Poetry Quotes

What Do the Trees Know?What do the trees know? To bend when all the wild winds blow. Roots are deep and time is slow. All we grasp we must let go.What do the trees know? Buds can weather ice and snow. Dark gives way to sunlight's glow. Strength and stillness help us grow.

~ Joyce Sidman

Isn’t it time that, loving, we freed ourselves from the beloved, and, trembling, endured:as the arrow endures the bow, so as to be, in its flight, something more than itself?

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Isn't it time that, in love, we freed ourselves from the loved one and, trembling, endured:as the arrow endures the string, collecting itselfto be more than itself as it shoots?

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

We were fair game but we have kept out of the cesspool. We are strong. We are the good ones. Do not discover us for we lie together all in green like pond weeds. Hold me, my young dear, hold me.

~ Anne Sexton

Almighty Freedom! give my venturous songThe force, the charm that to thy voice belong;Tis thine to shape my course, to light my way,To nerve my country with the patriot lay,To teach all men where all their interest lies,How rulers may be just and nations wise:Strong in thy strength I bend no suppliant knee,Invoke no miracle, no Muse but thee.

~ Joel Barlow

And this is what being an artist means, being a poet? To sacrifice yourself for your art, sacrifice your heart for your art, because it’s only through something broken that something beautiful can grow.

~ Charlotte Eriksson

But the walls of my resolvemortared with stubbornnesshave been breached by circumstancesI cannot handle alone.

~ Susie Clevenger

Creating means living.

~ Dejan Stojanovic

Just because we have birds inside is, we don't have to be cages. -from Instant Recognition between Strangers

~ Dean Young

Just because we have birds inside is, we don't have to be cages.

~ Dean Young

One moment now may give us moreThan fifty years of reason,Our minds shall drink at every poreThe spirit of the season.

~ William Wordsworth

To greet each day ossified,Like fossil remains forgotten beneath the feet of something more lively.

~ Taylor Patton

If I die today, will you remember me tomorrow?The love I'm leaving behind, will you care to borrow? From a snake-shed-skin or from the sky unknownIn all living and the dead I'll dwell to groan

~ Munia Khan

The tender spring upon thy tempting lipShows thee unripe; yet mayst thou well be tasted:Make use of time, let not advantage slip;Beauty within itself should not be wasted:Fair flowers that are not gather'd in their primeRot and consume themselves in little time.

~ William Shakespeare

Then since we mortal lovers are,Ask not how long our love may last;But while it does, let us take careEach minute be with pleasure passed:Were it not madness to denyTo live because we're sure to die?

~ George Etherege

To-day I shall be strong,No more shall yield to wrong,Shall squander life no more;Days lost, I know not how,I shall retrieve them now;Now I shall keep the vowI never kept before.

~ A.e. Housman

Was it worth while to lay— with infinite exertion—a roof I can't live under? —All those blueprints, closings of gaps,measurings, calculations? A life I didn't choose chose me: even my tools are the wrong ones for what I have to do. I'm naked, ignorant, a naked man fleeing across the roofs who could with a shade of difference be sitting in the lamplight against the cream wallpaper reading—not with indifference—about a naked man fleeing across the roofs.

~ Adrienne Rich

A poem a day keeps the doctor away.

~ Jill Telford

Astray from a deep sleep chronic as I write by phonics, like insomnia I will always live the onyx night for revealing, and, upon it, still I'll steal the bright light of day right away just to keep building at speeds hypersonic.

~ Criss Jami

And so I've written everything down, too afraid of my demons and what they may say, the doubt that eats at me from the inside. Too afraid that I'll forget and it'll all be a madwoman's dream.

~ Nadège Richards

I have a lot of work to do today; I need to slaughter memory, Turn my living soul to stone Then teach myself to live again.

~ Anna Akhmatova

I am a complicated person with a simple life.

