Poetry Quotes

Who you are contributes to your poetry in a number of important ways, but you shouldn't identify with your poems so closely that when they are cut, you're the one that bleeds.

~ Dorianne Laux

This cruel age has deflected me,like a river from this course.Strayed from its familiar shores,my changeling life has flowedinto a sister channel.How many spectacles I've missed:the curtain rising without me,and falling too. How many friendsI never had the chance to meet.

~ Anna Akhmatova

This fire that we call Loving is too strong for human minds. But just right for human souls.

~ Aberjhani

Sometimes I think,I need a spare heart to feel all the things I feel.

~ Sanober Khan

Like poetry, fashion does not state anything. It merely suggests

~ Karl Lagerfeld

And to 'scape stormy days, I choose an everlasting night.

~ John Donne

Wordplay hides a key to reality that the dictionary tries in vain to lock inside every free word.

~ Julio Cortázar

one day, when tenderness has become the single rule of the morning,/ I will wake in your arms. perhaps your skin will be overly gorgeous./ and the light will include the impossible understanding of love.

~ José Luís Peixoto

I watched the spinning stars, grateful, sad and proud, as only a man who has outlived his destiny and realizes he might yet forge himself another, can be.

~ Roger Zelazny

John Keats / John Keats / John / Please put your scarf on.

~ J.d. Salinger

Not everything can be felt and not everything will be ever understood.

~ Santosh Kalwar

So the nymphs they spoke,we kissed and laid.By noontime’s hourour love was made.Like braided chains of crocus stems,we lay entwined, I laid with them.Our breath, one glassy, tideless sea,our bodies draping wearily,we slept, I slept so lucidly,with hopes to stay this memory.

~ Roman Payne

Songwriting and poetry are so commonly birthed from underdogs because one can make even the ugliest situations admirable, or more beautiful than the beautiful situations - they are the most graceful media in which the lines of society are distorted.

~ Criss Jami

...but it is good to be several floors up in the dead of night wondering whether you are any good or not and the only decision you can make is that you did it...

~ Frank O'hara

Poetry is a rich, full-bodied whistle, cracked ice crunching in pails, the night that numbs the leaf, the duel of two nightingales, the sweet pea that has run wild, Creation's tears in shoulder blades.

~ Boris Pasternak

I wanted the past to go away, I wantedto leave it, like another country; I wantedmy life to close, and openlike a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the songwhere it fallsdown over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery;I wantedto hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know,whoever I was, I wasalivefor a little while.

~ Mary Oliver

Real haiku is the soul of poetry. Anything that is not actually present in one's heart is not haiku. The moon glows, flowers bloom, insects cry, water flows. There is no place we cannot find flowers or think of the moon. This is the essence of haiku. Go beyond the restrictions of your era, forget about purpose or meaning, separate yourself from historical limitations—there you will find the essence of true art, religion, and science.

~ Santōka Taneda

A precious, mouldering pleasure ’t is To meet an antique book, In just the dress his century wore; A privilege, I think.

~ Emily Dickinson

Marriage I thinkFor womenIs the best of opiates.It kills the thoughtsThat think about the thoughts,It is the best of opiates.So said Maria.But too long in solitude she'd dwelt,And too long her thoughts had feltTheir strength. So when the man drew near,Out popped her thoughts and covered him with fear.Poor Maria! Better that she had kept her thoughts on a chain,For now she's alone again and all in pain;She sighs for the man that went and the thoughts that stayTo trouble her dreams by night and her dreams by day.

~ Stevie Smith

The true poem rests between the words.

~ Vanna Bonta

Art is long, and Time is fleeting.

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

This weekin live currentevents: your eyes.All power can bedangerous:Director alternating,you, socket to me.Plugged in and the gridis humming,this electricity,molecule-deep desire:particular friction, a chargestrong enough to stopa heartor start itagain; volt, re-volt--I shudder, I stutter, I startto life. I've got my ionyou, copper-top,so watch how youconduct yourself.Here's today'snewsflash: a battery of rollingblackouts in California, sudden,like lightning kisses:sudden, whitehotdarkness and you'rehere, fumbling forthat small switchwith an urgent surgestrong enough to killlesser machines.Static makes hair raise,makes things cling,makes things rise likea gathering stormcharging outsideour darkened houseand here I am:tempest, pouring outmouthfullsof tsunami on the ground,I've got that rain-soaked kite,that drenched key.You know what it's for,circuit-breaker, you knowhow to kiss until it's hertz.

