Poetry Quotes

A tough life needs a tough language—and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is.

~ Jeanette Winterson

I'm like the weather, never really can predict when this rain cloud's gonna burst; when it's the high or it's the low, when you might need a light jacket.Sometimes I'm the slush that sticks to the bottom of your work pants, but I can easily be the melting snowflakes clinging to your long lashes.I know that some people like:sunny and seventy-five,sunny and seventy-five,sunny and seventy-five,but you take me as I am and neverforget to pack an umbrella.

~ Naomi Shihab Nye

Anyone who has no need of anybody but himself is either a beast or a God.Aristotle

~ Bruce Wayne Sullivan

I saw my face todayAnd it looked older,Without the warmth of wisdomOr the softnessBorn of pain and waiting.The dreams were gone from my eyes,Hope lost in hollownessOn my cheeks,A finger of deathPulling at my jaws.So I did my push-upsAnd wondered if I'd ever find you,To see my faceWith friendlier eyes than mine.

~ James Kavanaugh

A man who knows how little he knows is well, a man who knows how much he knows is sick. If, when you see the symptoms, you can tell, Your cure is quick.A sound man knows that sickness makes him sick and before he catches it his cure is quick.

~ Lao Tzu

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.

~ T.s. Eliot

My love runs by like a day in June, And he makes no friends of sorrows. He'll tread his galloping rigadoon In the pathway of the morrows. He'll live his days where the sunbeams start, Nor could storm or wind uproot him. My own dear love, he is all my heart, -- And I wish somebody'd shoot him.

~ Dorothy Parker

Don't you know no one can escapethe power of creatures reaching outwith breath alone?

~ Marina Tsvetaeva

In fact she herself once blamed meKyprogeneiabecause I prayed this word:I want.

~ Sappho

Relate comic things in pompous fashion. Irregularity, in other words the unexpected, the surprising, the astonishing, are essential to and characteristic of beauty. Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony. The blend of the grotesque and the tragic are attractive to the mind, as is discord to blasé ears. Imagine a canvas for a lyrical, magical farce, for a pantomime, and translate it into a serious novel. Drown the whole thing in an abnormal, dreamy atmosphere, in the atmosphere of great days … the region of pure poetry.

~ Charles Baudelaire

For books are more than books, they are the lifeThe very heart and core of ages past,The reason why men lived and worked and died,The essence and quintessence of their lives.

~ Amy Lowell

And, even yet, I dare not let it languish,Dare not indulge in memory’s rapturous pain;Once drinking deep of that divinest anguish,How could I seek the empty world again?

~ Emily Brontë

I see your picture and in that picture I didn't see you.

~ Santosh Kalwar

And the Spring arose on the garden fair,Like the Spirit of Love felt everywhere;And each flower and herb on Earth's dark breastRose from the dreams of its wintry rest.

~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

If you are of the opinion that the contemplation of suicide is sufficient evidence of a poetic nature, do not forget that actions speak louder than words.

~ Fran Lebowitz

I thought my fireplace dead and stirred the ashes. I burned my fingers.

~ Antonio Machado

so much of the world is plunged in darkness and chaos...So ring the bells that still can ringForget your perfect offeringThere is a crack in everythingThat’s how the light gets in.

~ Leonard Cohen

Who could have foretoldthe heart grows oldfrom touching others

~ Leonard Cohen

I am obnoxious to each carping tongue/ Who says my hand a needle better fits./ A poet's pen all scorn I should thus wrong/ For such despite they cast on female wits;/ If what I do prove well, it won't advance,/ They'll say it's stolen, or else, it was by chance.

~ Anne Bradstreet

And marbled clouds go scudding byThe many-steepled London sky.

~ John Betjeman

Self love is an oceanand your heart is a vessel. Make it full,and any excess will spill overinto the lives of the peopleyou hold dear. But you must come first.

