Poetry Quotes

At times you have to fight really hard to remember it. Fight within your mind’s dungeons and bring it out alive before it could have been killed and buried forever by the demons living deep down inside your mind’s dungeons.

~ Avijeet Das

Keep your whole being on the thing you are turning into words. The minute you flinch, and take your mind off this thing, and begin to look at the words and worry about them... Then your worry goes into them and they set about killing each other. So you keep going as long as you can, then look back and see what you have written. After a bit of practice and after telling yourself you are going to use any old word that comes into your head so long as it seems right, you will surprise yourself. You will read back through what you have written and you will get a shock. You will have captured a spirit, a creature.

~ Ted Hughes

The movementOf the body isWhere poetryBegins

~ Clint Catalyst

PLEASE TELL ME YOU KNOW OF SYLVIA PLATHConventions bleed my soulsqueeze me oldwear me grey like a headstone in transit.It’s tradition and form—fear of the unknown—driving me deadin tight spaces darkly.I cry aloudbut who can hearwhen I stand alonein the middle of an art show….

~ Chila Woychik

Dream!Forge yourself and riseOut of your mind and into others.Men, be women.Fish, be flies.Girls, take beards.Sons, be your mothers.The future of the world now liesIn coral wombs behind our eyes.

~ Clive Barker

There are, in places, fallen angelswho in their iniquity and desolationlinger like a stranger on a foggy night,sustained by the misdeeds of city-dwellersand spurred on by bitter hatredfor their bright kin moving past them.

~ Miriam Joy

Some of the greatest poetry is revealing to the reader the beauty in something that was so simple you had taken it for granted.

~ Neil Degrasse Tyson

Must I wonder if your thoughts are of me? If you are missing me, wanting me, creating heart beats and poet-less words for me? [ i do…]

~ N'zuri Za Austin

THE KEY TO A WONDERFUL LIFEThe key to a wonderful lifeIs to never stop wandering into wonder.Because to live a predictable life,Only fills a person with strife,And such a person will always be wondering:'What a limitless life could be lived beyond the lines?'Such is a question a curious spirit would never sit and ponder.So always pursue new ventures in your life,And be willing to open doors to different light;This is the only way to keep it magical and always filled with wonder.Days will feel shorter, but your happiness will grow stronger --Because living a life without curiosity and adventure,Is a stale life where days only feel longer andLonger.Poetry by Suzy Kassem

~ Suzy Kassem

I wonder how many women are held up in their bed waiting to be sung to, served wine to, read poetry to, kissed slowly with.

~ Brandon Villasenor

Veins of ivy scale stones,find footholds butthe caretaker cuts earth short, peels creepers from Cotswold rock and props the deadhead to head so they won’ttopple like drunkson their moss-soft shadows.

~ Jalina Mhyana

Thus spake brave Horatius, the captain of the gate. To all men upon this Earth, death cometh soon or late. And what better way to die, than facing fearful odds, for the ashes of ones' fathers, and the temples of ones' G/Ds? For the tender mother, who dandled him to rest. And for the wife, who nurses his baby at her breast. And for the holy maidens, who feed the eternal flame. To save them from false sextus, that wrought the deed of shame. Lay down the bridge, Sir Consul, with all the speed ye may. I, with two more at either side, shall hold the foe in play. In Yon straight path a thousand may well be stop by three. Now who will stand on either hand and hold the bridge with me?

~ Thomas Babington Macaulay

Dying only means moving into a nicer house. We have only gone into the next room.We still are what we have always been.We aren’t far away. We are only on the other side of the pathway.

~ Kerry Okines

As joy dwindles with the yearsI wistfully recallWhen the christmas treeLooked ten feet tallAnd the presents under itSeemed endless And more Than mere wrapping paper.

~ Justin Wetch

When the holly’s in the redAnd the pine is in the green,When the mornings all are frosty,In a brilliant silver sheenThen I love to go a’ walkingRambling here and there, quite slow,Plucking greenery and berries;Wishing for a Christmas snow

~ Rachel Heffington

This gesture is one of the motifs of modernity's turn against the principle of imitating nature, that is to say, imitating predefined morphological expectations. It is still capable of perceiving message-totalities and autonomous thing-signals when no morphologically intact figures are left - indeed, precisely then. The sense for perfection withdraws from the forms of nature - probably because nature itself is in the process of losing its ontological authority. The popularization of photography also increasingly devalues the standard views of things. As the first edition of the visible, nature comes into discredit. It can no longer assert its authority as the sender of binding messages - for reasons that ultimately come from its disenchantment through being scientifically explored and technically outdone. After this shift, 'being perfect' takes on an altered meaning: it means having something to say that is more meaningful than the chatter of conventional totalities. Now the torsos and their ilk have their turn: the hour of those forms that do not remind us of anything has come. Fragments, cripples and hybrids formulate something that cannot be conveyed by the common whole forms and happy integrities; intensity beats standard perfection.

~ Peter Sloterdijk

It is true that a mathematician who is not somewhat of a poet, will never be a perfect mathematician.

~ Karl Weierstrass

They think thee mad? I'll show thou mad, my lord.

