Quotes by Poets - Page 470

I don’t know how to save the world, though I do know it involves a great deal of love and kindness.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Once a man takes honesty as his ideal, he cannot confine himself to showing to pleasant and reasonable side of his nature.
Hermann Hesse
He had not been able to see it in himself, but looking at Hungerford, he was able at least to speculate on the possibility that fear, raw, physical fear, had a kind of gift to give, too. Who but the terrified has heard his own heart pounding, listened to his own stertorous breathing, wishing that heart and lungs would be more quiet, and yet learning in their pulsation the lessons of rhythm and metrics? (Anagrams, p. 80)
David R. Slavitt
As life in general constituted much pain in the form of struggles against poverty, disease, ignorance, and emotional anguish, what more civilized way for people to alleviate the same than by giving themselves to one another as brothers and sisters in deed as well as in word? A society of people hoping to become politically superior needed first to become spiritually valid.
Aberjhani
Now I will burn you back, I will burn you through,Though I am damned for it we two will lieAnd burn, here where the starlings fly
Charlotte Mew
If you ever want to remember anything, tell it to a child.
Charmaine J.Forde
The world has changed from quality to quantity, and so have we.
Santosh Kalwar
His own life suddenly seemed repellently formal. Whom did he know or what did he know and whom did he love? Sitting on the stump under the burden of his father's death and even the mortality inherent in the dying, wildly colored canopy of leaves, he somehow understood that life was only what one did every day.... Nothing was like anything else, including himself, and everything was changing all of the time. He knew he couldn't perceive the change because he was changing too, along with everything else.
Jim Harrison
Love's the sonstood stammering elocutionwhile the poor ship in flames went down
Elizabeth Bishop
I, too, head for the Baths of Caracalla,thinking—with my old, magnificentprivilege of thinking…(And let there still be a god in me that thinks,lost, weak, and childish,yet whose voice is so humanit is almost a song.) Oh, to leavethis prison of poverty!To be free of the yearningthat makes these ancient nights so splendid!He who knows yearning, and he who does not,have something in common: man’s desires are humble.
Pier Paolo Pasolini
Though I knew how this failure would hurt you, I had to fold like a grey moth and let go.You could not believe I was more than your echo.
Margaret Atwood
The true test of a warrior is how your 'stance' holds up after any 'circumstance'. Meaning, even after the stormiest weather, a true warrior will still reflect the brilliant rays of the magnificent sun through both his or her eyes. You may get hit by sudden lightning or take severe beatings from the cruel wind, but you will always get back up and stand strong on your feet again, soak in the sunlight, and be prepared to get hit by even the most merciless hail - time and time again.
Suzy Kassem
Take care of your life force and always keep it streaming. Always be active and creative, and never ever stop dreaming.
Suzy Kassem
The ache for home lives in all of us. The safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.
Maya Angelou
There are easier ways of making sense,the connoisseurship of gesture, for example.You hold a girl's face in your hands like a vase.You lift a gun from the glove compartmentand toss it out the window into the desert heat.
Billy Collins
For the mentally disturbed, Marie knew these sandwich visits might be the only dependable moments in their lives. She also knew she delivered the sandwiches for her own sanity. Something would crumble inside of her if she ever walked by a homeless person and pretended not to notice. Or simply didn't care. In a way, she believed that homeless people were treated as Indians had always been treated. Badly. The homeless were like an Indian tribe, nomadic and powerless, just filled with more than any tribe's share of crazy people and cripples. So, a homeless Indian belonged to two tribes, and was the lowest form of life in the city. The powerful white men of Seattle had created a law that made it illegal to sit on the sidewalk. That ordinance was crazier and much more evil than any homeless person. Sometimes Marie wondered if she worked so hard at anything only because she hated powerful white men. She wondered if she went to college and received good grades just because she was looking for revenge.
Sherman Alexie
To think is to ignore the differences, to generalize, to abstract.
Jorge Luis Borges
Peaceful disputes are maintained when men sincerely believe that they are morally, logically correct about the issues at hand. It is when neither side is really certain that wars are instigated.
Criss Jami
Only air and light and the love of friends! Let no man lose heart who still has these.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
History honors the unique minority the majority cannot forget.
