few are the easy ones that lie within it.
Walter Savage Landor
Criticism is like politics: if you don't make your own you are by default accepting the status quo and are finally yourself responsible for whatever the status quo does to you.
Annie Finch
There are over a million types of fish in the sea as there are flowers in all of the world's gardens. There are at least a million different types of minerals as there are species of birds or monkeys. The possible configurations of lifeforms that could be created from a single atom are infinite. There are at least a billion people on this earth, and no two faces look the same. It is very arrogant to assume that we have seen all of God's miracles.
Suzy Kassem
Oh,' said a very white body as it threw a wrist watch to the ground which broke without attracting anyone's attention, 'Oh, how can anyone not love poetry, natural machines, large white houses, the brilliance of steel, crimes and wild passions?
Robert Desnos
We belong far less to where we've come from than where we want to go.
Franz Werfel
All our words are but crumbs that fall down from the feast of the mind.
Kahlil Gibran
I'm two days away from day after tomorrowCounting the hours to my upcoming sorrow Suddenly I lookinto the eyes of my childThen all sadness goneas I smile the way she smiled
Munia Khan
how sad and bad and mad it was - but then, how it was sweet
Robert Browning
A blaze of love and extinction, was better than a lantern glimmer of the same which should last long years.
Thomas Hardy
Because someday, in one way or another, you will be taken from me or I you.
Lang Leav
Toward dawn we shared with youyour hour of desolation,the huge lingering passionof your unearthly out cry,as you swung your blind headtowards us and laboriously openeda bloodshot, glistening eye,in which we swam with terror and recognition.
Stanley Kunitz
All our lives we postpone everything that can be postponed; perhaps we all have the certainty, deep inside, that we are immortal and sooner or later every man will do everything, know all there is to know.
Jorge Luis Borges
Nature is the guardian of Africa. While the sun lights the African sky in day time, the moon begs the world to help her lighting Africa in the night
Munia Khan
The sated day is never firstThe best day is a day of thirstYes, there is goal and meaning in our path -but it is the way that is the labour's worth.
Karin Boye
He watch'd and wept he pray'd and felt for all.
Oliver Goldsmith
Wealth mostly ignored the real reality.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
The life of the hero of the tale is, at the outset, overshadowed by bitter and hopeless struggles; one doubts that the little swineherd will ever be able to vanquish the awful Dragon with the twelve heads. And yet, ...truth and courage prevail and the youngest and most neglected son of the family, of the nation, of mankind, chops off all twelve heads of the Dragon, to the delight of our anxious hearts. This exultant victory, towards which the hero of the tale always strives, is the hope and trust of the peasantry and of all oppressed peoples. This hope helps them bear the burden of their destiny.
Gyula Illyés
Strong relationships come from well-bonded friendships.
Jonathan Anthony Burkett
When I write, I disturb. When I show a film, I disturb. When I exhibit my painting, I disturb, and I disturb if I don't. I have a knack for disturbing.
Jean Cocteau
...that we should look out of the window, choose a star, and make a last wish before we went to sleep, and she told us we should wish the best, not just for each of ourselves, but more for each other, because we were all the best of friends.
Michael Morpurgo
Maybe love was meant to save us from ourselves.
Robert M. Drake
There is no beauty in sadness. No honor in suffering. No growth in fear. No relief in hate. It’s just a waste of perfectly good happiness.
Katerina Stoykova-Klemer
Like the coffin was settling down for a long, long nap, for a forever nap.
Sherman Alexie
A misery is not to be measured from the nature of the evil, but from the temper of the sufferer.
Joseph Addison
Poetry led me by the hand out of madness.
Anne Sexton
To live is to war with trolls.
Henrik Ibsen
He who seeks ecstasy in love should not complain of suffering.
Kahlil Gibran