Poetry Quotes

#1. I'm not a stickler for truth. To me, lying in poetry is much more fun. I'm against lying in life, in principle, in any other activity except poetry. #Quote by Charles Simic

#2. Comic strips introduced me to metaphors. They are pure metaphor, so you learn how to tell a story with symbols, which is a very valuable thing to learn. And I learned that from motion pictures, too, and from poetry. Poetry is mainly metaphor. If it doesn't have a metaphor, it doesn't work. #Quote by Ray Bradbury

#3. We all know what good writing is: It's the novel we can't put down, the poem we never forget, the speech that changes the way we look at the world. It's the article that tells us when, where, and how, the essay that clarifies what was hazy before. Good writing is the memo that gets action, the letter that says what a phone call can't. It's the movie that makes us cry, the TV show that makes us laugh, the lyrics to the song we can't stop singing, the advertisement that makes us buy. Good writing can take form in prose or poetry, fiction or nonfiction. It can be formal or informal, literary or colloquial. The rules and tools for achieving each are different, but one difficult-to-define quality runs through them all: style. "Effectiveness of assertion" was George Bernard Shaw's definition of style. "Proper words in proper places" was Jonathan Swift's. You #Quote by Mitchell Ivers

#4. I read a lot of prose poetry and get inspired by more-so just a state of mind. #Quote by William Beckett

#5. She wasn't
bored
just restless
between
adventures. #Quote by Atticus Poetry

#6. I tell my sisters: / cultivate loneliness / like you might care for / an orchid, turning it / gently towards the light, / serving it water like wine / aerated, purified, filtered. #Quote by Holly Walrath

#7. The first thing I tried to do in the months after losing my mother was to write a poem. I found myself turning to poetry in the way so many people do - to make sense of losses. And I wrote pretty bad poems about it. But it did feel that the poem was the only place that could hold this grief. #Quote by Natasha Trethewey

#8. I never send a story off until I have read it aloud to at least two or three people. Because when I read - and I don't need their criticism, what I need is my own - when I read it aloud, there is a flow, there is a poetry to it. #Quote by Harlan Ellison

#9. You're speaking volumes, my friend, and tonight we're doing short poems only. #Quote by Andre Aciman

#10. Don't find her and lose you. Find her to find you. #Quote by Atticus Poetry

#11. the case is even stronger, and the parallel with madness is yet more strange. For it was our case against the exhaustive and logical theory of the lunatic that, right or wrong, it gradually destroyed his humanity. Now it is the charge against the main deductions of the materialist that, right or wrong, they gradually destroy his humanity; I do not mean only kindness, I mean hope, courage, poetry, initiative, all that is human. For instance, when materialism leads men to complete fatalism (as it generally does), it is quite idle to pretend that it is in any sense a liberating force. It is absurd to say that you are especially advancing freedom when you only use free thought to destroy free will. The determinists come to bind , not to loose . They may well call their law the "chain" of causation. It is the worst chain that ever fettered a human being. You may use the language of liberty, if you like, about materialistic teaching, but it is obvious that this is just as inapplicable to it as a whole as the same language when applied to a man locked up in a mad-house. You may say, if you like, that the man is free to think himself a poached egg. But it is surely a more massive and important fact that if he is a poached egg he is not free to eat, drink, sleep, walk, or smoke a cigarette. Similarly you may say, if you like, that the bold determinist speculator is free to disbelieve in the reality of the will. But it is a much more massive and important fact that he is not free to ra #Quote by G.K. Chesterton

#12. i am broken up after being broken up with #Quote by Connor Franta

#13. Oh, it's a beautiful day, it's an elegant, graceful day, and I'm sailing down the Strip in glamorous Las Vegas, on my motor scooter, in company with a certified illegal prostitute who loves poetry and remembers it. Sonofabitch, I'm a real writer! I used to worry about it, but no more. Life is good. #Quote by Peter S. Beagle

#14. I felt torn
Between living and dying
Between sleeping and surviving. #Quote by Stacy Morris

#15. You either a poet or a homosexual."

"Oh, shit, that's fucked up. Why can't I be both? #Quote by Paul Beatty

#16. Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion, it is not the desire to mate every second minute of the day, it is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every cranny of your body. No, don't blush, I am telling you some truths. That is just being "in love", which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. #Quote by Louis De Bernieres

#17. There is nothing more poetic than the truth. He who does not see poetry in it will always be a poor versifier outside of it. #Quote by Multatuli

#18. How much must be forgotten out of love,
How much must be forgiven, even love. #Quote by W.H. Auden

#19. And when our bodies rise again,
they will be wildflowers, then rabbits,
then wolves singing a perfect love
to the beautiful, meaningless moon. #Quote by Philip Appleman

#20. Death defines life. I'd rather stay undefined. #Quote by Lera Auerbach

#21. I hear you talking to me in a dream
(Your kiss felt asleep on my lips)
I see you coming back from December
And slowly enter in my shelter
(Your warmth, which all my nights depend on)
You tell me about your immense love
(We can heal from certain wounds)
You tell me about your divine love
(It has the shape of your hands) #Quote by Emmanuelle Soni-Dessaigne

#22. Thighs made of hymns, I read 'em like I'm reading runes. Now tell me where my future lies ... your neck, can I Savion on it? #Quote by Brandi L. Bates

#23. Life can be like a poem that way, with the unexpected appearing in the room, not just on the page. #Quote by Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge

#24. Poetry is a process of getting back to the unconscious. Hence, I am always writing-even when I'm not facing the white space. I feel writers are like reservoirs of images. We take in what is around us. #Quote by Yusef Komunyakaa