~ Beau Taplin

Fare well we call to hearth and hallThough wind may blow and rain may fallWe must away ere break of dayOver the wood and mountain tallTo Rivendell where Elves yet dwellIn glades beneath the misty fellThrough moor and waste we ride in hasteAnd wither then we cannot tellWith foes ahead behind us dreadBeneath the sky shall be our bedUntil at last our toil be spedOur journey done, our errand spedWe must away! We must away!We ride before the break of day!

~ J.r.r. Tolkien

Nothing is more natural than mutual misunderstanding; the contrary is always surprising. I believe that one never agrees on anything except by mistake, and that all harmony among human beings is the happy fruit of an error.

~ Paul Valéry

Even this late it happens:the coming of love, the coming of light.

~ Mark Strand

Everything comes down so pasteurizedeverything comes down 16 degreesthey say your amplifier is too loudturn your amplifier downare we high all alone on our kneesmemory is just hips that swinglike a clockthe past projects fantastic scenestic/toc tic/toc tic/tocfuck the clock!

~ Patti Smith

You will come away bruised.You will come away bruisedbut this will give you poetry.

~ Yrsa Daley-Ward

Fireflies in the GardenBy Robert Frost 1874–1963 Here come real stars to fill the upper skies, And here on earth come emulating flies, That though they never equal stars in size, (And they were never really stars at heart) Achieve at times a very star-like start. Only, of course, they can't sustain the part.

~ Robert Frost

He drove his mind into the abyss where poetry is written.

~ George Orwell

Rem tene, verba sequentur: grasp the subject, and the words will follow. This, I believe, is the opposite of what happens with poetry, which is more a case of verba tene, res sequenter: grasp the words, and the subject will follow.

~ Umberto Eco

And must I then, indeed, Pain, live with youall through my life?-sharing my fire, my bed,Sharing-oh, worst of all things!-the same head?-And, when I feed myself, feeding you too?

~ Edna St. Vincent Millay

It was not death, for I stood up,And all the dead lie down;It was not night, for all the bellsPut out their tongues, for noon.It was not frost, for on my fleshI felt siroccos crawl,Nor fire, for just my marble feetCould keep a chancel cool.And yet it tasted like them all;The figures I have seenSet orderly, for burial,Reminded me of mine,As if my life were shavenAnd fitted to a frame,And could not breathe without a key;And I was like midnight, some,When everything that ticked has stopped,And space stares, all around,Or grisly frosts, first autumn morns,Repeal the beating ground.But most like chaos,--stopless, cool,Without a chance or spar,--Or even a report of landTo justify despair.

~ Emily Dickinson

I lock my door upon myself, And bar them out; but who shall wall Self from myself, most loathed of all?

~ Christina Rossetti

সারাটি রাত্রি তারাটির সাথে তারাটিরই হয় কথা,আমাদের মুখ সারাটি রাত্রি মাটির বুকের 'পরে!

~ Jibanananda Das

a bruise, bluein the muscle, youimpinge upon me.As bone hugs the ache home, soI'm vexed to love you, your bodythe shape of returns, your hair a torsoof light, your heatI must have, your openingI'd eat, each momentof that soft-finned fruit,inverted fountain in which I don't see me.

~ Li-Young Lee

Isn’t it time that these most ancient sorrows of ours grew fruitful? Time that we tenderly loosed ourselves from the loved one, and, unsteadily, survived: the way the arrow, suddenly all vector, survives the string to be more than itself. For abiding is nowhere.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

ConnubialBecause with alarming accuracy she’d been identifying patterns I was unaware of—this tic, that tendency, like the way I've mastered the language of intimacy in order to conceal how I felt— I knew I was in danger of being terribly understood.

~ Stephen Dunn

But far more numerous was the herd of such,Who think too little, and who talk too much.

~ John Dryden

while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time.

~ Vladimir Nabokov

When you cried, I learned what helplessness tastes like. Because all I could do was swallow.

~ Penny Reid

A lover goes toward his beloved as enthusiastically as a schoolboy leaving his books, but when he leaves his girlfriend, he feels as miserable as the schoolboy on his way to school. (Act 2, scene 2)

~ William Shakespeare