Poetry Quotes - Page 63

She was, in short, melted by his distress, as so often happens with the female sex. Poets have frequently commented on this. You are probably familiar with the one who said, "Oh, woman in our hours of ease tum tumty tiddly something please, when something something something brow, a something something something thou.

The difference between the poet and the mathematician is that the poet tries to get his head into the heavens while the mathematician tries to get the heavens into his head.

Mind led bodyto the edge of the precipice.They stared in desireat the naked abyss.If you love me, said mind,take that step into silence.If you love me, said body,turn and exist.

ILikeThe WayThat when youTiltPoemsOn their sideTheyLook likeMiniatureCities FromA long wayAway. SkyscrapersMade outOfWords.

By giving words the latitude she does, (Marianne) Van Hirtum emphasizes their contagious qualities: they become almost like viruses, with which it is necessary to put oneself in harmony by sympathetic magic if one is not to be overwhelmed. ... What is essential is to become one with the sickness, that is, in the context of language as a whole, to enter into contact with words.

a body betrayeda heart destroyeda mind in confusionand yet a womanis capable of taking painand transforming it into triumph

I could not have climbed any mountains while looking from the ground... I would not have flown... or dived... or surfed... or swum... I am not a tourist nor a spectator... this is the life I have left, and I will not waste it like some rubber-neck

Broken hearts, you can run, you can hide and perhaps the earth is big enough to believe you’re safe. So maybe for a moment you have escaped but hear me, hear me well. Love will find you and it will leave nothing behind.

Writing is my passion. Words are the way to know ecstasy. Without them life is barren. The poet insists, language is a body of suffering and when you take up language you take up the suffering too. All my life I have been suffering for words. Words have been the source of the pain and the way to heal. Struck as a child for talking, for speaking out of turn, for being out of my place. Struck as a grown woman for not knowing when to shut up, for not being willing to sacrifice words for desire. Struck by writing a book that disrupts. There are many ways to be hit. Pain is the price we pay to speak the truth.

He feeds upon her face by day and night,And she with true kind eyes looks back on him,Fair as the moon and joyful as the light:Not wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim;Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright;Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.

Through everything I have passed but nowhere I have been.

Let them shoot us in the head,My blood will grow rootsand will blossom.

Ya no la quiero, es cierto, pero tal vez la quiero.Es tan corto el amor, y es tan largo el olvido.

Stephen kissed me in the spring,Robin in the fall,But Colin only looked at meAnd never kissed at all.Stephen’s kiss was lost in jest,Robin’s lost in play,But the kiss in Colin’s eyesHaunts me night and day.

She's fire. But she won't burn you... she knows all too well, how it feel to live with ashes.

You must have thought more times than you realized "it will hurt".You should know it may. Okay. It may hurt immensely to open you up in your safe, dark space, sporadic light and chaotic air hitting you unlike anything you have known. Sometimes it will feel impossible to swallow. Because finding your way back to you involves telling the truth about oneself while pushing through a field of trees that are all whispering different tones of you.

Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies.And be it gash or gold it will not comeAgain in this identical disguise.

I am poetry in motion

you wanted it all to make senseand you wanted the most complicated answer, but the answer is simple.just be.

[Kieran]his head propped on a stack of poetry books he’d brought from the library. Almost all of them had been inscribed on the inside cover by a James Herondale, who had neatly written out his favorite lines.

And in despair I bowed my head;"There is no peace on earth," I said;"For hate is strong,And mocks the songOf peace on earth, good-will to men!"Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:"God is not dead, nor doth he sleep!The Wrong shall fail,the Right prevail,With peace on earth, good-will to men!

I began to write because of love. I wrote to understand what I felt and what I knew.

To whom shall I offer this book, young and sprightly,Neat, polished, wide-margined, and finished politely?To you, my Cornelius, whose learning pedantic,Has dared to set forth in three volumes giganticThe history of ages—ye gods, what a labor!—And still to enjoy the small wit of a neighbor.A man who can be light and learned at once, sir,By life's subtle logic is far from a dunce, sir.So take my small book—if it meet with your favor.The passing of years cannot dull its sweet savor.

It’s just another stop on the curvy roadthe final encounterfor the man who has liveddeath is the answer.

I believe in Aphrodite, I believe in insane thinkers, I believe in roaring free-spirits, I believe in full-throated poetry, I believe in feverish sex and moony love with all its facets.

Love is almost never simple.

Fate is the cruelest of masters, takingLife when it pleases or at random, handingRigged decks to whom it pleases, cheatingAll alike and none the wiser, takingEverything away from those with nothing.

I don't feel strong anymoreI feel like falling to my knees.Things aren't the way they were before,They're not the way they're supposed to be.

I belong with the trees,the wind,the earth beneath my feet.I belong in the land of enchanting things.But mostly,I belong entwined in your kiss,lost,yet wild and free,pure bliss,like poetry.

You are a full of beautiful madness, an unreasonable reason, but you make sense in all things senseless.

My heart born nakedwas swaddled in lullabies.Later alone it worepoems for clothes.Like a shirtI carried on my backthe poetry I had read.So I lived for half a centuryuntil wordlessly we met.From my shirt on the back of the chairI learn tonighthow many yearsof learning by heartI waited for you.

I wanted nothing more than her attention. Her thoughts filled with me. Her eyes lost in my image. I wanted her so badly I didn't even realize I lost myself in the process. Now, when I look in the mirror, I only see her... where is me?

