Poetry Quotes

She wore his flowerIn her hairScent of amberSweetened the airHer dress was whiteHer feet bareHe found heavenWaiting thereShe is aliveIn his painful sigh...

~ Dinesh Kumar Biran

slow down, oh sweet tearsflowing nectar...down my lashes' tipssomedaysomeone will kiss you away,even before you can reach my lips.

~ Sanober Khan

But when you kiss me there's a spark, and I can't remember I'm only food to be consumed like an apple and not loved like a woman.

~ Phar West Nagle

I mostly hope you think I miss you and in the end you hope you'll get me, but that's fantasy, untrue as you, and bitter as the hope you left me.

~ Phar West Nagle

It's better to have loved and lost than never love at all - I doubt that sorry statement every time I fall.

~ Phar West Nagle

When true love broke my heart in half,I took the whiskey from the shelf,And told my neighbors when to laugh.I keep a dog, and bark myself.

~ Theodore Roethke

I think a lover, when broken, is given a gift not a scar, not a poem, not a rhyme (unless it fits.) I think as humans, we see a set of hues but when wounded, we see something more: deeper shades of hurt and worry, colors never seen before. Because I can’t imagine a child could see the same black as a widower, and I don’t think healthy hearts know the true meaning of blue. When children close their eyes, they see a color they call empty. But in the eyelids of the bruised, the empty black’s a crowded room.

~ Katya Polo

A Very Short Song Once, when I was young and true, Someone left me sad- Broke my brittle heart in two; And that is very bad. Love is for unlucky folk, Love is but a curse. Once there was a heart I broke; And that, I think, is worse.

~ Dorothy Parker

Watch me go. Watch me. Because you said i couldn't. Because you thought I wouldn't. Go on, cry now. Cry.

~ Kellie Elmore

It was about how men walk into a forest afraid because they know all the things that can happen. They might wake the noisy birds and cause chaos. But kids come into the trees and see the magic. They climb them and see stars that the men were too afraid to see.

~ Laura Anderson Kurk

Did you not enjoy the fragrant flowers on the trails edge,The cool, crisp drink from the glistening pools at sunset,The song birds that filled the time as you experienced all that I Am, and all that I Am not?Did the dewy raindrops glisten on the gardens giving you a different memory of familiar landscapes?Did the rainbow fill your skies and force a pause of wonder in the midst of your journey?

~ Bella Vespira

I am a butterfly poetbirthed from painflying with the freedomof my verses.

~ Susie Clevenger

Choice, and all its attendant energy, is a characteristic of youth. It is before one chooses that one feels desire and longing without fulfillment, which gives an edge to any artistic endeavor. Galway Kinnell recently said in an interview that a young poet has so many choices but an old poet must simply endure his chosen life.

~ Mary Ruefle

All Mad'He is mad as a hare, poor fellow, And should be in chains,' you say,I haven't a doubt of your statement, But who isn't mad, I pray?Why, the world is a great asylum, And the people are all insane,Gone daft with pleasure or folly, Or crazed with passion and pain.The infant who shrieks at a shadow, The child with his Santa Claus faith,The woman who worships Dame Fashion, Each man with his notions of death,The miser who hoards up his earnings, The spendthrift who wastes them too soon,The scholar grown blind in his delving, The lover who stares at the moon.The poet who thinks life a paean, The cynic who thinks it a fraud,The youth who goes seeking for pleasure, The preacher who dares talk of God,All priests with their creeds and their croaking, All doubters who dare to deny,The gay who find aught to wake laughter, The sad who find aught worth a sigh,Whoever is downcast or solemn, Whoever is gleeful and gay,Are only the dupes of delusions— We are all of us—all of us mad.

~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Wonder of time,' quoth she, 'this is my spite,That, thou being dead, the day should yet be light.'Since thou art dead, lo, here I prophesy:Sorrow on love hereafter shall attend:It shall be waited on with jealousy,Find sweet beginning, but unsavoury end,Ne'er settled equally, but high or low,That all love's pleasure shall not match his woe.'It shall be fickle, false and full of fraud,Bud and be blasted in a breathing-while;The bottom poison, and the top o'erstraw'dWith sweets that shall the truest sight beguile:The strongest body shall it make most weak,Strike the wise dumb and teach the fool to speak.'It shall be sparing and too full of riot,Teaching decrepit age to tread the measures;The staring ruffian shall it keep in quiet,Pluck down the rich, enrich the poor with treasures;It shall be raging-mad and silly-mild,Make the young old, the old become a child.'It shall suspect where is no cause of fear;It shall not fear where it should most mistrust;It shall be merciful and too severe,And most deceiving when it seems most just;Perverse it shall be where it shows most toward,Put fear to valour, courage to the coward.'It shall be cause of war and dire events,And set dissension 'twixt the son and sire;Subject and servile to all discontents,As dry combustious matter is to fire:Sith in his prime Death doth my love destroy,They that love best their loves shall not enjoy.

