Poetry Quotes

Five minutes are enough to dream a whole life, that is how relative time is.

~ Mario Benedetti

To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation...Love is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world for himself for another's sake, it is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

A truth should exist,it should not be usedlike this. If I love youis that a fact or a weapon?

~ Margaret Atwood

I want you to knowone thing. You know how this is: if I look at the crystal moon, at the red branch of the slow autumn at my window, if I touch near the fire the impalpable ash or the wrinkled body of the log, everything carries me to you, as if everything that exists, aromas, light, metals, were little boats that sail toward those isles of yours that wait for me. Well, now, if little by little you stop loving me I shall stop loving you little by little. If suddenly you forget me do not look for me, for I shall already have forgotten you. If you think it long and mad, the wind of banners that passes through my life, and you decide to leave me at the shore of the heart where I have roots, remember that on that day, at that hour, I shall lift my arms and my roots will set off to seek another land. But if each day, each hour, you feel that you are destined for me with implacable sweetness, if each day a flower climbs up to your lips to seek me, ah my love, ah my own, in me all that fire is repeated, in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten, my love feeds on your love, beloved, and as long as you live it will be in your arms without leaving mine.

~ Pablo Neruda

I have named you queen.There are taller than you, taller.There are purer than you, purer.There are lovelier than you, lovelier.But you are the queen.When you go through the streetsNo one recognizes you.No one sees your crystal crown, no one looksAt the carpet of red goldThat you tread as you pass,The nonexistent carpet.And when you appearAll the rivers soundIn my body, bellsShake the sky,And a hymn fills the world.Only you and I,Only you and I, my love,Listen to it.

~ Pablo Neruda

I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets. Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.

~ Pablo Neruda

AmorSo many days, oh so many daysseeing you so tangible and so close,how do I pay, with what do I pay?The bloodthirsty springhas awakened in the woods.The foxes start from their earths,the serpents drink the dew,and I go with you in the leavesbetween the pines and the silence,asking myself how and whenI will have to pay for my luck.Of everything I have seen,it's you I want to go on seeing:of everything I've touched,it's your flesh I want to go on touching.I love your orange laughter.I am moved by the sight of you sleeping.What am I to do, love, loved one?I don't know how others loveor how people loved in the past.I live, watching you, loving you.Being in love is my nature.You please me more each afternoon.Where is she? I keep on askingif your eyes disappear.How long she's taking! I think, and I'm hurt.I feel poor, foolish and sad,and you arrive and you are lightningglancing off the peach trees.That's why I love you and yet not why.There are so many reasons, and yet so few,for love has to be so,involving and general,particular and terrifying,joyful and grieving,flowering like the stars,and measureless as a kiss.That's why I love you and yet not why.There are so many reasons, and yet so few,for love has to be so,involving and general,particular and terrifying,joyful and grieving,flowering like the stars,and measureless as a kiss.

~ Pablo Neruda

It seems to me now that the plain state of being human is dramatic enough for anyone you don't need to be a heroin addict or a performance poet to experience extremity. You just have to love someone.

~ Nick Hornby

So for now,I will miss you like I’ll never see you again,And the next time I see you,I will kiss you like I’ll never kiss you again,And when I fall asleep beside you I will fall asleep as if I’ll never wake up again,because I don’t know if I will.I don’t know if I will.- I Will Love You Like The World Is Ending

~ Charlotte Eriksson

How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true; But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face.

~ W.b. Yeats

Maybe you could be mine / or maybe we’ll be entwined / aimless in this sexless foreplay.

~ Jess C. Scott

If you love me, Henry, you don’t love me in a way I understand.

~ Richard Siken

I hold it true, whate'er befall;I feel it when I sorrow most;'Tis better to have loved and lostThan never to have loved at all.

~ Alfred Tennyson

I haven’t been very impressed lately.By people,or places,or the way someone said he loved me and then slowly changed his mind.

~ Charlotte Eriksson

I am two fools, I know,For loving, and for saying so.

