Poetry Quotes

Writing poetry and reading books causes brain damage.

~ Pat Conroy

One need not be a Chamber — to be Haunted — One need not be a House — The Brain has Corridors — surpassing Material Place —

~ Emily Dickinson

Times change, as do our wills, What we are - is ever changing; All the world is made of change, And forever attaining new qualities.

~ Luís De Camões

So the freshness lives onin a lemon,in the sweet-smelling house of the rind,the proportions, arcane and acerb.

~ Pablo Neruda

All those other girls are cake...I'm Crème brûlée...Tiramisu, if you will. Just a few notches above.

~ Brandi L. Bates

Dreams, books, are each a world; and books, we know,Are a substantial world, both pure and good:Round these, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood,Our pastime and our happiness will grow.

~ William Wordsworth

Sometimes, looking at the many books I have at home, I feel I shall die before I come to the end of them, yet I cannot resist the temptation of buying new books. Whenever I walk into a bookstore and find a book on one of my hobbies — for example, Old English or Old Norse poetry — I say to myself, “What a pity I can’t buy that book, for I already have a copy at home.

~ Jorge Luis Borges

So come to the pond, or the river of your imagination, or the harbor of your longing,and put your lips to the world.And live your life.

~ Mary Oliver

O stand, stand at the window As the tears scald and start;You shall love your crooked neighbour With your crooked heart.

~ W.h. Auden

the only thing required to be a woman is to identifyas one.- period, end of story.

~ Amanda Lovelace

come back so i can say yes this time do it again now that i know what to call what you didthis time i'll be ready i like it rough now and i'm done with romance i never met another man who loved me so much at first sight he had to hurt me to do it

~ Daphne Gottlieb

Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and falls again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet.

~ Virginia Woolf

Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies.And be it gash or gold it will not comeAgain in this identical disguise.

~ Gwendolyn Brooks

If you only write when you’re inspired you may be a fairly decent poet, but you’ll never be a novelist because you’re going to have to make your word count today and those words aren’t going to wait for you whether you’re inspired or not.You have to write when you’re not inspired. And you have to write the scenes that don’t inspire you. And the weird thing is that six months later, a year later, you’ll look back at them and you can’t remember which scenes you wrote when you were inspired and which scenes you just wrote because they had to be written next.The process of writing can be magical. …Mostly it’s a process of putting one word after another.

~ Neil Gaiman

Anyone who says, “Here’s my address,write me a poem,” deserves something in reply.So I’ll tell a secret instead:poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes,they are sleeping. They are the shadowsdrifting across our ceilings the moment before we wake up. What we have to dois live in a way that lets us find them.

~ Naomi Shihab Nye

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:The sun-comprehending glass,And beyond it, the deep blue air, that showsNothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

~ Philip Larkin

Ask him why there are hypocrites in the world.''Because it is hard to bear the happiness of others.''When are we happy?''When we desire nothing and realize that possession is only momentary, and so are forever playing.''What is regret?''To realize that one has spent one's life worrying about the future.''What is sorrow?''To long for the past.''What is the highest pleasure?''To hear a good story.

~ Vikram Chandra

When soul meets soul on lovers' lips.

~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

The Children's HourBetween the dark and the daylight,When the night is beginning to lower,Comes a pause in the day's occupations,That is known as the Children's Hour.I hear in the chamber above meThe patter of little feet,The sound of a door that is opened,And voices soft and sweet.From my study I see in the lamplight,Descending the broad hall stair,Grave Alice, and laughing Allegra,And Edith with golden hair.A whisper, and then a silence:Yet I know by their merry eyesThey are plotting and planning togetherTo take me by surprise.A sudden rush from the stairway,A sudden raid from the hall!By three doors left unguardedThey enter my castle wall!They climb up into my turretO'er the arms and back of my chair;If I try to escape, they surround me;They seem to be everywhere.They almost devour me with kisses,Their arms about me entwine,Till I think of the Bishop of BingenIn his Mouse-Tower on the Rhine!Do you think, o blue-eyed banditti,Because you have scaled the wall,Such an old mustache as I amIs not a match for you all!I have you fast in my fortress,And will not let you depart,But put you down into the dungeonIn the round-tower of my heart.And there will I keep you forever,Yes, forever and a day,Till the walls shall crumble to ruin,And moulder in dust away!

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!As tho’ to breathe were life!

~ Alfred Tennyson

Those ancients who in poetry presented the golden age, who sang its happy state,perhaps, in their Parnassus, dreamt this place. Here, mankind's root was innocent; and herewere every fruit and never-ending spring; these streams--the nectar of which poets sing.

~ Dante Alighieri

In my darkest night,when the moon was coveredand I roamed through wreckage,a nimbus-clouded voicedirected me:“Live in the layers,not on the litter.”Though I lack the artto decipher it,no doubt the next chapterin my book of transformationsis already written.I am not done with my changes.

~ Stanley Kunitz

Nothing like poetry when you lie awake at night. It keeps the old brain limber. It washes away the mud and sand that keeps on blocking up the bends.Like waves to make the pebbles dance on my old floors. And turn them into rubies and jacinths; or at any rate, good imitations.

~ Joyce Cary

One should write only those books from whose absence one suffers. In short: the ones you want on your own desk.

~ Marina Tsvetaeva

Everything is all right,When you’re here,When you’re right next to me,When my hand is in yours,Don’t leave me,Don’t leave me empty handed.

~ Elizabeth Brooks

I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume,For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

~ Walt Whitman

Hearts rebuilt from hope resurrect dreams killed by hate.

~ Aberjhani

For the moon never beams without bringing me dreamsOf the beautiful Annabel Lee,And the stars never rise but i feel the bright eyesOf the beautiful Annabel Lee.

~ Edgar Allan Poe

Ya no la quiero, es cierto, pero tal vez la quiero.Es tan corto el amor, y es tan largo el olvido.

~ Pablo Neruda

Twas the night before Thanksgiving. All the food's in the oven. And I'm in the bedroom performin' self lovin'.

~ Craig Ferguson

When you write about what you dream, you become a writer.When you dream about what you write, you become haunted by a curse.

~ A. Saleh

Our two souls therefore, which are one, Though I must go, endure not yet A breach, but an expansion, Like gold to aery thinness beat. If they be two, they are two so As stiff twin compasses are two ; Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show To move, but doth, if th' other do. And though it in the centre sit, Yet, when the other far doth roam, It leans, and hearkens after it, And grows erect, as that comes home. Such wilt thou be to me, who must, Like th' other foot, obliquely run ; Thy firmness makes my circle just, And makes me end where I begun.

~ John Donne

A fallen blossomreturning to the bough, I thought --But no, a butterfly.

~ Arakida Moritake

A grain of poetry suffices to season a century.

~ José Martí

Escóndeme en tus brazospor esta noche sola,mientras la lluvia rompecontra el mar y la tierrasu boca innumerable.

~ Pablo Neruda

I have been happy, though in a dream.I have been happy-and I love the theme:Dreams! in their vivid colouring of lifeAs in that fleeting, shadowy, misty strife

~ Edgar Allan Poe

Great poetry needs no interpreter other than a responsive heart.

~ Helen Keller

And medecine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love: these are what we stay alive for.

~ Tom Schulman

No man can reveal to you aught but that which already lies half asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.

~ Kahlil Gibran

I found the poems in the fields,And only wrote them down.

~ John Clare