Suzy Kassem
For Reason, ruling alone, is a force confining; and Passion, unattended,is a flame that burns to its own destruction.
Kahlil Gibran
A Fairy must make her own way in the world, for the world will never make way for her. That, incidentally, is the First Theorem of Questing Physicks, which you’ll learn all about when you’re older and don’t care anymore.
Catherynne M. Valente
You know something, you never know what lonely is until you are really alone, alone all day, alone all night, with no one to talk to.
Michael Morpurgo
I think I could turn and live with animals they are so placid and self-contain'd I stand and look at them long and long They do not sweat and whine about their condition They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God Not one is dissatisfied not one is demented with the mania of owning things. Not one kneels to another nor to his kind that liveth thousands of years ago Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.
Walt Whitman
Don't say Fili, sister. Say Pili. In Tagalog, pili means to choose. Pino means fine. Pilipino equals 'fine choice.
Jessica Hagedorn The Gangster of Love
There are but two roads that lead to an important goal and to the doing of great things: strength and perseverance. Strength is the lot of but a few privileged men but austere perseverance harsh and continuous may be employed by the smallest of us and rarely fails of its purpose for its silent power grows irresistibly greater with time.
Johann von Goethe
There must always be two kinds of art: escape-art, for man needs escape as he needs food and deep sleep, and parable-art, that art which shall teach man to unlearn hatred and learn love.
W.H. Auden
I hear the singing of the lives of women. The clear mystery, the offering, and the pride.
Muriel Rukeyser
[A]nd the wizened youth trembles more and more violently, wrinkles his nose and then pounces on the story. But only I know the story, the real story. And it is simple and cruel and true and it should make us laugh, it should make us die laughing. But we only know how to cry, the only thing we do wholeheartedly is cry.
Roberto Bolaño
The telling and the hearing of a story is not a simple act. The one who tells must reach down into deeper layers of the self, reviving old feelings, reviewing the past. Whatever is retrieved is reworked into a new form, one that narrates events and gives the listener a path through these events that leads to some fragment of wisdom. The one who hears takes the story in, even to a place not visible or conscious to the mind, yet there. In this inner place a story from another life suffers a subtle change. As it enters the memory of the listener it is augmented by reflection, by other memories, and even the body hearing and responding in the moment of the telling. By such transmissions, consciousness is woven.
Susan Griffin
And I have fitted up some chambers thereLooking towards the golden Eastern air,And level with the living winds, which flowLike waves above the living waves below.—I have sent books and music there, and allThose instruments with which high spirits callThe future from its cradle, and the pastOut of its grave, and make the present lastIn thoughts and joys which sleep, but cannot die,Folded within their own eternity.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
And those, who come together in the night and are twined in quivering pleasure, are performing a serious work and are heaping up sweetness, depth and force for the song of some coming poet, who will arise to express inexpressible ecstasies
Rainer Maria Rilke
Believe nothing you hear, and only one half that you see.
Edgar Allan Poe
They put spotlights on me standing there in the road in jeans and workclothes, with the big woeful rucksack a-back, and asked:-"Where are you going?" which is precisely what they asked me a year later under Television floodlights in New York, "Where are you going?"-Just as you cant explain to the police, you cant explain to society "Looking for peace.
Jack Kerouac
This singularity of meaning--I was my face, I was ugliness--though sometimes unbearable, also offered a possible point of escape. It became the launching pad from which to lift off, the one immediately recognizable place to point to when asked what was wrong with my life. Everything led to it, everything receded from it--my face as personal vanishing point.
Lucy Grealy
But the thing is, I didn't make my friends happy and they didn't make me happy. All we did was get stoned out of our minds. That didn't have anything to do with happiness.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
All is best, though we oft doubt, what the unsearchable dispose, of highest wisdom brings about.
John Milton
Be wild; that is how to clear the river. The river does not flow in polluted, we manage that. The river does not dry up, we block it. If we want to allow it its freedom, we have to allow our ideational lives to be let loose, to stream, letting anything come, initially censoring nothing. That is creative life. It is made up of divine paradox. To create one must be willing to be stone stupid, to sit upon a throne on top of a jackass and spill rubies from one’s mouth. Then the river will flow, then we can stand in the stream of it raining down.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés
If what we think of ourselves were true, the planet would overflow with geniuses.