#25. Shapes began to appear in the mist as it thickened. Clary saw herself and Simon as children, holding hands, crossing a street in Brooklyn,; she had barrettes in her hair and Simon was adorably rumpled, his glasses sliding off his nose. There they were again, throwing snowballs in Prospect Park; and at Luke's farmhouse, tanned from summer, hanging upside down from tree branches. She saw them in Java Jones, listening to Eric's terrible poetry, and on the back of a flying motorcycle as it crashed into a parking lot, with Jace there, looking at them, his eyes squinted against the sun. And there was Simon with Isabelle, his hands curved around her face, kissing her, and she could see Isabelle as Simon saw her: fragile and strong, and so, so beautiful. And there was Valentine's ship, Simon kneeling on Jace, blood on his mouth and shirt, and blood at Jace's throat, and there was the cell in Idris, and Hodge's weathered face, and Simon and Clary again, Clary etching the Mark of Cain onto his forehead. Maureen, and her blood on the floor, and her little pink hat, and the rooftop in Manhattan where Lilith had raised Sebastian, and Clary was passing him a gold ring across a table, and an Angel was rising out of a lake before him and he was kissing Isabelle... #Quote by Cassandra Clare

#26. The advice of poets is the cordiality of kings. #Quote by Neil Gaiman

#27. So when you inhale and exhale, notice your breath and realize God is dwelling in your chest. #Quote by Trinka Polite

#28. To him,
she was like a flower
that bloomed in the snow.
Thriving under conditions
in which nothing could grow.
To some,
she was a weed
born benighted.
But in his eyes,
she was a wildflower
with a soul ignited. #Quote by A.Y. Greyson

#29. No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. #Quote by T. S. Eliot

#30. My cup is yellow
Or not, though not's
Impossible
It's yellow #Quote by Aram Saroyan

#31. No matter how long you behest, to the fruit draped tree.
It will do you no best, until a shingle you free. #Quote by Shahzad Ashraf

#32. He read me another poem, and another one - and he explained the true history of poetry, which is a kind of secret, a magic known only to wise men. Mr. Premier, I won't be saying anything new if I say that the history of the world is the history of a ten-thousand-year war of brains between the rich and the poor. Each side is eternally trying to hoodwink the other side: and it has been this way since the start of time. The poor win a few battles (the peeing in the potted plants, the kicking of the pet dogs, etc.) but of course the rich have won the war for ten thousand years. That's why, on day, some wise men, out of compassion for the poor, left them signs and symbols in poems, which appear to be about roses and pretty girls and things like that, but when understood correctly spill out secrets that allow the poorest man on earth to conclude the ten-thousand-year-old brain-war on terms favorable to himself. #Quote by Aravind Adiga

#33. I think many people love poetry who don't know they love it. People are sometimes afraid of poetry, or they've been introduced to poetry that doesn't speak to them. #Quote by Ellen Bass

#34. Every day is still
A precious thing #Quote by Christopher Lilley

#35. Treat me like a rare first edition of your favourite novel. #Quote by Christina Strigas

#36. When a boy I could never bear to read any Poetry whatever without disgust and reluctance," he said.32 He #Quote by Benita Eisler

#37. Yet, the most wonderful in my heart remains unsaid and it will remain so forever! #Quote by Preeth Nambiar

#38. An intelligent man, a man who has a little meditative consciousness, can make his life a beautiful piece of art, can make it so full of love and full of music and full of poetry and full of dance that there are no limitations for it. Life is not hard. It is man's stupidity that makes it hard. #Quote by Rajneesh

#39. She taught me everything I knew about crawfish and kissing and pink wine and poetry. She made me different.
I lit a cigarette and spit into the creek. "You can't just make me different and ten leave," I said out loud to her. "Because I was fine before, Alaska. I was fine with just me and last words and shool friends, and you can't just make me different and then die. #Quote by John Green

#40. I've always been a fan of poetry. I grew up with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Beat poets. I really followed that stuff for a while. I just love the way people threw words around like they were painting. #Quote by Ric Ocasek

#41. Not that the writers weren't good. I believe in those books and those writers very much. It's just that in the climate it's really hard to keep the lights on and the doors open when you're selling poetry and literature that appeals to a fringe audience. #Quote by Henry Rollins

#42. He [the poet] brings out the inner part of things and presents them to men in such a way that they cannot refuse but must accept it. But how the mere choice and rhythm of words should produce so magical an effect no one has yet been able to comprehend, and least of all the poets themselves. #Quote by Hilaire Belloc

#43. Poetry, in its own way, is a carrier of the sparks, because it too comes out of silence, seeking connection with unseen others. #Quote by Adrienne Rich

#44. All the same, we ought to point out that if the kinds of poetry and representation which are designed merely to give pleasure can come up with a rational argument for their inclusion in a well-governed community, we'd be delighted
short of compromising the truth as we see it, which wouldn't be right
to bring them back from exile: after all, we know from our own experience all about their spell. I mean haven't you ever fallen under the spell of poetry, Glaucon, especially when the spectacle is provided by Homer? #Quote by Plato

#45. paint the pony I will ride
soft hues that gather childhood
and thrust forward, to nowhere

back again, we turn
to plunking calliope tune
loud, round notes, we lift higher

hollowed ponies with painted ribbons
between our thighs,
laughter in her eyes

-- from 'Paint the Dancing Pony' (a poem) #Quote by Christina M. Ward

#46. Fear is the vehicle in which love can do its worst. #Quote by Phil Volatile

#47. Poetry was invented as an mnemonic device to enable people to remember their prayers. #Quote by Peter Davison

#48. I, like a river,
Have been diverted by the ruthless era.
My life was switched.
It flows
Into another channel, past strange lands,
And I no longer recognize my shores. #Quote by Anna Akhmatova

#49. How do you find the right one in a world of 7 billion people? First - you become the right one. The rest will follow. #Quote by Bianca Sparacino

#50. I feel that music on the screen can seek out and intensify the inner thoughts of the characters. It can invest a scene with terror, grandeur, gaiety, or misery. It can propel narrative switftly forward, or slow it down. It often lifts mere dialogue into the realm of poetry. Finally, it is the communicating link between the screen and the audience, reaching out and enveloping all into one single experience. #Quote by Bernard Herrmann

#51. Dividing earth and sky
is not the right way
to think about this wholeness.
It only allows one to live
at a more precise address--
were I to be searched for
I'd be found much faster.
My distinguishing marks
are rapture and despair.