Poetry arises from the desire to get beyond the finite and the historical—the human world of violence and difference—and to reach the transcendent or divine. You're moved to write a poem, you feel called upon to sing, because of that transcendent impulse. But as soon as you move from that impulse to the actual poem, the song of the infinite is compromised by the finitude of its terms.

For a game, you don’t need a teacher.

twice I have lived forever in a smile

As melancholia replaced the jarring of my invention, I sat.Unable to breathe in the smog I had created, unable to stand on my betraying legs, unable to howl at the heavens over my sordid soul.In this inferno, I became paroxysmic, my self-hatred, superparamount, numbness dulling the agony of such a devilish act,An iron curtain fell upon the surrounding world, or at least what I had left of it to be owned by the laconic eclipse.All the angels fled, disowning my prayers, the lurid world backed away, leaving me forsaken and detached,I could no longer hear the bombings, hear them fall, my own fabrication, only the dead air that came after, the intense silence.Cynical and paralyzed, I realized I had purloined a portion of Hell and given it to the unwilling Earth,Punishing those I had no right to punish, judging those I had no reason to condemn, destroying cities I had never set foot in.This is how I became Death, the destroyer of Worlds.

The first fact of the world is that it repeats itself. I had been taught to believe that the freshness of children lay in their capacity for wonder at the vividness and strangeness of the particular, but what is fresh in them is that they still experience the power of repetition, from which our first sense of the power of mastery comes. Though predictable is an ugly little world in daily life, in our first experience of it we are clued to the hope of a shapeliness in things. To see that power working on adults, you have to catch them out: the look of foolish happiness on the faces of people who have just sat down to dinner is their knowledge that dinner will be served. Probably, that is the psychological basis for the power and the necessity of artistic form...Maybe our first experience of form is the experience of our own formation...And I am not thinking mainly of poems about form; I’m thinking of the form of a poem, the shape of its understanding. The presence of that shaping constitutes the presence of poetry.

The moon glistens in her dreamy eyes as she frolics in the dark forest. She’s got wild overgrowing in her bones, and tangles upon tangles of midnight weaving through her long silky hair, this belle of the night.

Doubt not, O poet, but persist. Say 'It is in me, and shall out.' Stand there, balked and dumb, stuttering and stammering, hissed and hooted, stand and strive, until at last rage draw out of thee that dream-power which every night shows thee is thine own; a power transcending all limit and privacy, and by virtue of which a man is the conductor of the whole river of electricity.

They lay together in a sheltered place among the ruins of Brasilia while deathbeams from Chinese EMVs played like blue searchlights on broken ceramic walls.

You can't rock the boat & act like you were just trying to put a baby to sleep.

brave love, dreamnot of staunching such strict flame, but come,lean to my wound; burn on, burn on.

The very essence of I is being killed by You.

Poetry had always seemed something I could turn to in need - an emergency exit, a lifebuoy, as well as a justification.

i do not know how to live tepidly.i was never built to fit in.i live by my souland my soul is insane.

Every heart must have its privatebestseller book.

How can I tell Bob that my happiness streams from having wrenched a piece out of my life, a piece of hurt and beauty, and transformed it to typewritten words on paper? How can he know I am justifying my life, my keen emotions, my feeling, by turning it into print?

Her veins flowed with liquid poetry. I stole the words from her mouth with my kisses.

I was stressed and scared and I had to hurry to be someone, become something, do something. I was running and talking and cursed myself when I wasted my time on things that wouldn’t get me anywhere. It was work and it was money and I was never where I was, always somewhere else in my head far, far away.

I wanted you mine. I wanted me yours.

Deb and I were married on a snowy night - wind cross-wove a veil of snow for her then threw confetti at us as we left the lighted church...

ink marks the page/where you execute your will like a doe announcing an/ox-stern mate with a single, bleary blink.

it is so dark now with the sadness ofpeoplethey were tricked, they were taught to expect theultimate when nothing ispromisednow young girls weep alone in small roomsold men angrily swing their canes atvisions asladies comb their hair asants search for survivalhistory surrounds usand our livesslink awayinshame.

Every particle of dust on a patch of earthWas a sun-cheek or brow of the morning star;Shake the dust off your sleeve carefully--That too was a delicate, fair face.

But that so many scholars are barbarians does not much matter so long as a few of them are ready to help with their specialized knowledge the few independent thinkers, that is to say the poets, who try to to keep civilization alive.

The trouble with poetry is it's often written to the sound of a drum only the poet may hear; nonetheless, blessed are those poets who always manage to find unshakeable pleasure in their own works.

But writing poems and letters doesn't seem to do much good.

It was a dance of masks and every mask was perfect because every mask was a real face and every face was areal mask so there was no mask and there was no face for there was but one dance in which there was butone mask but one true face which was the same and which was a thing without a name which changed andchanged into itself over and over.

There is still peace left in the world,and only those with beauty in their soul,care enough to be it.

Dear . . .You’re the poem I couldn’t finish The journey I should have never started I saw tragedy in our ending My pen bled its heart out trying to change it But you were the fight I didn’t want to lose The addiction I didn’t want to quitYet there was only one of us holding on I wasn’t attached to the man you areBut the one you could be I tried to build where there was no foundationCreate a fairy tale on blank pages But some stories need not be told, let alone written You’ll read my words and won’t be moved Your arrogance will not soften You won’t be changed Your heart, if you should have one, will not bend or break The worst part of it all Is this poem is about you and you’ll never even know it