Poetry Quotes

It's 8a.m. and time to restIt's 10a.m. and time to relaxIt's noon and time for reposeIt's 3p.m. and time for shut-eyeIt's 6p.m. and time for siestaIt's 9p.m. and time to slumberIt's midnight and time to snoozeIt's 4a.m. and time to hang upside down from your bedroom ceiling, screaming.

~ Francesco Marciuliano

Football is the poetry of a motion.

~ Pubudu Lasal Dissanayake

The unity in diversity lies only in your heart.

~ Cass Van Krah

We hear the saints saying: Our brother the world. We hear the revolutionaries: Dare we win?

~ Muriel Rukeyser

Expansion (both far and wide) is the order of the day

~ Sereda Aleta Dailey

A scar on the heart will heal. Let your love remain pure as if it was never cut in the first place.

~ Aline Alzime

Note the lessons a broken heart has taught you but don't ever alter the love you can give. Don't let a broken heart hinder your kind of love.

~ Aline Alzime

Things change, time changes. People change, life changes. Time changes things, life changes people.

~ Aline Alzime

Some, they didn't make it.The temptation just too strong.How can darkness cloud the mindTo what I know as wrong?

~ Kimberly Nalen

Come on up, boys-I'm dead.

~ Dylan Thomas

The world has never favored the experimental life. It despises poets, fanatics, prophets and lovers.

~ Randolph Bourne

...Feel no fear before the multitude of men, do not run in panic,but let each man bear his shield straight toward the fore-fighters,regarding his own life as hateful and holding the dark spirits of death as dear as the radiance of the sun.

~ Tyrtaeus

Love's night and a lampJudged our vows:That she would love me everAnd I should never leave her.Love's night and you, lamp,Witnessed the pact.Today the vow runs:Oaths such as these, waterwords.Tonight, lamp,Witness her lying- In other arms.

~ Meleager

Emotional pain was the price I paid on the path to becoming a woman. So excuse me if I’m not clueless like a little girl.

~ J.a. Anum

Idols of the injury,dug in behind the least understoodmotor plan information.The vile abomination temporal lobes andThe four loathsome memory walls andThe four reasoning, arithmetic beastsare found for all behind pain and planes.Portrayed as a house,Go in, function, cause blindness fromThe house's hearing spirit, judgment andThe court's four bronze woes andThe functioning brain lobe wings,Go in, hearing and perception,I dig under door fronts, pain and plans.

~ Bill Ectric

You cannot deny the struggle, the struggle denies you.

~ Lori Jenessa Nelson

Life without strife is a rose without thorns.Alive as one is thriving today towards tomorrow,Nowhere is the past but simply a school of memory.Dreams, wishes, goals then becomes a wheel of “wills,”Spirit of a unique being on each soul breathing.Care to ponder some matter or another?Awareness sliding towards discovery gliding…Peace, contentment, fulfillment,Enwrapped like a mirage enchantment.Soaring freely, excitingly, happily home-love-bound!Over precious moments in a breathing of a soul,Flowing high emotions, feelings, hearts in bliss.All around any season of one's existence, one asks: “Anyone out there? A heart of a soul that didn’t harden? A touch of a soul that didn’t hurt? A life of a soul that didn't love?”Sands of time, rough, warm, indefinite, simply spreading, transforming, mounting.Oasis of a soul from a desert journey, flourishing with endless beauty and security.Utmost bliss, fulfillment and contentment, under covers a struggling, hopeful soul,Laboring service, living justice, loving peace and tranquillity passed on to humanity!�

~ Angelica Hopes

And when you are foolish enough to identify yourself as a poet, your interlocutors will often ask: A PUBLISHED Poet? And when you tell them that you are, indeed, a published poet, they seem at least vaguely impressed. Why is that? Its not like they or anybody they know reads poetry journals. And yet there is something deeply right, I think, about this knee-jerk appeal to publicity. It's as if to say: Everybody can write a poem, but has your poetry, the distillation of your innermost being, been found authentic and intelligible by others? Can it circulate among persons, make of its readership, however small, a People in that sense? This accounts for the otherwise bafflingly persistent association of Poetry and fame - baffling since no poets are famous among the general population. To demand proof of fame is to demand proof that your songs made it back intact from the dream in the stable to the social world of the fire, that your song is at once utterly specific to you and exemplary for others.

~ Ben Lerner

I define influence simply as literary love, tempered by defense. The defenses vary from poet to poet. But the overwhelming presence of love is vital to understanding how great literature works.

~ Harold Bloom

Mistrust of good success hath done this deed.O hateful error, Melancholy's child,Why dost thou show to the apt thoughts of menThe things that are not? O Error, soon concieved,Thou never com'st unto a happy birth,But kill'st the mother that engendered thee.