From 'Sky', in the collection 'Miracle Fair #Quote by Wislawa Szymborska

#52. Discovery's friend is creativity #Quote by Phillip Gary Smith

#53. I'm sure that you didn't think I would notice,
but we memorize the strangest things in a person
when we're in love with them. #Quote by Danabelle Gutierrez

#54. Shakespeare wrote better poetry for not knowing too much; Milton , I think, knew too much finally for the good of his poetry. #Quote by Alfred North Whitehead

#55. You have scarred me for a lifetime, Even the angels won't take me without your permission. I'm your leftover they say, And I'm all yours to keep… #Quote by Piyush Rohankar

#56. Any movement or sound is a profession of faith,
as the millstone grinding is explaining
how it believes in the river.
No metaphor can explain this,
but I cannot stop pointing to the beauty.

Every moment and place says,
Put this design in your carpet.

I want to be in such a passionate adoration
that my tent gets pitched against the sky.

Let the beloved come
and sit like a guard dog
in front of the tent.

When the ocean surges,
don't let me just hear it.
Let is splash inside my chest. #Quote by Rumi

#57. Whatever others may say, they say it to deceive and comfort themselves, not help you. #Quote by Dejan Stojanovic

#58. Poetry is our heart, our spirit, our soul. Call it whatever; without it, everything else is nothing but hardware. #Quote by Vanna Bonta

#59. Be a witch they cannot burn. #Quote by Nichole McElhaney

#60. Old things climb out through my mouth and set themselves free in the air. On the high moor there are patterns and in my small mind there are patterns. [...] All the centuries drop away, and I am in the presence of something that does not know time. #Quote by Paul Kingsnorth

#61. Remind your bones that that dance inside something worthy #Quote by Q. Gibson

#62. Evening came, a paw, to the gray hut by the river. #Quote by William Stafford

#63. Following dark winter's strife, a warm air rises, teemed with life. Birth, rebirth, as the waiting die. Old love, new love sprouts wings to fly. #Quote by Phar West Nagle

#64. In the garden of life,
Grows a sapling of pain,
The deer of songs nibbles at it.
The winds of seperation
Blow through the night,
A few leaves drop.
A few leaves drop,
Mother, they drop,
And sounds stir in the garden.
If a few birds of breath
Should fly away,
The deer of songs is afraid.
But the birds of breath
Will surely fly,
Nothing can hold them back.
Through the night
In every direction
They fly away. #Quote by Shiv Kumar Batalvi

#65. Poems should be like pins which prick the skin of boredom and leave a glow equal in its pride to the gate of the sadist who stuck the pin and walked away #Quote by Norman Mailer

#66. December is a bewitching month.
The grey of cold teases
to explode into something worthwhile,
into a dream of cold,
a starlight shower you can taste,
a cold that does not chill.

I've lost my memory
of my first snow--
did I gasp at a field of white?
Or scream at the freeze
untill my cheeks reddened?

The crunch underfoot is satisfying
and the thrill of virgin snow
near leaves. #Quote by Joseph Coelho

#67. That love can be a band:
tears if you pull it too hard,
but also flexible enough
to stretch around the most chaotic mass #Quote by Elizabeth Acevedo

#68. Some people complain there are too many people on earth,
Some people complain about secret societies,
Some people accuse others of not being able to wake up early.
Almost all people complain about something. #Quote by Dejan Stojanovic

#69. We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time. #Quote by T. S. Eliot

#70. The counsellor who never reads a novel or never opens a book of poetry is neglecting an important resource for empathic development. #Quote by Dave Mearns

#71. Both the devil and the artist share the same dream: to unknow the world. #Quote by Jake Kennedy

#72. Poetry endures when it possesses passionate and primally sincere clarity in the service of articulating universal human concerns. #Quote by Franz Wright

#73. I'm not really a musician. I'm a performer, and I love rock n' roll. I've embraced rock n' roll because it encompasses all the things I'm interested in: poetry, revolution, sexuality, political activism - all of these things can be found in rock n' roll. #Quote by Patti Smith

#74. Don't be afraid of your struggles, they are making you dangerously strong and wise. They are preparing you for your superpowers. Let them happen, otherwise you'll stay in the same damn place you've always been, and until you know there is so much more awesomeness in the world you'll be content in your tiny cocoon, spinning the same circles day in and day out. Your struggles are transforming you. #Quote by Melody Lee

#75. With the need for the self in the time of another / I left my seaport grim and dear / knowing good work could be made / in the state governed by both Hope and Despair. #Quote by Roman Payne

#76. Poetry requires deliberate movement in its direction, a filament of faith in its persistence, receptivity to its fundamental worthwhileness. Within its unanesthetized heart there is quite a racket going on. Choices have to be made with respect to every mark. Not every mistake should be erased. Nor shall the unintelligible be left out. Order is there to be wrenched from the tangles of words. Results are impossible to measure. A clearing is drawn around the perimeter as if by a stick with a nail on the end. #Quote by C.D. Wright

#77. Sylvia Plath, Rumi, there's a lot of spoken word poets who do a really incredible job putting their spoken work into page poetry - that's what I strive to do. #Quote by Mary Lambert

#78. No sword
Of wrath her right arm whirl'd,
But one poor poet's scroll, and with his word
She shook the world. #Quote by Alfred Tennyson

#79. How do you like your blue-eyed boy Mr Death? #Quote by E. E. Cummings

#80. THE METAPHYSICAL POETS

Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime

(Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress)

