Quotes by Poets - Page 69

Tears are Summer showers to the soul.
Alfred Austin
This boy - his name was Eric - said he thought it disgusting the way all the girls at my college stood around on the porches under the porch lights and in the bushes in plain view, necking madly before the one o'clock curfew, so everybody passing by could see them. A million years of evolution, Eric said bitterly, and what are we? Animals.
Sylvia Plath
Those things that inspire, enthuse, and compel you should consume your life.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Laughter puts your brain your central nervous system and your whole being into a state of free play.
Max Eastman
Fear is the proof of a degenerate mind.
Virgil
My lips got lost on the way to the kiss - that's how drunk Iwas.
Jalaluddin Rumi
Everyone thinks writers must know more about the inside of the human head, but that's wrong. They know less, that's why they write. Trying to find out what everyone else takes for granted.
Margaret Atwood
Your fear of death is but the trembling of the shepherd when he stands before the king whose hand is to be laid upon him in honour.
Kahlil Gibran
With life as short as a half taken breath, don't plant anything but love.
Jalaluddin Rumi
Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement.
William Stafford
As the yellow gold is tried in fire so the faith of friendship must be seen in adversity.
Ovid
We are against war and the sources of war. We are for poetry and the sources of poetry.
Muriel Rukeyser
Our poor world aspires simply to point out where Christians have gone wrong, and that is pretty much where it goes wrong. It is as though many of us, when of the world, are actually all the more judgmental: for we are stuck on a bad Christian while the Christian is pinned to a good Christ.
Criss Jami
The world is come upon me, I used to keep it a long way off, But now I have been run over and I am in the hands of the hospital staff.
Stevie Smith
To be a bear and love a she-bear, that would not be such a bad life, and would, at least, be a far better one than to keep his reason and his thoughts, with all the rest that made him human, and yet live on alone, unloved, in sadness.
Hermann Hesse
When the mind is truly at peace, wherever you are is pleasant, Whether you live in a marketplace or in a mountain hermitage.
Baisao
Some people are like the fragrance of flowers!
Avijeet Das
A sight to touch e’en hatred’s self with pity.
Sophocles
In this early memory he looks different from the way I would remember him later.
Siri Hustvedt
Obedient to no man, dependent only on weather and season, without a goal before them or a roof above them, owning nothing, open to every whim of fate, the homeless wanderers lead their childlike, brave, shabby existence. They are the sons of Adam, who was driven out of Paradise; the brothers of the animals, of innocence. Out of heaven's hand they accept what is given them from moment to moment: sun, rain, fog, snow, warmth, cold, comfort, and hardship; time does not exist for them and neither does history, or ambition, or that bizarre idol called progress and evolution, in which houseowners believe so desperately. A wayfarer may be delicate or crude, artful or awkward, brave or cowardly—he is always a child at heart, living in the first day of creation, before the beginning of the history of the world, his life always guided by a few simple instincts and needs. He may be intelligent or stupid; he may be deeply aware of the fleeting fragility of all living things, of how pettily and fearfully each living creature carries its bit of warm blood through the glaciers of cosmic space, or he may merely follow the commands of his poor stomach with childlike greed—he is always the opponent, the deadly enemy of the established proprietor, who hates him, despises him, or fears him, because he does not wish to be reminded that all existence is transitory, that life is constantly wilting, that merciless icy death fills the cosmos all around.
Hermann Hesse
My father had a lifelong terror, phobia whatever, about hospitals. Makes a lot of sense in hindsight. He was so scared of doctors, he passed that on to me. That's what parents exist for: to pass their phobias on generation to generation.
Jackie Kay
The house that does not comfort the needy is worthy of naught but destruction.
Kahlil Gibran
What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power.