~ William Shakespeare

I'm Noah, and you are the ship coasting along the banks and as long as you are my valentine I will sail between your eyes..

~ Adel Abouhana

the impossibility of being humanall too humanthis breathingin and outout and inthese punksthese cowardsthese championsthese mad dogs of glorymoving this little bit of light towardusimpossibly.

~ Charles Bukowski

Through creativity, we are seamlessly connected and sustained as we pullback the veil, revealing beneath our differences and distinctive characteristics,human expression and the human experience are universal. It is the greatnessof this experience that connects us together by infinite invisible threads strewnacross the globe. This is my responsibility, passion and desire as an artist—mysoul purpose.

~ Brian Bowers

One error, in fact, of eccentricity in poetry is to seek for new human emotions to express; and in this search for novelty in the wrong place it discovers the perverse. The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.

~ T.s. Eliot

i am so crammedfull of fearsthat if you were to touch me i might eitherfly or break.

~ Sanober Khan

But now he understood why someone would write things like 'she walked in beauty like the night' and so forth. Because poetry was a barrier against raw emotions. It distilled them into bearable music, allowed one to accommodate them a little at a time.

~ Julie Anne Long

Words do not come back to me easily,so I pull out my heart and wrap itin a thin sheet of paper, let the bloodseep across in stanzas of honestyand hand it to anyone who will take itso that the still-beating heart can tell themall my secrets, all my weaknesses,because if they are not hiddenthey cannot be taken and used against me.

~ Miriam Joy

The poem is the point at which our strength gave out.

~ Richard Rosen

I think poor poetry writing skills are excused when you’re simply trying to flush out emotions.

~ Katie Kiesler

The loss of these tastes [for poetry and music] is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.

~ Charles Darwin

I don't think I've ever dared to write down what I see in the ruins of me, or tell in any detail the scars and all their secrets.

~ Ashly Lorenzana

I went to the Garden of Love, And saw what I never had seen: A Chapel was built in the midst, Where I used to play on the green. And the gates of this Chapel were shut, And 'Thou shalt not' writ over the door; So I turn'd to the Garden of Love, That so many sweet flowers bore. And I saw it was filled with graves, And tomb-stones where flowers should be: And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds, And binding with briars, my joys & de

~ William Blake

Every situation is of man's making and can only contain what man contains.

~ Milan Kundera

Many of the poets writing today are hung up on language and symbolism. If the poem does not have depth of meaning or fit a certain academic styles and standards, then it is not poetry. Poetry should relate to the man on the street who has to work for a living. Until poetry connects with the working man, it’s not going to sell; it’s not going to be of value.

~ Harley King

For if our bodies aren’t our own,And justice isn’t ours,And our love is just a sin,And voices by the peopleAre no longer for the people,What have we left to lose?

~ Phar West Nagle

All acts of kindness are lights in the war for justice.

~ Joy Harjo

Our confidence in the future restorative justice of God may even give us confidence to do justice ourselves in the present. We are called then, to stretch out the arms of our minds and hearts and to find ourselves Christ shaped, cross shaped, at the intersection of the past present and future of God’s time and our own time. This is a place of intense pain and intense joy, the sort that perhaps only music or poetry can express or embody.

~ N.t. Wright

Perhaps pondering words is also a form of seeking justice. If a monologue can invite a chorus, then perhaps it can speak for others as well.

~ Duo Duo

You'll never be able to silence the woman who was born to write.

~ Melody Lee

Just because she doesn't talk about it, doesn't mean she isn't feeling it. She hurts, but she won't wear it on her sleeve. She will never let an illness, a diagnosis, or a prediction, define her. She doesn't want sympathy, because that type of attention is not her goal. She'd rather you see the woman who smiles in the face of adversity, than be the one who begs you to see her frown.

~ Alfa H

I respond to many names.Sometimes I am different people.Sometimes I am the me that howls in the night.Sometimes I am the sickening silence.I wear moonlight in my hair and bare my teeth.

~ Jessica Bates

As a childI put my finger in the fireto becomea saint.As a teenagerevery day I would knock my head against the wall.As a young girlI went out through a window of a garretto the roofin order to jump.As a womanI had lice all over my body.They cracked when I was ironing my sweater.I waited sixty minutesto be executed.I was hungry for six years.Then I bore a child,they were carving mewithout putting me to sleep.Then a thunderbolt killed methree times and I had to rise from the dead three timeswithout anyone’s help.Now I am restingafter three resurrections.

~ Anna Swir

Thing were falling apart. We just could not slow down. We were evolving into something greater, perhaps too much for our own good. And one thing always remained as I moved on. I saved a little bit of love just in case you would ever return home.

~ Robert M. Drake

Start with your heart, and only good can follow!

~ Ocean

I'm going to Hell in a basketWeaved in from my sinsLike wickerWith little Wiccan tiesAs if I'm a witchAccused

~ Matthew Little