While theatre was the most public literary form of the period, poetry tended to be more personal, more private. Indeed, it was often published for only a limited circle of readers. This was true of Shakespeare's sonnets, as we have seen, and even more so for the Metaphysical poets, whose works were published mostly after their deaths. John Donne and George Herbert are the most significant of these poets.
The term 'Metaphysical' was used to describe their work by the eighteenth-century critic, Samuel Johnson. He intended the adjective to be pejorative. He attacked the poets' lack of feeling, their learning, and the surprising range of images and comparisons they used. Donne and Herbert were certainly very innovative poets, but the term 'Metaphysical' is only a label, which is now used to describe the modern impact of their writing. After three centuries of neglect and disdain, the Metaphysical poets have come to be very highly regarded and have been influential in recent British poetry and criticism. They used contemporary scientific discoveries and theories, the topical debates on humanism, faith, and eternity, colloquial speech-based rhythms, and innovative verse forms, to examine the relationship between the individual, his God, and the universe. Their 'conceits', metaphors and images, paradoxes and inte #Quote by Ronald Carter

#81. Even this late it happens:
the coming of love, the coming of light. #Quote by Mark Strand

#82. A trip to the market in the morning to buy bread, an afternoon spent reading in a cafe - nothing was routine; a strange place helped you find the poetry in everyday life. #Quote by Brian Morton

#83. i bring my kiasu friend to the airport
leavings are never easy, not for long
and though we both saw blur along the way
memories flooded present tensions.
in the curry of his life no lemak remained
so now the predictable exit signalled
the end of his roundings, his bombings–
he can bluff like hell, ma, he got style–
and left me thinking about home, my kampong. #Quote by Kirpal Singh

#84. Poetry, at least the kind I write, is written out of immediate need; it is written out of pain, joy, and experience too great to be borne until it is ordered into words. And then it is written to be shared. #Quote by Madeleine L'Engle

#85. And my friend Karen remembers
as a little girl
studying Hebrew she inquired
of her refugee tutor who stroked his beard
and said in Yiddish "if there is a god
or if there isn't a god
a Jew studies"
isn't that a good story
beloved, but the woman in me
says that the poet lies
the poet can afford to lie #Quote by Alicia Suskin Ostriker

#86. How does a tiny heart harbor so many clashing sentiments?
One moment it is devoted. The next, purely disdaining.
Weeping at tremendous heartache
and then laughing, lighthearted, through the same tears.
How can a heart rage so fierce as to boil blood while it turns to ice?

How is this done?

To love, hate, esteem, deride, rejoice, deplore, favor, resent -
all of these and more swirling inside.
This sensitive heart, so full and resilient, buoys up to the point of bursting
and then deflates on a dime; it is a slave to whims and whispers.
How is it that the human heart beats so wild and untamed? #Quote by Richelle E. Goodrich

#87. For once,
engulf,
not air,
but hope.
For once,
breathe on,
a firm belief! #Quote by Jasleen Kaur Gumber

#88. She chose messy, she chose wild. She chose life on her own terms. #Quote by Liz Newman

#89. The poetry of speech. #Quote by Lord Byron

#90. Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history. #Quote by Plato

#91. If emptiness is endless, then everything rests in emptiness. #Quote by Dejan Stojanovic

#92. Moths and other nocturnal insects navigate by the moon and stars. Those heavenly bodies are useful for them to find their way, even though they never get far from the surface of the earth. But lightbulbs and candles send them astray; they fly into the heat or the flame and die. For these creatures, to arrive is a calamity. When activists mistake heaven for some goal at which they must arrive, rather than an idea to navigate Earth by, they burn themselves out, or they set up a totalitarian utopia in which others are burned in the flames. Don't mistake a lightbulb for the moon, and don't believe that the moon is useless unless we land on it. After all those millennia of poetry about the moon, nothing was more prosaic than the guys in space suits stomping around on the moon with their flags and golf clubs thirty-something years ago. The moon is profound except when we land on it. Paradise #Quote by Rebecca Solnit

#93. But bad manners or vulgar gestures can sometimes have a touch of poetry about them, just enough not to arouse one's indignation. #Quote by Tahar Ben Jelloun

#94. Fragmentary Blue
Why make so much of fragmentary blue
In here and there a bird, or butterfly,
Or flower, or wearing-stone, or open eye,
When heaven presents in sheets the solid hue?
Since earth is earth, perhaps, not heaven (as yet)
Though some savants make earth include the sky;
And blue so far above us comes so high,
It only gives our wish for blue a whet. #Quote by Robert Frost

#95. The difference between poets and mystics ... The mystic nails a symbol to one meaning that was true for a moment but soon becomes false. The poet, on the other hand, sees that truth while it's true but understands that symbols are always in flux and that their meanings are fleeting. #Quote by Neal Stephenson

#96. Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry. #Quote by Eugenio Montale

#97. At any moment, you know, your manufactured cool could blow. #Quote by Nicole Blackman

#98. No man was ever yet a great poet, without at the same time being a profound philosopher. #Quote by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

#99. Even though I am the daughter of a poet, and my stepmother is also a poet, growing up, I didn't think I could understand poetry; I didn't think that it had any relevance to my life, the feelings that I endured on a day-to-day basis, until I was introduced to the right poem. #Quote by Natasha Trethewey

#100. may my faith always be
at the end of the day

like a hummingbird...returning
to its favorite flower. #Quote by Sanober Khan

#101. You obsess (but of course you obsess) until the joy is gone from that thing you'd loved, until your fury overwhelms your passion, until you no longer know how to sit with your back against a tree and write poetry that no one will ever see. #Quote by Beth Kephart

#102. I'd rather be not the light in your life
The bright day might make me obscure
I'd rather be the cold darkness
For it remains, unseen, uncertain and unsure #Quote by Sanhita Baruah

#103. twice I have lived forever in a smile #Quote by E. E. Cummings

#104. My heart rides the wind and my thoughts sail away - to a land below the horizon where I know you hide from me ... #Quote by John Geddes

#105. I believe in the power of poetry, which gives me reasons to look ahead and identify a glint of light. #Quote by Mahmoud Darwish

