Poetry Quotes

You may write me down in historyWith your bitter, twisted lies,You may tread me in the very dirtBut still, like dust, I'll rise.Does my sassiness upset you? Why are you beset with gloom? 'Cause I walk like I've got oil wellsPumping in my living room.Just like moons and like suns,With the certainty of tides,Just like hopes springing high,Still I'll rise.Did you want to see me broken? Bowed head and lowered eyes? Shoulders falling down like teardrops.Weakened by my soulful cries.Does my haughtiness offend you? Don't you take it awful hard'Cause I laugh like I've got gold minesDiggin' in my own back yard.You may shoot me with your words,You may cut me with your eyes,You may kill me with your hatefulness,But still, like air, I'll rise.Does my sexiness upset you? Does it come as a surpriseThat I dance like I've got diamondsAt the meeting of my thighs? Out of the huts of history's shameI riseUp from a past that's rooted in painI riseI'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.Leaving behind nights of terror and fearI riseInto a daybreak that's wondrously clearI riseBringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,I am the dream and the hope of the slave.I riseI riseI rise.

~ Maya Angelou

Fear of joy is the darkest of captivities.

~ Phil Kaye

all they want to dois tie the poem to a chair with ropeand torture a confession out of it.They begin beating it with a hoseto find out what it really means.

~ Billy Collins

But you hate poetry!Yes, but you make me want to write it.

~ Cassandra Clare

My friend, you thought you lost Him;that all your life you've been separated from Him.Filled with wonder, you've always looked outside for Him,and haven't searched within your own house.

~ Jalaluddin Rumi

Deprivation is the mother of poetry.

~ Leonard Cohen

The night has a thousand eyes,And the day but one; Yet the light of the bright world dies With the dying sun. The mind has a thousand eyes, And the heart but one: Yet the light of a whole life dies When love is done.

~ Francis William Bourdillon

But some nights, I must tell you,I go down there after everyone has fallen asleep.I swim back and forth in the echoing blackness.I sing a love song as well as I can,lost for a while in the home of the rain.

~ Billy Collins

I don't wish to be everything to everyone, but I would like to be something to someone.

~ Javan

Living is no laughing matter:You must take it seriously.So much so and to such a degreethat, for example, your hands tiedbehind your back,your back to the wallor else in a laboratoryin your white coat and safety glasses,you can die for people –even for people whose faces you’venever seen,even though you know livingis the most real, most beautifulthing.I mean, you must take living soseriouslythat even at seventy, for example, you’llplant olive trees –and not for your children, either,but because, although you fear death youdon’t believe it,because living, I mean, weighs heavier.- On Living

~ Nâzım Hikmet

For you she learned to wear a short black slipand red lipstick,how to order a glass of red wineand finish it. She learned to reach outas if to touch your arm and then nottouch it, changing the subject.she'd begin, orTo call your best friendsby their schoolboy namesand give them kisses good-bye,to look away when they say! So your confidence grows.She doesn't ask what you wantbecause she knows.Isn't that what you think?When actually she was only waitingto be stunned, and then do this,never rehearsed, but perfectly obvious:in one motion up, over, and gone,the X of her arms crossing and uncrossing,her face flashing away from you in the fabricso that you couldn't say if she wasappearing or disappearing.

~ Deborah Garrison

Our love was bornoutside the walls,in the wind,in the night,in the earth,and that's why the clay and the flower,the mud and the rootsknow your name.

~ Pablo Neruda

Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces.

~ Virginia Woolf

No one wants to read poetry. You have to make it impossible for them to put the poem down--impossible for them to stop reading it, word after word. You have to keep them from closing the book.

~ Muriel Rukeyser

My brain hums with scraps of poetry and madness.

~ Virginia Woolf

To the Virgins, To Make much of TimeGather ye rose-buds while ye may,Old Time is still a-flying;And this same flower that smiles today, Tomorrow will be dying.The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun, The higher he’s a-getting,The sooner will his race be run, And nearer he is to setting.That age is best which is the first, When youth and blood are warmer;But being spent, the worse, and worst Times still succeed the former.Then be not coy, but use your time, And while you may, go marry;For having lost but once your prime, You may for ever tarry.

~ Robert Herrick

Wild Nights – Wild Nights!Were I with theeWild Nights should beOur luxury!Futile – the winds –To a heart in port –Done with the compass –Done with the chart!Rowing in Eden –Ah, the sea!Might I moor – Tonight –In thee!