~ Charlotte Eriksson

life is other, always there,further off, beyond you andbeyond me, always on the horizon,life which unlives us and makes us strangers,that invents our face and wears it away

~ Octavio Paz

better the crime,the suicides of lovers, the incest committedby brother and sister like two mirrorsin love with their likeness, better to eatthe poisoned bread, adultery on a bedof ashes, ferocious love, the poisonousvines of delirium, the sodomite who wearsa gob of spit for a rose in his lapel,better to be stoned in the plaza than to turnthe mill that squeezes out the juice of life,that turns eternity into empty hours,minutes into prisons, and time intocopper coins and abstract shit

~ Octavio Paz

Oh I must pass nothing byWithout loving it much,The raindrop try with my lips,The grass with my touch;For how can I be sureI shall see againThe world on the first of MayShining after the rain?

~ Sara Teasdale

This is what I think aboutwhen I shovel compostinto a wheelbarrow,and when I fill the long flower boxes,then press into rowsthe limp roots of red impatiens—the instant hand of Deathalways ready to burst forthfrom the sleeve of his voluminous cloak.Then the soil is full of marvels,bits of leaf like flakes off a fresco,red-brown pine needles, a beetle quickto burrow back under the loam.Then the wheelbarrow is a wilder blue,the clouds a brighter white,and all I hear is the rasp of the steel edgeagainst a round stone,the small plants singingwith lifted faces, and the clickof the sundialas one hour sweeps into the next.

~ Billy Collins

THE SILENT PEOPLESome people are so rude,Living their lives with no concern for others,Or possibly just intent on pissing other people off-Annoying everyone around them.The silent people-Want to kill them-And drive forks into their skulls-Create weapons of extreme torture-And scream from the top of their lungs-SHUT UP.But words are not spoken-And attention is not given.Though annoyance is apparent,The annoying keep on living.

~ Giorge Leedy

I don’t existmetal pressed to pagesspilling blood, inkin vein each thought ragesSunlight shootingthrough a forest of pinesblack top windingand yellow dotted linesI am not hereonly a deep aching,a lightning flashand a tree trunk breakingSheets once alive covered in a deep redmark the presentbut I am not yet deadNothing is hereonly the rain and mistfresh air and soilI do not need to exist.

~ Abby Musgrove

There’s plenty of room for strangeness, mystery, originality, wildness, etc. in poems that also invite the reader into the human and alive center about which the poem circles.

~ Thomas Lux

We live longerbut less preciselyand in shorter sentences.

~ Wisława Szymborska

The way we are living,timorous or bold,will have been our life.

~ Seamus Heaney

All that really matters isto feel alive, if only for a single moment –to feel in Intense Sensationthat our existence is not an endless repetitionof sleeping, eating, drinking, and dressing.

~ Pietros Maneos

there are so many dayswhen living stops and pulls up and sitsand waits like a train on the rails.

~ Charles Bukowski

It’s not that we have to leave this life one day, it's how many things we have to leave all at once: holding hands, hotel rooms, wine, summertime, drunkenness, and the physics of falling leaves, clothing, myrrh, perfumed hair, flirting friends, two strangers' glance; the reflection of the moon, with words like, 'Soon' ... 'do you want me?' ... '...to lie enlaced' ... 'and sleep entwined' thinking ahead, with thoughts behind...?' Ô, Why!Why can’t we leave this life slowly?

~ Roman Payne

Let me live my final days whole.Let my memory remain that I might know love's face.Life don't unwrap me to be fed to scavengers.I want to escape into light - not exist in darkness.

~ Susie Clevenger

Find mebeneath your tongue,but not with other lipsnor by another tongueFind melet your yearning run wild as thirst seeks wateras silence seeks the soundFind meand I will be on my way...

~ Efrat Cybulkiewicz

I will walk by myself and cure myself in the sunshine and the wind.

~ Charles Reznikoff

Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, wishes. Who looks inside, finds infinite wisdom.

~ Sereda Aleta Dailey

Whenever a time arises where clarity is desired, it is always wise to reflect on the sage within.

~ Sereda Aleta Dailey

Years have passed, I suppose. I'm not really counting them anymore. But I think of this thing often: Perhaps there is a Golden Age someplace, a Renaissance for me sometime, a special time somewhere, somewhere but a ticket, a visa, a diary-page away. I don't know where or when. Who does? Where are all the rains of yesterday?In the invisible city?Inside me?It is cold and quiet outside and the horizon is infinity. There is no sense of movement.There is no moon, and the stars are very bright, like broken diamonds, all.

~ Roger Zelazny