#106. Written soul is called poetry #Quote by Munia Khan

#107. What of the firefly,
the one I love to chase?
The old man smiled
Love her
he said
but leave her wild,
and the old oak tree I love to climb?
Love her, he said, but leave her wild
the bird that sings that song I love?
Love her, he said, but leave her wild
and the wolf that cries to the old joke moon?
Love her, he said, but leave her wild
and the horse that loves to run with storms?
Love her, he said, but leave her wild.
And what of her,
the one I love most?
And the old man smiled.
Yes, he said,
you must love her too
but love her wild
and she'll love you #Quote by Atticus Poetry

#108. Poetry or science, what matters is saying it how you see it. Saying precisely what and how you saw, and no more. In science, poetry or describing a journey, accuracy is all you can do. Saying it as you saw. #Quote by Ruth Padel

#109. If you catch your
mind and heart
at war, it is your
worth, the mind
is fighting for. #Quote by Ventum

#110. Some stars are large, and some are small,
And some are quite invisiball! #Quote by Walter R. Brooks

#111. But Orlando was a woman - Lord Palmerston had just proved it. And when we are writing the life of a woman, we may, it is agreed, waive our demand for action, and substitute love instead. Love, the poet has said, is woman's whole existence. And if we look for a moment at Orlando writing at her table, we must admit that never was there a woman more fitted for that calling. Surely, since she is a woman, and a beautiful woman, and a woman in the prime of life, she will soon give over this pretence of writing and thinking and begin at least to think of a gamekeeper (and as long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking). And then she will write him a little note (and as long as she writes little notes nobody objects to a woman writing either) and make an assignation for Sunday dusk and Sunday dusk will come; and the gamekeeper will whistle under the window - all of which is, of course, the very stuff of life and the only possible subject for fiction. Surely Orlando must have done one of these things? Alas, - a thousand times, alas, Orlando did none of them. Must it then be admitted that Orlando was one of those monsters of iniquity who do not love? She was kind to dogs, faithful to friends, generosity itself to a dozen starving poets, had a passion for poetry. But love - as the male novelists define it - and who, after all, speak with greater authority? - has nothing whatever to do with kindness, fidelity, generosity, or poetry. Love is slipping off one' #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#112. LIFE IS SUBVERSIVE #Quote by Ernesto Cardenal

#113. How envious I am that the sun may kiss your porcelain skin and forever change how the world sees you. #Quote by Phar West Nagle

#114. Snapchat Poetry [10w] + {Couplet
On Hellopoetry,
poems are
dead
as soon as
they're read. #Quote by Beryl Dov

#115. Ye are better than all the ballads
That ever were sung or said;
For ye are living poems,
And all the rest are dead. #Quote by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

#116. But I have seen my obstacles: trivialities, learning and poetry. This last needs explaining: the old artist's readiness to dissolve characters into a haze. Characters cannot come alive and fight and guide the world unless the novelist wants them to remain characters. #Quote by E. M. Forster

#117. Winter Comes

Winter came too quick for me
it seems as though it was just spring.
Now summers gone and fall is here,
As the year behind just disappears. #Quote by Reed Abbitt Moore

#118. The reason we go to poetry is not for wisdom, but for the dismantling of wisdom #Quote by Jacques Lacan

#119. I promise a banquet for our ending.
I promise a parade of drums for the day you
close the door behind you for the last time.
I promise not to carry you around with me like a mistake
or a pack of gum, even when I forget what you taste like.
When they ask me about you,
I will always smile.
I will say your name and it will sound
like thank you. #Quote by Caitlyn Siehl

#120. Sometimes, it's the people who have been hurt the most who refuse to be hardened in this world, because they would never want to make another person feel the same way they have felt. If that isn't something to be in awe of, I don't know what is. #Quote by Bianca Sparacino

#121. To be honest
you scare me
I'm terrified of letting you in
of seeing myself
more clearly through your eyes
wondering if I'm good enough
or if one day I'll lose you
but the truth is
not having you at all scares me more
than all the other truths of love
and that thought
makes me brave. #Quote by Atticus Poetry

#122. I've written for every medium except poetry, at which I suck. #Quote by J. Michael Straczynski

#123. Always-
the sharp,
plaintive edge
on the rim
of the spoon
of my giving.
(lines 8-13 of the poem 'Confessions') #Quote by Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno

#124. FRIENDS

Looking out the window,
I see you looking in.
You are the sunshine,
That fills my soul. #Quote by Giorge Leedy

#125. I heard the voice of that bird, son of Polypas, whose piercing outcry
and whose arrival announces to men the season when fields
are plowed, and the voice of her broke the heart that darkens within me,
since other men posess my flourishing acres now,
and not for me are the mules dragging the plow through the grainland,
since I have given my heart to the restless seafarer's life. #Quote by Theognis

#126. I see woefully obscure poetry as simply a kind of verbal rudeness. #Quote by Billy Collins

#127. Fortune, if thou'll but gie me still
Hale breeks, a scone, an whisky gill,
An' rowth o' rhyme to rave at will,
Take a' the rest,
An' deal't about as thy blind skill
Directs thee best. #Quote by Robert Burns

#128. The other man, just as
lonesome as I am
In this empty universe #Quote by Jack Kerouac

#129. The sun was a fiery furnace of gold, but finally it set in the west and the cosmos glittered like a million burning embers, briefly reminding Awa of poetry readings under starry skies in Timbuktu #Quote by Rehan Khan

#130. Be aware of the high notes, of the blissful faces and their soft messages, and listen for the silent message of a highly decorated gift. #Quote by Dejan Stojanovic