~ Phar West Nagle

I would rather go mad, gone down the dark road to Mexico, heroin dripping in my veins, eyes and ears full of marijuana, eating the god Peyote on the floor of a mudhut on the border or laying in a hotel room over the body of some suffering man or woman; rather jar my body down the road, crying by a diner in the Western sun; rather crawl on my naked belly over the tincans of Cincinnati; rather drag a rotten railroad tie to a Golgotha in the Rockies; rather, crowned with thorns in Galveston, nailed hand and foot in Los Angeles, raised up to die in Denver, pierced in the side in Chicago, perished and tombed in New Orleans and resurrected in 1958 somewhere on Garret Mountain, come down roaring in a blaze of hot cars and garbage, streetcorner Evangel in front of City I-Tall, surrounded by statues of agonized lions, with a mouthful of shit, and the hair rising on my scalp, screaming and dancing in praise of Eternity annihilating the sidewalk, annihilating reality, screaming and dancing against the orchestra in the destructible ballroom of the world, blood streaming from my belly and shoulders flooding the city with its hideous ecstasy, rolling over the pavements and highways by the bayoux and forests and derricks leaving my flesh and my bones hanging on the trees.

~ Allen Ginsberg

They never say this,but it’s true,it was raining the first time I saw you.

~ Mandy Nachampassack-Maloney

All I ask the haters--and I, too, am one--is that they strive to perfect their contempt, even consider bringing it to bear on poems, where it will be deepened, not dispelled, and where, by creating a place for possibility and present absences (like unheard melodies), it might come to resemble love.

~ Ben Lerner

Most of us carry at least a weak sense of a correlation between poetry and human possibility that cannot be realized by poems. The poet, by his very claim to be a maker of poems, is therefore both an embarrassment and accusation.

~ Ben Lerner

But, in the end, a kiss is just a kiss; I have no time for love, or seasoned lips.

~ Phar West Nagle

Demonise one of them and the sympathisers will melt away.

~ Philippe Blenkiron

Among the fluctuation of the river currents, an abyss as green as the sea, its extension and profundity as immense as the ocean opened before me: the eyes of a beautiful girl. I succumbed into that abyss instantly, like a man who falls from the highest cliff into the ocean …… and I drowned.

~ Mya Robarts

It is not what a poem says with its mouth, it’s what a poem does with its eyes.

~ Mary Ruefle

I am running and singing and when it’s raining I’m the only one left on the open street, smiling with my eyes fixed on the sky because it’s cleaning me. I’m the one on the other side of the party, hearing laughter and the emptying of bottles while I peacefully make my way to the river, a lonely road, following the smell of the ocean. I’m the one waking up at 4am to witness the sunrise, where the sky touches the sea, and I hold my elbows, grasping tight to whatever I’ve made of myself.

~ Charlotte Eriksson

...who would have known the dark eyes staring into mine would become our children's eyes...?

~ John Geddes

My love, can't you seehow much i love theeFor i through your eyesshall seeOur great lovefor all eternity

~ Amal Sagheer

A black boy brought Wilson's gin and he sipped it very slowly because he had nothing else to do except to return to his hot and squalid room and read a novel - or a poem. Wilson liked poetry, but he absorbed it secretly, like a drug. The Golden Treasury accompanied him wherever he went, but it was taken at night in small doses - a finger of Longfellow, Macaulay, Mangan: 'Go on to tell how, with genius wasted, Betrayed in friendship, befooled in love...' His taste was romantic. For public exhibition he has his Wallace. He wanted passionately to be indistinguishable on the surface from other men: he wore his moustache like a club tie - it was his highest common factor, but his eyes betrayed him - brown dog's eyes, a setter's eyes, pointing mournfully towards Bond Street.

~ Graham Greene

Pressure knocks at my doorA clock ticks and demands its dueThe lava burns from the floorBut not in a game like it used to.So little time to figure it all outSo many distractions to prevent successI’m in a dark forest with no path or routeBut this internal fire knows no rest.

~ Justin Wetch

Sara talked to a placeless woman about the end of sadness. It's coming said the woman. Sara pointed out that she was on fire and the woman mostly said screams after that. Sara knew they would spend the rest of their lives together.

~ Sara June Woods

Even through the smoke,you are still the most beautiful thingin this city and I, well, I am stillthe last thing you’d save in a fire.

~ Danabelle Gutierrez

Fire is calling my name. It is whispering words of encouragement, sweet things. It wants out, for me to fan the heat until it’s a vortex that can’t and won’t be stopped.

~ Alexandra Bracken

Fire will run like poetry through your blood.

~ Rachel Neumeier

I blind myself to see the bright fireplace radiating skin piercing warmth. The yellow illuminating a lonely light that unites with the red to create an ambiance so comforting. They burn and hush, they rise and fall, they breath and devour together in synch; creating a bond, a bond thicker than blood, forged by love and held together by an insurmountable friendship. You cannot separate them, you'll burn. She is red, he is yellow and they are fire

~ Evy Michaels

I think you should ignore Sara Teasdale (she’s a bit of a moper, to be honest.). Take Christina Rossetti’s advice and be fire.

~ Mary Jane Hathaway

i want to love you with simple,like a bare singular matchstick.onestroketo ignitewith no words spokenby the heated flames of the timber of crimsoned scarlet fire.as it crackleswith closeseparationentangled with the intimacy of firefly asheschoosing to enchantingly dance around in abundantjoy.hazily whistling into the glorified heavensmaking the ebony soot dissolve into the cool crisp air.yearning to be the explosion whoburnsthrough your bonesas you visualize red ecstasy of aprovoked kindle.

~ Zuky Rose Leigh

Fuck I hate fucksWho think they’re so fucking greatThey know everything about fucking,When they’re just fucking fucks fucking!And no one changes the fucking worldWhen they keep fucking to another fuck’s fuck.

~ Initially No

On the edge of a laughing teacupDid Kubla Kat decreeThe the corn fritter festooned with medalsShall make the brownies freeAnd so the walls turned to waterTo let our sorrows drownAs the chairs burned themselves for warmthSo they need not face the clownThen the spoons burst into songAnd all the forks they understoodAs I stared at my talking clawsBecasue this catnip is just that good

~ Francesco Marciuliano