Michael Ondaatje
No one leaves this hidden treasure,Feeling the same way they came,They always refer their friends to this Gem,This island with a beautiful name,My beautiful “Bim”—Barbados
Charmaine J.Forde
In my experience nursing is waiting. The mother becomes the background against which the baby lives, becomes time. I used to exist against the continuity of time. Then I became the baby's continuity, a background of ongoing time for him to live against. I was the warmth and milk that was always there for him, the agent of comfort that was always there for him. My body, my life, became the landscape of my son's life. I am no longer merely a thing living in the world; I am a world.
Sarah Manguso
I’m learning geography is about lossand so I keep moving
Paul Guest
Every great artist has the sense of provocation.
Arthur Cravan
They say when you are missing someone that they are probably feeling the same, but I don't think it's possible for you to miss me as much as I'm missing you right now
Edna St. Vincent Millay
I believed in the faith of faith without acknowledging his quality of being an absolute truth.
Sorin Cerin
Raindrops fall from clouds of gray.The fragile flowers grow.Teardrops seem all I can say.They speak of endless woe.Your fingers wipe my grief away.A seed of love you sow.A hardened heart reverts to clay.You mold my love just so.
Richelle E. Goodrich
This bond is forfeit And lawfully by this the Jew may claim A pound of flesh.
William Shakespeare
Disappointments are to the soul what the thunder-storm is to the air.
J. C. F. von Schiller
One thing at a time,' said the Boy. 'You must be patient. This is a day of hope and wild revenge. Do not interrupt me. I am a courier from another world. I bring you golden words.Listen!' said the Boy. 'Where I come from there is no more fear. But there is a roaring and a bellowing and a cracking of bones. And sometimes there is silence when, lolling on your thrones, your slaves adore you.
Mervyn Peake
Unless one lives and loves in the trenches, it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless.
Audre Lorde
Whatever you say or do, remember there's always someone watching you.
Gift Gugu Mona
When you know my love, my love will warm you.
Ruby Dee
The pen is the tongue of the mind.
Miguel de Cervantes
My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tamboura I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony.
Fernando Pessoa
There is a cop who is both prowler and father:he comes from your block, grew up with your brothers,had certain ideals.You hardly know him in his boots and silver badge,on horseback, one hand touching his gun.You hardly know him but you have to get to know him:he has access to machinery that could kill you.He and his stallion clop like warlords among the trash,his ideals stand in the air, a frozen cloudfrom between his unsmiling lips.And so, when the time comes, you have to turn to him,the maniac’s sperm still greasing your thighs,your mind whirling like crazy. You have to confessto him, you are guilty of the crimeof having been forced.And you see his blue eyes, the blue eyes of all the familywhom you used to know, grow narrow and glisten,his hand types out the detailsand he wants them allbut the hysteria in your voice pleases him best.You hardly know him but now he thinks he knows you:he has taken down you worst momenton a machine and filed it in a file.He knows, or thinks he knows, how much you imagined;he knows, or thinks he knows, what you secretly wanted.He has access to machinery that could get you put away;and if, in the sickening light of the precinct,and if, in the sickening light of the precinct,your details sound like a portrait of your confessor,will you swallow, will you deny them, will you lie your way home?
Adrienne Rich
Every luxury must be paid for, and everything is a luxury, starting with being in this world.
Cesare Pavese
By day I am nothing, by night I am I.
Fernando Pessoa
I'm a sucker for curiosity's whims.Does that make me a cat person?