~ John Donne

People Die...Beauty Fades...Love Changes...And You Will Always Be Alone

~ L.j. Smith

After all, my erstwhile dear,My no longer cherished,Need we say it was not love,Just because it perished?

~ Edna St. Vincent Millay

The Quiet WorldIn an effort to get people to lookinto each other’s eyes more,and also to appease the mutes,the government has decidedto allot each person exactly one hundred and sixty-seven words, per day.When the phone rings, I put it to my ear without saying hello. In the restaurant I point at chicken noodle soup.I am adjusting well to the new way.Late at night, I call my long distance lover, I only used fifty-nine today. When she doesn’t respond,I know she’s used up all her words, thirty-two and a third times.After that, we just sit on the line and listen to each other breathe.

~ Jeffrey Mcdaniel

I believein love at first sightbut I will always believe that the peoplewe lovewe have loved before.Many, many, many times beforeand when we stumblethrough grace and circumstance and that brilliant illusion of choiceto finally meet them again, we feel it fastereach time through.The one glance that set life alightis two sets of two eyesstaring through the layersof lifetimes and stolen glancesand first kisses and hands held;the brace against the weight and unrelenting tideof waiting.I believein love at first sightbut am not burdened with the misconceptionthat it's a first sightat all.

~ Tyler Knott Gregson

But I was youngand didn’t know betterand someone should have told me to capture every secondevery kiss & every nightBecause now I’m sitting here alone and it’s getting really hard to breath because tears are growing in my throat and they want to break out, but there are peoplewatchingand I just want to be somewhere silentsomewhere stillBut still I don’t want to be alone because I’m scared and lonelyand I don’t understandBecause I was alone my whole lifeMy whole lifeI was so damn lonely and I was content with thatbecause I liked myself and my own company and I didn’t need anyoneI thoughtBut then there was you .. ...So, someone should have told me that love is for those few brave who can handle the unbearable emptiness,the unbearable guilt and lack of oneself,Because I lost myself to someone I loveand I might get myself back one daybut it will take time, it will take time.This is gonna take some time.I wish someone would have told me this.Someone should have told me this.

~ Charlotte Eriksson

Love is a game of tic-tac-toe,constantly waitingfor the next x or o.

~ Lang Leav

I am the poet of the poor, because I was poor when I loved; since I could not give gifts, I gave words.

~ Ovid

And think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.

~ Kahlil Gibran

No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees,sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air,dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding,our animal passion rooted in the city.

~ Adrienne Rich

When love beckons to you, follow him,Though his ways are hard and steep.And When his wings enfold you yield to him,Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you.And When he speaks to you believe in him,Though his voice may shatter your dreams as the north wind lays waste the garden...But if in your fear you would seek only love’s peace and love’s pleasure,Then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out oflove’s threshing-floor,Into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears...But if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires:To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night.To know the pain of too much tenderness.To be wounded by your own understanding of love;And to bleed willingly and joyfully.

~ Kahlil Gibran

With a chaste heart With pure eyes I celebrate your beautyHolding the leash of bloodSo that it might leap out and trace your outline Where you lie down in my Ode As in a land of forests or in surfIn aromatic loam, or in sea musicBeautiful nudeEqually beautiful your feetArched by primeval tap of wind or soundYour ears, small shellsOf the splendid American seaYour breasts of level plentitudeFulfilled by living lightYour flying eyelids of wheatRevealing or enclosingThe two deep countries of your eyesThe line your shoulders have divided into pale regionsLoses itself and blends into the compact halves of an apple Continues separating your beauty down into two columns ofBurnished goldFine alabasterTo sink into the two grapes of your feetWhere your twin symmetrical tree burns again and risesFlowering fireOpen chandelierA swelling fruit Over the pact of sea and earth From what materialsAgate?Quartz?Wheat?Did your body come together?Swelling like baking bread to signal silvered hills The cleavage of one petal Sweet fruits of a deep velvet Until alone remainedAstonished The fine and firm feminine form It is not only light that falls over the world spreading inside your bodyYet suffocate itselfSo much is clarity Taking its leave of youAs if you were on fire within The moon lives in the lining of your skin.