Dejan Stojanovic
A writer always begins by being too complicated—he’s playing at several games at once.
Jorge Luis Borges
I fail to remember, the mind has fuses.
B.S. Johnson
If a woman holds on to this gift of being old while she is young and young while she is old, she will always know what comes next If she has lost it, she can yet reclaim it with some purposeful psychic work.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés
Fear envelops bones like new skin,envelops blood with night’s skin,the earth moves beneath the soles of the feet -it is not your hair but the terror in your head,like long hair made of vertical nails,and what you see are not shattered streets,but rather, within you, your own crushed walls,your frustrated infinity, again the city comescrashing down: in your silence, only water’s threatis heard, and in the waterdrowned horses gallop through your death.
Pablo Neruda
I think that at the bottom of all art lies the impulse to preserve.
Philip Larkin
Unless philosophy can make a Juliet,Displant a town, reverse a prince’s doom,It helps not, it prevails not.
William Shakespeare
It is true that I suffered in a difficult and stupid love affair and that I worked at one bad job after another to try to keep myself going. Nevertheless, I remember that time as extraordinary, and I wouldn't trade it for anything. I don't even wish now that I had more money. And had I been asked if I was suffering at the time, I would have said a defiant no.
Siri Hustvedt
It helps I think to consider ourselves on a very long journey: the main thing is to keep to the faith to endure to help each other when we stumble or tire to weep and press on.
Mary Caroline Richards
The tales lovers tell each other about how they met are hushed and secret things. They change year by year, for we all meet many times as we grow up and become different and new and exciting people--and this never stops, even for a minute, even when we are ninety.
Catherynne M. Valente
If the whole world I once could seeOn free soil stand, with the people freeThen to the moment might I say,Linger awhile. . .so fair thou art.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Never forget:we walk on hell,gazing at flowers.
Kobayashi Issa
Fate goes ever as fate must.
Seamus Heaney
Resolve to be thyself ... he who finds himself loses his misery!
Matthew Arnold
Anything in the world can be endured, except a series of wonderful days.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Fame usually comes to those who are thinking about something else.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
later that night i held an atlas in my lap ran my fingers across the whole world and whispered where does it hurt?it answered everywhere everywhere everywhere.
Warsan Shire
Let my heiress have full rights,Live in my house, sing songs that I composed.Yet how slowly my strength ebbs,How the tortured breast craves air.The love of my friends, my enemies' rancorAnd the yellow roses in my bushy garden,And a lover's burning tenderness—all thisI bestow upon you, messenger of dawn.Also the glory for which I was born,For which my star, like some whirlwind, soaredAnd now falls. Look, its fallingProphesies your power, love and inspiration.Preserving my generous bequest,You will live long and worthily.Thus it will be. You see, I am content,Be happy, but remember me.
Anna Akhmatova
If at anytime this life of ours grows feeble, or low, or lonely, I know no other remedy than to return to its Eternal Source, to God Himself; and through Him all the means of grace become again living and true; and through Him all His creatures become again near and dear and accessible
Elizabeth Rundle Charles
I see you go bare-shod. This is most likely extremely sensible. Shoes are no end of trouble for girls. . . . How many have danced to death in slippers of silk and glass and fur and wood? Too many to count—the graveyards, they are so full these days. You are very wise to let your soles become grubby with mud, to let them grow their own slippers of moss and clay and calluses. This is far preferable to shoes which may become wicked at any moment.
Catherynne M. Valente
You had an image of life inside you, a belief or an ideal, that you were ready to do good deeds, to suffer, and to sacrifice – and by degrees you noticed that the world had no need of your good deeds, or sacrifices, and such like; that life was not an heroic tale, with roles for heroes, and such like, but a comfortable bourgeois parlour, where one is perfectly satisfied with eating and drinking, coffee and knitted stockings, tarot readings and music on the radio. And he who wants otherwise and has the heroic and the beautiful inside him, the veneration of great poets or the adoration of saints inside him, he is a fool and a knight errant, a latter day Don Quixote?
Hermann Hesse
Trouble makes us one with every human being in the world - and unless we touch others, we're out of touch with life.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.