~ Emily Dickinson

The stars are forth, the moon above the topsOf the snow-shining mountains.—Beautiful!I linger yet with Nature, for the nightHath been to me a more familiar faceThan that of man; and in her starry shadeOf dim and solitary loveliness,I learn'd the language of another world.

~ George Gordon Byron

I wrote too many poems in a language I did not yet know how to speakBut I know now it doesn't matter how well I say grace if I am sitting at a table where I am offering no bread to eatSo this is my wheat fieldyou can have every acre, Lovethis is my garden songthis is my fist fightwith that bitter frosttonight I begged another stage light to become that back alley street lamp that we danced beneaththe night your warm mouth fell on my timid cheekas i sang maybe i need youoff keybut in tunemaybe i need you the way that big moon needs that open seamaybe i didn't even know i was here til i saw you holding megive me one room to come home togive me the palm of your handevery strand of my hair is a kite stringand I have been blue in the face with your skycrying a flood over Iowa so you mother will wake to Venice Lover, I smashed my glass slipper to build a stained glass window for every wall inside my chestnow my heart is a pressed flower and a tattered bibleit is the one verse you can trustso I'm putting all of my words in the collection plateI am setting the table with bread and gracemy knees are bentlike the corner of a pageI am saving your place

~ Andrea Gibson

Inebriate of Air — am I —And Debauchee of Dew —Reeling — thro endless summer days —From Inns of Molten Blue —

~ Emily Dickinson

The poet must always, in every instance, have the vibrant word... that by it's trenchancy can so wound my soul that it whimpers.... One must know and recognize not merely the direct but the secret power of the word; one must be able to give one's writing unexpected effects. It must have a hectic, anguished vehemence, so that it rushes past like a gust of air, and it must have a latent, roistering tenderness so that it creeps and steals one's mind; it must be able to ring out like a sea-shanty in a tremendous hour, in the time of the tempest, and it must be able to sigh like one who, in tearful mood, sobs in his inmost heart.

~ Knut Hamsun

TO what purpose, April, do you return again? Beauty is not enough. You can no longer quiet me with the redness Of little leaves opening stickily. I know what I know. The sun is hot on my neck as I observe The spikes of the crocus. The smell of the earth is good. It is apparent that there is no death. But what does that signify? Not only under ground are the brains of men Eaten by maggots. Life in itself Is nothing, An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs. It is not enough that yearly, down this hill, April Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

~ Edna St. Vincent Millay

I sent my Soul through the Invisible, Some letter of that After-life to spell: And by and by my Soul return'd to me, And answer'd: 'I Myself am Heav'n and Hell

~ Omar Khayyám

There is a time for reciting poems and a time for fists.

~ Roberto Bolaño

How to be a Poet (to remind myself)Make a place to sit down. Sit down. Be quiet. You must depend upon affection, reading, knowledge, skill—more of each than you have—inspiration work, growing older, patience, for patience joins time to eternity… Breathe with unconditional breath the unconditioned air. Shun electric wire. Communicate slowly. Live a three-dimensional life; stay away from screens. Stay away from anything that obscures the place it is in. There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places. Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came.

~ Wendell Berry

You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts;And when you can no longer dwell in the solitude of your heart you live in your lips, and sound is a diversion and a pastime.And in much of your talking, thinking is half murdered.

~ Kahlil Gibran

She walks in beauty, like the nightOf cloudless climes and starry skies;And all that’s best of dark and brightMeet in her aspect and her eyes:Thus mellow’d to that tender lightWhich heaven to gaudy day denies.One shade the more, one ray the less,Had half impaired the nameless graceWhich waves in every raven tress,Or softly lightens o’er her face;Where thoughts serenely sweet expressHow pure, how dear their dwelling-place.And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,The smiles that win, the tints that glow,But tell of days in goodness spent,A mind at peace with allA heart whose love is innocent!