#131. In The Sunset Sky
The sunset sky dazzling with the golden hues,
Taking bow in brilliant sparkle of experience
Is it not a climax, of the story so far, that was today?
Or is it building anticipation of the night yet to come.
Watch the days go,
some proud of their accomplishments
Some leaving sighs of disappointments, Leaving all in awe of its Amaranthine twists and turns
And the fortunate get to see the moon trying to steal the show from setting sun,
Oh she is such a show off, isn't she, basking in reflected glory
Its magical, the sunset sky,Puzzling, sometimes just like a riddle,
Leaving the nature stunned and amazed For it has been filling the canvas whole day with colours
And now the sunset threatens to hide them all
And in dark all the colours will be same
A cue for the wise.
Sunset sky has so much to offer,
is she not a fine exampleof how uncertain a life can be
Often reminding no matter what you planned, there will besome unexpected returns
For End has its own brain, its own script
Charting its own course
So why just the beginning,every moment of the life should be grand,
meted with equal passion and fervor
She has been so clever; the sunset sky
Leaving Twinkling cryptic messages for the night sky
For even the dark has sparkle and hope if you keep your head up,
A constant reminder that exuberance is an attitude of deep,rich, warm hearts
#Quote by Soma Mukherjee

#132. The idea that myth is the opposite of knowledge, or the opposite of truth, is simply to disallow it. It is like saying poetry is the opposite of truth. #Quote by Marilynne Robinson

#133. Do not look for my heart any more; the beasts have eaten it. #Quote by Charles Baudelaire

#134. Your cruelties and mistakes may look damning to you, but that is not what I see. Every human conversation is more elegant and complex than the entire solar system that contains it. You have no idea how marvelous you are, but I am not only here to protect what you are now, I am here to protect what you will become. I can't tell you what that might be because I don't know. That unknown is a diamond in a universe of dirt. Uncertainty. Unpredictability. It is when you turn your emotions into art. It is BTS and the Sistine Chapel and Rumi's poetry and Ross Geller on the stairs yelling, 'Pivot.' Every creation great and small, they are our diamonds. And what you may be in two hundred years, we can guess with fair accuracy. What you are in two thousand . . . Oh, my friends . . . my best friends, you cannot know. #Quote by Hank Green

#135. Although you be, as I am, one of those
Who feel a Christian ought to write in prose,
For poetry is magic: born in sin, you
May read it to exorcies the Gentile in you. #Quote by W. H. Auden

#136. Last night your thin walls invited me to the party next door / reminded me I am a quiet person in a quiet life. #Quote by Drew Myron

#137. we would stride over Hinksey and Cumnor - we walked almost as fast as we talked - disputing and quoting, as we looked for the dark dingles and tree-topped hills of Matthew Arnold. This kind of walk must be among the commonest, perhaps among the best, of undergraduate experiences. Lewis, with the gusto of a Chesterton or a Belloc, would suddenly roar out a passage of poetry that he had newly discovered and memorized, particularly if it were in Old English, a language novel and enchanting to us both for its heroic attitudes and crashing rhythms #Quote by Jocelyn Gibb

#138. Juliet and Romeo

Awake the scene, a twilight chamber'd dream,
Two angels both alike in dignity:
One imaged misadventure on the screen;
The second struck by moonlight's alchemy.
A pair of star-crossed lovers spends their night;
He in deed dreams such a sight as she,
Swing crystal scales to crispest fair delight.
In his eyes her merry fragrant dance: she
Civil thoughts and civil music meet; on
Fair Lansdowne Street where love lays its scene,
Romeo and Juliet did greet; within
Their airy eyes on hopes and thoughts unseen.
The curtain lifts on this sweet poem with woe,
For love to find Juliet and her Romeo. #Quote by Tiger Lewis

#139. Part memory part distance remaining
mine in the ways that I learn to miss you #Quote by W.S. Merwin

#140. Love grows by not giving to us. And if our passion for poetry lives on and persists, it is because poetry offers us only its bits of lint. #Quote by Kiki Dimoula

#141. Nor is there wanting in the press
Some spirit to stand simply forth,
Heroic in it nakedness,
Against the uttermost of earth.
The tale of earth's unhonored things
Sounds nobler there than 'neath the sun;
And the mind whirls and the heart sings,
And a shout greets the daring one. #Quote by Robert Frost

#142. Munch writes poetry with color. He has taught himself to see the full potential of color in art His use of color is above all lyrical. He feels color and he reveals his feelings through colors; he does not see them in isolation. He does not just see yellow, red and blue and violet; he sees sorrow and screaming and melancholy and decay. #Quote by Sigbjorn Obstfelder

#143. Loneliness is necessary for pure poetry. When someone intrudes into the poet's life (and any sudden personal contact, whether in the bed or in the heart, is an intrusion) the poet loses his or her balance for a moment, slips into being what he or she is, uses his or her poetry as one would use money or sympathy. The person who writes the poetry emerges, tentatively, like a hermit crab from a conch shell. The poet, for that instant, ceases to be a dead person. #Quote by Jack Spicer

#144. arms thrashing
dragging bodies from the sea
limp dreams #Quote by Elancharan Gunasekaran

#145. In practicing the art of confusion, there is no better weapon than poetry. #Quote by Susan Hubbard

#146. From heart-experience, and in humblest sense
Of Modesty, that he, who in his youth
A daily wanderer among woods and fields
With living Nature hath been intimate,
Not only in that raw unpractised time
Is stirred to ecstasy, as others are,
By glittering verse but further, doth receive,
In measure only dealt out to himself,
Knowledge and increase of enduring joy
From the great Nature that exists in works
Of mighty Poets. #Quote by William Wordsworth

#147. When you choose to be a poet,
you become a place that people walk through
and then leave when they are ready #Quote by Rudy Francisco

#148. [...] The fact is that in order to be loved and to accept love you have to get naked to the very bone of your own being. Taking off every layer of skin that gives us humans the illusion that in some way we're different from the rest. For better or for worse. Truth is though that under that burden of skin and flesh we're all the same mortal skeletons dancing to the same bittersweet song of life. [...] #Quote by Fiphie

#149. We are bored in the city, there is no longer any Temple of the Sun. Between the legs of the women walking by, the dadaists imagined a monkey wrench and the surrealists a crystal cup. That's lost. We know how to read every promise in faces-the latest stage of morphology. The poetry of the billboards lasted twenty years. We are bored in the city, we really have to strain to still discover mysteries on the sidewalk billboards, the latest state of humor and poetry. #Quote by Ivan Chtcheglov

