Poetry Quotes

She's burning and out of control and everything I love about fire.

~ Melody Lee

Registration Day' by Gavin Gunhold (1899— ) Toronto Review of Poetry, 1947On registration day at taxidermy schoolI distinctly saw the eyes of the stuffed mooseMove.

~ Gordon Korman

If I wouldn’t have spent so much time shooting spit wads at my English teacher, I’d know how to punctuate. Good thing I normally write poetry.

~ Stanley Victor Paskavich

A newborn is murderous/but can't do anything about it.

~ Kathleen Ossip

HYMN OF THE DIVINE DANDELION I am born as the sun, But then turn into the moon, As my blonde hairs turn Grayish-white and fallTo the ground, Only to be buried again, Then to be born again, Into a thousand suns And a thousand Moons. Suzy Kassem

~ Suzy Kassem

The panther that has stalked yousince you were a childis old now. No longer wild,and tired of guarding the treasureyou yourself left behind - blind and deaf, she will give it all to youif you just let her go.

~ Pat Schneider

Love alters all. Unblood my instinct, love.

~ Theodore Roethke

Complexity is not an aesthetic criterion. It is a quality associated only with division and organization of labor.

~ Christopher Caudwell

This is the hardest part— That boy is not made of fists. That boy learned how to braid my hair. These things do not un-truth themselveswhen the first door slams.I did not stop loving himall the months I was holding my breath.

~ Brenna Twohy

you remind me of someone i knew. looked just like you but kind.

~ Taylor Rhodes

when you allow that man. to walk through your children. plant his feet. in their veins. hold their voices. necks. bodies. inside his violence. you are no longer a mother. when you give him the key to that door. because you need to be loved by someone. you have seasoned them for the wolf. burned their childhood into a fantasy. it’s going to take a third of their lives. all the courage. from their cells to their hair. to learn the alchemetic formula that turns that kind of betrayal. a demothering. soft. liveable. – before you get that key made

~ Nayyirah Waheed

We look at your eyes. The eyes carry the wounds. The eyes know damage. Damaged people recognize other damaged people, and we let you in. We are kindred. - Broken Places

~ Rachel Thompson

I look up upon a sparsely starred abyssHaving wandered to this street cornerIn the middle of the nightWatching the cars and people go byWonderingIf this deep, black nothingnessIs the sum total of being human.

~ Justin Wetch

Under a night’s skyFilled with a hundred billion starsIs it so crazy to believeOur paths were destined to cross?

~ Justin Wetch

Yo me salgo desnudo a la calle,maduro de versos perdidos.I step naked into the streetripe with lost poems.

~ Federico García Lorca

A radiant full moon of silver hangs in the black sky, between the veils of misty clouds.

~ Moonshine Noire

In the darkness and the snow, the street is emptyand it is just the night, the ice and me.

~ Miriam Joy

from the prose poem The Universe Thrums on regardless in my book SPAN.We are almost nothing in the night. Reduced to warm blobs and the sound of breathing. There is comfort in that.

~ Jay Woodman

A night of exhilaration, of boredom and terror, in which the merest of sounds took on other forms - grew large in the expanse of darkness. After several hours the sheep gradually stopped calling to each other from accross the river banks, and a brittle quiet descended. I desperately wanted to walk down to the water's edge. To see the black river in the moonlight. But a mixture of reason and fear kept me locked along the safe paths high above.

~ Richard Skelton

A friend is a companion for the journey,never a means to our own.What we take we take together,the joy we reap, we have sown.

~ Tom Althouse

Poetry is a disease vector. Like malaria.

~ Katie Douglas

he pays his respect by smiling at youwhen others are looking how he calls you a bitchright after is truly amazing

~ Ymatruz

You see demons in the eyes of the world, and the world sees bottomless pit in yours.

~ Neal Shusterman

The neurologist had dismissed her case after a single visit, handing out an easy nostrum by telling her father that if she continued to write poetry, she would be all right.

~ Flora Rheta Schreiber

The spiritual life to me has always meant just one thing: emotion. Emotion is the poetry of life.

~ Marty Rubin

The intensest feeling of the beauty of a cloud lighted by the setting sun, is no hindrance to my knowing that the cloud is a vapour of water, subject to all the laws of vapours in a state of suspension; and I am just as likely to allow for, and act on, these physical laws whenever there is occasion to do so, as if I had been incapable of perceiving any distinction between beauty and ugliness.

~ John Stuart Mill

Haiku does not express emotion from the inside out by displaying the mind of a character. Haiku builds the emotional thrust, makes the artistic statement from the outside in, from the physical world to the mind of the reader.

~ Harley King

The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.

~ T.s. Eliot

If you know something to be trueSay it onceThose who can, will receive itOnly the foolish believe they can justify a truth to a court of foolsHonor the truthFor even before a just judgeA lie can be proven to be credibleOn the other handTruth will never require a woman or man's justificationIt can stand aloneBe torn and ridiculed and even stillIt will remain True

~ Gregory Warner

Good is not always good.

~ Dejan Stojanovic

clouds very high looknot one word helped them get up there

~ Ikkyu

born born everything is always bornthinking about it try not to

~ Ikkyu

How much does he lack himself who must have many things?

~ Sen No Rikyū

My thatched hut; the whole sky Is its roof The mountains are its hedge, And it has the sea for a garden. I’m inside with nothing at all, Not even a bag, And yet there are visitors who say “It’s hidden behind a bamboo door” — Muso Soseki

~ Musō Soseki

Don’t read books!Don’t chant poems!When you read books your eyeballs wither awayleaving the bare sockets.When you chant poems your heart leaks out slowlywith each word.People say reading books is enjoyable.People say chanting poems is fun.But if your lips constantly make a soundlike an insect chirping in autumn,you will only turn into a haggard old man.And even if you don’t turn into a haggard old man,it’s annoying for others to have to hear you.It’s so much betterto close your eyes, sit in your study,lower the curtains, sweep the floor,burn incense.It’s beautiful to listen to the wind,listen to the rain,take a walk when you feel energetic,and when you’re tired go to sleep.

~ Yang Wanli

He had been searching for it his entire life. He had devoted himself to poetry to find it. Now, in the middle of his life, he found it. It was in the face of the love of his life, his daughter. She who had never blushed before, now blushed. And in that blushing, he knew, was the existence of God. That was the day her father learned what God was. God was pure beauty, God was his daughter’s face when she blushed.

~ Roman Payne

Jason Mashak’s SALTY AS A LIP is grounded in a voice patiently bridging the “steeples and ‘scrapers” of an inquisitive mind. The poems are at once syllogistic, hard-edged, satirical, reflective, and finally as playful as love notes. The true joy of this book is that we are deliciously engaged in a pantomime of pleasure which the language and imagery generously evoke.

~ James Ragan

Absence of problems   does not lead to happiness.     Dealing with them does.

~ J. Benson

You may be ableto fly to heaven with my love.But for real, my love is onlya cheap wine.Seriously,Only God’s love is the precious wine.And She evengives it to everyone.For free!

~ Subhan Zein

Nor do we merely feel these essences for one short hour no, even as these trees that whisper round a temple become soon dear as the temples self, so does the moon, the passion posey, glories infinite, Haunt us till they become a cheering light unto our souls and bound to us so fast, that wheather there be shine, or gloom o'er cast, They always must be with us, or we die.

~ John Keats