~ George Gordon Byron

APPLY WITHINYou once told meYou wanted to findYourself in the world -And I told you toFirst apply within,To discover the worldwithin you.You once told meYou wanted to saveThe world from all its wars -And I told you toFirst save yourselfFrom the world,And all the warsYou put yourselfThrough.APPLY WITHIN by Suzy Kassem

~ Suzy Kassem

I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,I see my father strolling outunder the ochre sandstone arch, thered tiles glinting like bentplates of blood behind his head, Isee my mother with a few light books at her hipstanding at the pillar made of tiny bricks with thewrought-iron gate still open behind her, itssword-tips black in the May air,they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they areinnocent, they would never hurt anybody.I want to go up to them and say Stop,don't do it--she's the wrong woman,he's the wrong man, you are going to do thingsyou cannot imagine you would ever do,you are going to do bad things to children,you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of,you are going to want to die. I want to goup to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,her hungry pretty blank face turning to me,her pitiful beautiful untouched body,his arrogant handsome blind face turning to me,his pitiful beautiful untouched body,but I don't do it. I want to live. Itake them up like the male and femalepaper dolls and bang them togetherat the hips like chips of flint as if tostrike sparks from them, I sayDo what you are going to do, and I will tell about it

~ Sharon Olds

...you look at me like an emergency

~ Adrienne Rich

She lends her pen,to thoughts of him,that flow from it,in her solitary.For she is his poet,And he is her poetry.

~ Lang Leav

Where are you hiding my love?Each day without you will never come again.Even today you missed a sunset on the ocean,A silver shadow on yellow rocks I saved for you,A squirrel that ran across the road,A duck diving for dinner.My God! There may be nothing left to show youSave wounds and wearinessAnd hopes grown dead,And wilted flowers I picked for you a lifetime ago,Or feeble steps that cannot run to hold you,Arms too tired to offer you to a roaring wind,A face too wrinkled to feel the ocean's spray.

~ James Kavanaugh

Kerouac: You're ruining American poetry, O'Hara.O'Hara: That's more than you ever did for it, Kerouac

~ Frank O'hara

BELOVED, gaze in thine own heart, The holy tree is growing there; From joy the holy branches start, And all the trembling flowers they bear. The changing colours of its fruit Have dowered the stars with merry light; The surety of its hidden root Has planted quiet in the night; The shaking of its leafy head Has given the waves their melody, And made my lips and music wed, Murmuring a wizard song for thee. There the Loves a circle go, The flaming circle of our days, Gyring, spiring to and fro In those great ignorant leafy ways; Remembering all that shaken hair And how the wingèd sandals dart, Thine eyes grow full of tender care: Beloved, gaze in thine own heart. Gaze no more in the bitter glass The demons, with their subtle guile, Lift up before us when they pass, Or only gaze a little while; For there a fatal image grows That the stormy night receives, Roots half hidden under snows, Broken boughs and blackened leaves. For all things turn to barrenness In the dim glass the demons hold, The glass of outer weariness, Made when God slept in times of old. There, through the broken branches, go The ravens of unresting thought; Flying, crying, to and fro, Cruel claw and hungry throat, Or else they stand and sniff the wind, And shake their ragged wings; alas! Thy tender eyes grow all unkind: Gaze no more in the bitter glass.- The Two Trees

~ W.b. Yeats

God moves in mysterious waysHis wonders to performs

~ William Cowper

Wake! For the Sun, who scatter'd into flightThe Stars before him from the Field of Night,Drives Night along with them from Heav'n,and strikesThe Sultan's Turret with a Shaft of Light

~ Omar Khayyám

...But...to sing,to dream, to smile, to walk, to be alone, be free,with a voice that stirs and an eye that still can see!To cock your hat to one side, when you pleaseat a yes, a no, to fight, or- make poetry!To work without a thought of fame or fortune,on that journey, that you dream of, to the moon!Never to write a line that's not your own...

~ Edmond Rostand

In the bleak midwinter Frosty wind made moan, Earth stood hard as iron, Water like a stone; Snow had fallen, Snow on snow, Snow on snow, In the bleak midwinter, Long ago.

~ Christina Rossetti

Look, the treesare turningtheir own bodiesinto pillarsof light,are giving off the richfragrance of cinnamonand fulfillment,the long tapersof cattailsare bursting and floating away overthe blue shouldersof the ponds,and every pond,no matter what itsname is, isnameless now.Every yeareverythingI have ever learnedin my lifetimeleads back to this: the firesand the black river of losswhose other sideis salvation,whose meaningnone of us will ever know.To live in this worldyou must be ableto do three things:to love what is mortal;to hold itagainst your bones knowingyour own life depends on it;and, when the time comes to let it go,to let it go.

~ Mary Oliver

there are some poemsthat we leave behindsome that leave us behindwhile some just livesilentlyin the heartcrumble, sometimesdwindledisappeardieand are rebornwhen you smile again.

~ Sanober Khan