#150. There can be no forced inspiration. #Quote by Dejan Stojanovic

#151. My aspirations are to ennoble Photography and to secure for it the character and uses of High Art by combining the real and Ideal and sacrificing nothing of the Truth by all possible devotion to Poetry and beauty. #Quote by Julia Margaret Cameron

#152. I think I view myself primarily as a fiction writer. Poetry is more of a "hobby," a time of rest from the hard work of writing fiction. #Quote by Yuriy Tarnawsky

#153. As a poet I would say everything should be able to come into a poem but I can't put toothbrushes in a poem. I really can't. #Quote by Sylvia Plath

#154. In Aristotle ... leisure is a far more noble, spiritual goal than work ... leisure is pursued solely for its own sake ... : the pleasures of music and poetry, ... conversation with friends, and ... gratuitous, playful speculation. In Latin, the ultimate good is otium - the opposite is negotium, or gainful work.
We have sought too much counsel in the proto-Calvinist work ethic preached by St Paul ... during the cessation of work we nurture family, educate, nourish friendships ... in loafing, most of our innovations come ... the routine of daily work has too often served as ... sleep ... a refuge from two crucial states - awakedness to the needs of others, and to the transcendent, which only comes ... loitering, dallying, tarrying, goofing off. #Quote by Francine Du Plessix Gray

#155. I want to
peel away all the labels
I had once given to others
and place them
upon the fabric
of my own identity.

They have reflected back to me,
everything that I refuse
to See in myself. #Quote by Meraaqi

#156. For even the best err in words when they are meant to mean most delicate and almost inexpressible things. #Quote by Rainer Maria Rilke

#157. there is a difference between
loneliness and solitude,
one will empty you and
one will fill you.

you have the power to choose. #Quote by AVA.

#158. Fall in love so that when death comes life will be cured. #Quote by Bzam

#159. One expects poetry, if it is Poetry, to offend. #Quote by Gregory Maguire

#160. to write is to give meaning to suffering #Quote by Alejandra Pizarnik

#161. The sort of poetry I seek resides in objects man can't touch. #Quote by E. M. Forster

#162. I don't believe in magic," the young boy said, the old man smiled, "you will, when you see her. #Quote by Atticus Poetry

#163. There's no difference between lyrics and poetry. Words are words. The only difference is the people who are in academic positions and call themselves poets and have an academic stance. They've got something to lose if they say it's all poetry; if there's not music to it, and you have to wear a certain kind of checkered shirt or something like that. It's all the same. Lyrics are lyrics, poetry is poetry, lyrics are poetry, and poetry is lyrics. They are interchangeable to me. #Quote by Van Morrison

#164. Poetry a riprap on the slick rock of metaphysics #Quote by Gary Snyder

#165. [It is not] the poet's business to use verse as an advanced form of rhetoric, nor to give to political statements the aura of eternal truth. #Quote by George Oppen

#166. I am my own reflection
But when I look at me
I can see your affliction #Quote by Munia Khan

#167. I think it's misguided, and probably profane, to look at a diverse collection of books written over thousands of years - history, poetry, law, Gospel accounts, proverbs, correspondence, and other writings - as absolute literal instructions without context, as we understand them, in all cases. #Quote by Sarah Bessey

#168. But poetry, romance, love, beauty? These are what we stay alive for! #Quote by N.H. Kleinbaum

#169. I'll run my nose through your hair, Bite the bottom of your ears, Press your nails across my skin, And hear me through your silence, As I say I love you… #Quote by Piyush Rohankar

#170. Wilted or in bloom,
taking or lending daylight,
the world transitions. #Quote by Richelle E. Goodrich

#171. I have a potent degree of love that is so
unwise
in one world that it is wisdom in another. #Quote by Sun Ra

#172. I was coming together...
limb by limb, after being broken
for an infinity. #Quote by Sanober Khan

#173. Wanting All

Husband, it's fine the way your mind performs
Like a circus, sharp
As a sword somebody has
To swallow, rough as a bear,
Complicated as a family of jugglers,
Brave as a sequined trapeze
Artist, the only boy I ever met
Who could beat me in argument
Was why I married you, isn't it,
And you have beaten me, I've beaten you,
We are old polished hands.

Or was it your body, I forget, maybe
I foresaw the thousands on thousands
Of times we have made love
Together, mostly meat
And potatoes love, but sometimes
Higher than wine,
Better than medicine.
How lately you bite, you baby,
How angels record and number
Each gesture, and sketch
Our spinal columns like professionals.

Husband, it's fine how we cook
Dinners together while drinking,
How we get drunk, how
We gossip, work at our desks, dig in the garden,
Go to the movies, tell
The children to clear the bloody table,
How we fit like puzzle pieces.
The mind and body satisfy
Like windows and furniture in a house.
The windows are large, the furniture solid.
What more do I want then, why
Do I prowl the basement, why
Do I reach for your inside
Self as you shut it
Like a trunkful of treasures? Wait,
I cry, as the lid slams on my fingers. #Quote by Alicia Suskin Ostriker

#174. In fact, you could say that I became a poet by renouncing poetry. #Quote by Aime Cesaire

#175. [Children] use up the same part of my head as poetry does. To deal with children is a matter of terrific imaginative identification. And the children have to come first. It's no use putting off their evening meal for two months. #Quote by Libby Houston

#176. I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone enough #Quote by Rainer Maria Rilke

#177. Now the fire rises and offers a dozen, singing, deep-red roses of flame. #Quote by Mary Oliver

#178. We've all got a dozen or so friends, haven't we? And when we're drunk we philosophise well into the night on an array of subjects ranging from what happened before the Big Bang to who would win a fight between a vampire and zombie, to what's the most compromising position to be caught in, but we're hardly going to be extolled in 60 or 70 years' time as the Heat Generation or the Cheat Generation or the Street Generation, are we?