Richelle E. Goodrich
The Everlasting Staircase"Jeffrey McDanielWhen the call came, saying twenty-four hours to live,my first thought was: can't she postpone her exitfrom this planet for a week? I've got places to do,people to be. Then grief hit between the ribs,said disappear or reappear more fully. so I boardeda red eyeball and shot across America,hoping the nurses had enough quarters to keepthe jukebox of Grandma's heart playing. She grew uppoor in Appalachia. And while world war IIfunctioned like Prozac for the Great Depression,she believed poverty was a double feature,that the comfort of her adult years was merelyan intermission, that hunger would hobble back,hurl its prosthetic leg through her window,so she clipped, clipped, clipped -- became the JacquesCousteau of the bargain bin, her wetsuitstuffed with coupons. And now --pupils fixed, chindangling like the boots of a hanged man --I press my ear to her lampshade-thin chestand listen to that little soldier march toward whateverplateau, or simply exhaust his arsenal of beats.I hate when people ask if she even knew I was there.The point is I knew, holding the one-sidedconversation of her hand. Once I believed the heartwas like a bar of soap -- the more you use it,the smaller it gets; care too much and it'll snap offin your grasp. But when Grandma's last breathwaltzed from that room, my heart openedwide like a parachute, and I realized she didn't die.She simply found a silence she could call her own.
Jeffrey McDaniel
I think that I am too warm to negatively judge individuals, yet I am cold enough to negatively judge humanity.
Criss Jami
Most human beings come into the world and leave it with nothing to show they ever lived.
Tim Gilmore
the body is wiser than its inhabitants. the body is the soul. the body is god’s messenger.
Erica Jong
The most judgmental people are often those who complain most about being judged. The ones not complaining will look as though they're the ones doing the judging.
Criss Jami
Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore.
Herman Melville
I don’t know what understanding myself is. I don’t look inside.I don’t believe I exist behind myself.
Alberto Caeiro
O bid these strangers go ;Turn to my lips till their cup overflow ;Hurt me with kisses, kill me with desire,Consume me and destroy me with the fireOf bleeding passion straining at the heart,Touched to the core by sweetnesses that smart ;Bitten by fiery snakes, whose poisonous breathSwoons in the midnight, and dissolves to death !
Aleister Crowley
The tempter or the tempted, who sins most?
William Shakespeare
Be wary of any man who intentionally ignores another man's record of deeds or work history simply to impose their own agenda. Such a man's judgment lacks merit and should be disregarded immediately. Without a conscience, there is no truth in them.
Suzy Kassem
You must have hope in a better future and have faith in this hope. But then you must forget your hope and focus on this moment now.
Kamand Kojouri
Fail not to call to mind, in the course of the twenty-fifth of this month, that the Divinest Heart that ever walked the earth was born on that day; and then smile and enjoy yourselves for the rest of it; for mirth is also of Heaven's making.
Leigh Hunt
A good marriage is that in which each appoints the other guardian of his solitude. Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist a wonderful living side by side can grow up if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole and against a wide sky.
Rainer Maria Rilke
I would rather go mad, gone down the dark road to Mexico, heroin dripping in my veins, eyes and ears full of marijuana, eating the god Peyote on the floor of a mudhut on the border or laying in a hotel room over the body of some suffering man or woman; rather jar my body down the road, crying by a diner in the Western sun; rather crawl on my naked belly over the tincans of Cincinnati; rather drag a rotten railroad tie to a Golgotha in the Rockies; rather, crowned with thorns in Galveston, nailed hand and foot in Los Angeles, raised up to die in Denver, pierced in the side in Chicago, perished and tombed in New Orleans and resurrected in 1958 somewhere on Garret Mountain, come down roaring in a blaze of hot cars and garbage, streetcorner Evangel in front of City I-Tall, surrounded by statues of agonized lions, with a mouthful of shit, and the hair rising on my scalp, screaming and dancing in praise of Eternity annihilating the sidewalk, annihilating reality, screaming and dancing against the orchestra in the destructible ballroom of the world, blood streaming from my belly and shoulders flooding the city with its hideous ecstasy, rolling over the pavements and highways by the bayoux and forests and derricks leaving my flesh and my bones hanging on the trees.
Allen Ginsberg
We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the moment and see our illusions die.
W.H. Auden
God will forgive me that is His business.
Heinrich Heine
great books are the ones we need
Charles Bukowski
If seeing her an hour before her lastWeak cough into all blackness I could yetBe held by chalk-white
Mervyn Peake