~ Daphne Gottlieb

True and false fears let us refrain, Let us love nobly, and live, and add again Years and years unto years, till we attain To write threescore: this is the second of our reign.

~ John Donne

One! two! and through and throughThe vorpal blade went snickersnack!He left it dead, and with its headHe went galumphing back.

~ Lewis Carroll

I like the posture, but not the yoga. I like the inebriated morning, but not the opium. I like the flower but not the garden, the moment but not the dream. Quiet, my love. Be still. I am sleeping.

~ Roman Payne

I want my own will, and I wantsimply to be with my will,as it goes toward action.And in the silent, sometimes hardly moving times,when something is coming near,I want to be with those who knowsecret things or else alone...I want to unfold.I don’t want to be folded anywhere,because where I am folded,there I am a lie.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Love's mysteries in souls do grow,But yet the body is his book.

~ John Donne

A black cat among roses,phlox, lilac-misted under a quarter moon,the sweet smells of heliotrope and night-scented stock. The garden is very still.It is dazed with moonlight,contented with perfume...

~ Amy Lowell

The inmost spirit of poetry, in other words, is at bottom, in every recorded case, the voice of pain – and the physical body, so to speak, of poetry, is the treatment by which the poet tries to reconcile that pain with the world.

~ Ted Hughes

You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket.

~ John Adams

My silence knot is tied up in my hair; as if to keep my love out of my eyes. I cannot speak to one for whom i care. A hatpin serves as part of my disguise. In the play, my role is baticeer; a word which here means person who trains bats. The audience may feel a prick of fear, as if sharp pins are hidden in thier hats. My co-star lives on what we call a brae. His solitude might not be just an act. A piece of mail fails to arrive one day. This poignant melodrama's based on fact.The curtain falls just as the knot unties; the silence is broken by the one who dies.

~ Lemony Snicket

you will never catch up.Walk around feeling like a leafknow you could tumble at any second.Then decide what to do with your time.--The Art of Disappearing

~ Naomi Shihab Nye

But I don't shut up and I don't die.I liveand fight, maddeningthose who rule my country.For if I liveI fight,and if I fightI contribute to the dawn.

~ Otto René Castillo

We aren't suggesting that mental instability or unhappiness makes one a better poet, or a poet at all; and contrary to the romantic notion of the artist suffering for his or her work, we think these writers achieved brilliance in spite of their suffering, not because of it.

~ Dorianne Laux

I had been hungry all the years-My noon had come, to dine-I, trembling, drew the table nearAnd touched the curious wine. 'Twas this on tables I had seenWhen turning, hungry, lone,I looked in windows, for the wealthI could not hope to own. I did not know the ample bread,'Twas so unlike the crumbThe birds and I had often sharedIn Nature's diningroom. The plenty hurt me, 'twas so new,--Myself felt ill and odd,As berry of a mountain bushTransplanted to the road. Nor was I hungry; so I foundThat hunger was a wayOf persons outside windows,The entering takes away.

~ Emily Dickinson

Every poem is a coat of arms. It must be deciphered. How much blood, how many tears in exchange for these axes, these muzzles, these unicorns, these torches, these towers, these martlets, these seedlings of stars and these fields of blue!

~ Jean Cocteau

This is the city, and I am one of the citizens/Whatever interests the rest interests me

~ Walt Whitman

One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.

~ Voltaire

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;Conspiring with him how to load and blessWith fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shellsWith a sweet kernel; to set budding more,And still more, later flowers for the bees,Until they think warm days will never cease,For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

~ John Keats

You can never rouse Harris. There is no poetry about Harris- no wild yearning for the unattainable. Harris never weeps, he knows not why. If Harris's eyes fill with tears, you can bet it is because Harris has been eating raw onions, or has put too much Worcester over his chop.If you were to stand at night by the sea-shore with Harris, and say:Hark! do you not hear? Is it but the mermaids singing deep below the waving waters; or sad spirits, chanting dirges for white corpses held by seaweed? Harris would take you by the arm, and say:I know what it is, old man; you've got a chill. Now you come along with me. I know a place round the corner here, where you can get a drop of the finest Scotch whisky you ever tasted- put you right in less than no time.Harris always does know a place round the corner where you can get something brilliant in the drinking line. I believe that if you met Harris up in Paradise (supposing such a thing likely), he would immediately greet you with:So glad you've come, old fellow; I've found a nice place round the corner here, where you can get some really first-class nectar.

~ Jerome K. Jerome