~ William Shakespeare

She thought men were saviors......And she looked for more in them than what they were...Only to rescue herself from those she wished would rescue her...And isn't that the most tragic lie...The lie where we tell what we wished were true and believe it...?She had an artificial memory, a prosthesis to a past that never was...She was like a party that no one ever went to...Like a cure...without a disease...And isn't that the greatest fear of all...to be ready with the answersto questions that no one asks anymore?

~ Merrit Malloy

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ME AND YOUWhen I hold a rose,I see the soft, velvety petalsand smile, becausetucked betweenthose precious petalsis a special gift -the one of a fragrance,pure and sweet.When you hold a rose,you see the thornsalong the stem,and you frownbecause those thornscan bring you painand cause you to bleed.I see the gift.You see the tragedy.More and moreI fear that one of these dayssomeone will hand me a roseand all I will seeare thorns.Talk about tragedy.

~ Lisa Schroeder

The dead” we say   as if speakingof “the people” whogave up on making historysimply to get throughSomething dense and null   groanwithout echo   undergroundand owl-voiced I cry Whoare these dead people theselovers who if ever didlisten no longer answer: We :

~ Adrienne Rich

Here is a greedy man who keeps to himselfThe beautiful pears ripe in his garden.

~ Bashō Matsuo

T.S. Eliot said to me 'There’s only one way a poet can develop his actual writing – apart from self-criticism & continual practice. And that is by reading other poetry aloud – and it doesn’t matter whether he understands it or not (i.e. even if it’s in another language.) What matters above all, is educating the ear.' What matters, is to connect your own voice with an infinite range of verbal cadences & sequences – and only endless actual experience of your ear can store all that in your nervous system. The rest can be left to your life & your character.

~ Ted Hughes

It's not pain. It's raw material.

~ Jo Bell

too much explanation can take the pleasure out of any poetry.(Preface, vii)

~ Harold G. Henderson

If one proceeds philosophically before proceeding poetically, and this is central to the philosopher, pleasure is crushed, But if one begins by having pleasure, it is like knowing how to swim: one never forgets it [Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life, trans Elizabeth Lowe & Earl Fitz, Foreword by Hélène Cixous trans Verena Conley, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989].

~ Hélène Cixous

Our fate liesin the handsof the things we loveand sometimesthe things we loveare the thingsthat lead usto the fatal destructionof ourselves.

~ Robert M. Drake

She was the death of me,the beginning and the end.And I never understood her,for how could someoneSo beautiful be the causeof so much destructionafter all.

~ Robert M. Drake

By(e) pen, I've tried my hand at poetry; only to see how boring it is to me. That is, unless I get a chance to destroy each and every piece while doing it as I please.

~ Criss Jami

Sleepless nightsSpent looking at the ceilingSearching in those etched patternsFor some sort of adhesiveTo glue together the broken piecesOf a soul crushedBy the weight of the fact thatLife is profoundly sad.

~ Justin Wetch

Fate is the cruelest of masters, takingLife when it pleases or at random, handingRigged decks to whom it pleases, cheatingAll alike and none the wiser, takingEverything away from those with nothing.

~ Justin Wetch

Knowing that it is the earth we tread, we learn to tread carefully, lest it be rent open. Realizing that it is the heavens that hang above us, we come to fear the echoing thunderbolt. The world demands that we battle with others for the sake of our own reputation, and so we undergo the sufferings bred of illusion. While we live in this world with its daily business, forced to walk the tightrope of profit and loss, true love is an empty thing, and the wealth before our eyes mere dust.

~ Sōseki Natsume

I've been mistaken to assume that in this little village in the spring, so like a dream or a poem, life is a matter only of the singing birds, the falling blossoms, and the bubbling springs. The real world has crossed mountains and seas and is bearing down even on this isolated village, whose inhabitants have doubtless lived here in peace down the long stretch of years ever since they fled as defeated warriors from the great clan wars of the twelfth century. Perhaps a millionth part of the blood that will dye the wide Manchurian plains will gush from this young man's arteries, or seethe forth at the point of the long sword that hangs at his waist. Yet here this young man sits, beside an artist for whom the sole value of human life lies in dreaming. If I listen carefully, I can even hear the beating of his heart, so close are we. And perhaps even now, within that beat reverberates the beating of the great tide that is sweeping across the hundreds of miles of that far battlefield. Fate has for a brief and unexpected moment brought us together in this room, but beyond that it speaks no more.

~ Sōseki Natsume

Space is entirely poetic.

~ Mary-Louise Parker

I am fascinated by the dailies, what is daily.

~ Juan Ramón Jiménez

Seulement la terre qui obéit,sait bien qu'elle tourne en rond,tandis que nous vers l'infininous précipitons.Translation:But the obedient Earth well knowsthat she moves round and round,whereas we hurtle downtoward infinity.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

But glad to have sat underThunder and rain with you,And grateful tooFor sunlight on the garden.

~ Louis Macneice

...dark furrow lines grid the snow, punctuated by orange abacus beads of pumpkins - now the crows own the field...

~ John Geddes