The Tweet Generation, maybe, but that's about all.

So what was it about these few guys? Well, they wrote about what they did, and what they did was quite revolutionary back then. They went On the Road, and it was Jack Kerouac's book that turned the tide. #Quote by Karl Wiggins

#179. I'm writing to hold on to you. #Quote by Henriikka Tavi

#180. Poetry is the sister of Sorrow. Every man that suffers and weeps is a poet; every tear is a verse, and every heart a poem. #Quote by Marc-Andre Fleury

#181. Maybe silent hurting is the new Mid-Western love #Quote by Daniel Bailey

#182. A writer or any artist can't expect to be embraced by the people. I've done records where it seemed like no one listened to them. You write poetry books that maybe 50 people read. And you just keep doing your work because you have to, because it's your calling.

But it's beautiful to be embraced by the people.

Some people have said to me, "Well, don't you think that kind of success spoils one as an artist? If you're a punk rocker, you don't want to have a hit record…"

And I say to them, "Fuck you!"

One does their work for the people. And the more people you can touch, the more wonderful it is. You don't do your work and say, "I only want the cool people to read it." You want everyone to be transported, or hopefully inspired by it.

When I was really young, William Burroughs told me, "Build a good name. Keep your name clean. Don't make compromises. Don't worry about making a bunch of money or being successful. Be concerned with doing good work. And make the right choices and protect your work. And if you can build a good name, eventually that name will be its own currency. #Quote by Patti Smith

#183. Scholars heal poetic texts; poetry, to some degree, may heal scholars. #Quote by Kenneth J. Reckford

#184. Sometimes having little or no money makes you want to steal and live your life the only way you want to #Quote by Martellis Thurmand

#185. A loner by nature and an introvert ... i am a twinkling star, burning bright amidst a cloudless night. As such, i tend to fade in and out of people's lives. This aspect of me is often misunderstood as rejection or a lack of love and caring. In reality, the only way i can survive as an introvert, is to drop from the sky, from time-to-time, recharging within the energizing landscape of my inner-universe. To love me, is to let me me have the space i need to illuminate the sky. I can't be taken hostage or held captive. Inner-light is what gives my star its twinkle. #Quote by Jaeda DeWalt

#186. There will never be an end
To this droning of the surf. #Quote by Wallace Stevens

#187. I love women whose hidden desires make horses put an end to their lives at the threshold #Quote by Mahmoud Darwish

#188. Early poems are a thing it takes years to live down. #Quote by Angela Thirkell

#189. We wrote our names in the sand
You crossed mine out: I can't get
back to the way I was. #Quote by Kiera Woodhull

#190. Oh, why was he so handsomely blond, so courteously aloof, so maddeningly boring with his talk about Europe and books and music and poetry and things that interested her not at all - and yet so desirable? #Quote by Margaret Mitchell

#191. Me (Abridged)

Time
Seems.....to
Just, fly by
And get away from me
But it, can't be
That way
With you and
.......me

You
Seem.....to
Possess - feelings
The same - feelings
Put them right here
Put them all inside
Put them right here
.......inside me

Excerpt from:
Jacob's Ascent, New Poems by Mekael
© Mekael Shane, 2019 #Quote by Mekael Shane

#192. And here are trees and I know their gnarled surface, water and I feel its taste. These scents of grass and stars at night, certain evenings when the heart relaxes-how shall I negate this world whose power and strength I feel? Yet all the knowledge on earth will give me nothing to assure me that this world is mine. You describe it to me and you teach me to classify it. You enumerate its laws and in my thirst for knowledge I admit that they are true. You take apart its mechanism and my hope increases. At the final stage you teach me that this wondrous and multicolored universe can be reduced to the atom and that the atom itself can be reduced to the electron. All this is good and I wait for you to continue. But you tell me of an invisible planetary system in which electrons gravitate around a nucleus. You explain this world to me with an image. I realize then that you have been reduced to poetry: I shall never know. #Quote by Albert Camus

#193. If you want to penetrate into the heart of physics, then let yourself be initiated into the mysteries of poetry. #Quote by Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

#194. Little bucktoothed alligator
ready to taste my bills.
Make something suffer.
Make something stick. #Quote by B.J. Ward

#195. Put your arms around my waist,
Hold me close for a kiss and savour the taste,
I love you now I love you true,
Can I drown please in your eyes so blue?
Let's hang our hearts on a crescent moon,
And skinny-dip in starlit lakes to loves sweet tune,
Let's dance on boithrins grassy line,
And waltz 'Neath the canopied leaves of nature fine.
Lets sit afore fires on a winters night
Let me read you poetry aloud by candlelight,
Let's lay under the skylight and tell constellations apart,
And I'll remind you of the place you have in my heart. #Quote by Michelle Geaney

#196. Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, there is no reason either in football or in poetry why the two should not meet in a man's life if he has the weight and cares about the words. #Quote by Archibald MacLeish

#197. There is a difference between literature and just writing in your diary. I think perhaps the difference can be measured in degrees of pain. Hard work is also a factor. When I abandoned poetry there were so many questions lost to me as well. It remains astonishing to me the degree to which poetry has lost all value and meaning within the conditions of what I loosely refer to as corporate capitalism. Absolutely amazing. #Quote by Jacob Wren

#198. If every head of state and every government official spent an hour a day reading poetry we'd live in a much more humane and decent world. #Quote by Mark Strand

#199. You see how all occidental art loses by the fact that the magnificent expressions of love have been denied it. With us, eroticism is poor, stupid and frigid. It is always presented in ambiguous attitudes of sin, while here it preserves all its vital scope, all its passionate poetry and the stupendous pulse of all nature. But you are only a european lover ... a poor, timid, chilly little soul. #Quote by Octave Mirbeau

#200. Poetry affords us a respite in which we may gather renewed strength for the old struggle to adapt ourselves to reality. #Quote by Robert Haven Schauffler