~ Pablo Neruda

We join spokes together in a wheel, but it is the center hole that makes the wagon move.We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness insidethat holds whatever we want.We hammer wood for a house, but it is the inner spacethat makes it livable.We work with being, but non-being is what we use.

~ Lao Tzu

By night, Love, tie your heart to mine, and the two together in their sleep will defeat the darkness

~ Pablo Neruda

Were knowledge all, what were our needTo thrill and faint and sweetly bleed?

~ Christopher Brennan

There's two kinds of women--those you write poems about and those you don't.

~ Jeffrey Mcdaniel

As Unto the bow the the cord is ,So unto the man is woman;Though she bends him, she obeys him,Though she draws him , yet she follows:Useless each without the other.

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

she lived with hurricane eyes and fell in love with the way the waves collapsed against her cheeks.

~ Christopher Poindexter

Ah, when to the heart of man Was it ever less than a treason To go with the drift of things, To yield with a grace to reason, And bow and accept the end Of a love or a season?

~ Robert Frost

My wife with the hair of a wood fireWith the thoughts of heat lightningWith the waist of an hourglassWith the waist of an otter in the teeth of a tigerMy wife with the lips of a cockade and of a bunch of stars of the last magnitudeWith the teeth of tracks of white mice on the white earthWith the tongue of rubbed amber and glassMy wife with the tongue of a stabbed hostWith the tongue of a doll that opens and closes its eyesWith the tongue of an unbelievable stoneMy wife with the eyelashes of strokes of a child's writingWith brows of the edge of a swallow's nestMy wife with the brow of slates of a hothouse roofAnd of steam on the panesMy wife with shoulders of champagneAnd of a fountain with dolphin-heads beneath the iceMy wife with wrists of matchesMy wife with fingers of luck and ace of heartsWith fingers of mown hayMy wife with armpits of marten and of beechnutAnd of Midsummer NightOf privet and of an angelfish nestWith arms of seafoam and of riverlocksAnd of a mingling of the wheat and the millMy wife with legs of flaresWith the movements of clockwork and despairMy wife with calves of eldertree pithMy wife with feet of initialsWith feet of rings of keys and Java sparrows drinkingMy wife with a neck of unpearled barleyMy wife with a throat of the valley of goldOf a tryst in the very bed of the torrentWith breasts of nightMy wife with breasts of a marine molehillMy wife with breasts of the ruby's crucibleWith breasts of the rose's spectre beneath the dewMy wife with the belly of an unfolding of the fan of daysWith the belly of a gigantic clawMy wife with the back of a bird fleeing verticallyWith a back of quicksilverWith a back of lightWith a nape of rolled stone and wet chalkAnd of the drop of a glass where one has just been drinkingMy wife with hips of a skiffWith hips of a chandelier and of arrow-feathersAnd of shafts of white peacock plumesOf an insensible pendulumMy wife with buttocks of sandstone and asbestosMy wife with buttocks of swans' backsMy wife with buttocks of springWith the sex of an irisMy wife with the sex of a mining-placer and of a platypusMy wife with a sex of seaweed and ancient sweetmeatMy wife with a sex of mirrorMy wife with eyes full of tearsWith eyes of purple panoply and of a magnetic needleMy wife with savanna eyesMy wife with eyes of water to he drunk in prisonMy wife with eyes of wood always under the axeMy wife with eyes of water-level of level of air earth and fire

~ André Breton

If you're reading this...Congratulations, you're alive.If that's not something to smile about,then I don't know what is.

~ Chad Sugg

Unbeing dead isn't being alive.

~ E.e. Cummings

If I had my life to live over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week.

~ Charles Darwin

What a strange thing!to be alivebeneath cherry blossoms.

~ Kobayashi Issa

Do I dare Disturb the universe? In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

~ T.s. Eliot

Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries.

~ Theodore Roethke