Poetry Quotes

I wouldn’t want to be faster or greener than now if you were with me O you were the best of all my days!

~ Frank O'hara

Air goes in and outof my nose, throat, lungs, blood, heartbrain - and so I am

~ Matthew Quick

The press of my foot to the earth springs a hundred affections,They scorn the best I can do to relate them.

~ Walt Whitman

Equally, the surrealists consider words as witnesses of life acting in a direct way in human affairs. To use words properly it was necessary to treat them with respect, for they were the intermediaries between oneself and the rest of creation. To abuse them was immediately to set oneself adrift from true being. Words need to be coaxed to reveal a little of their true nature, so as to close the breach that exists between the writer and the universe. The world is not something alien against which man is in conflict. Rather man and cosmos exist in reciprocal motion. We are not cast adrift in an alien or meaningless environment. The universe is intimate with us and, as Breton insisted, it is a cryptogram to be deciphered.

~ Michael Richardson

High FlightOh! I have slipped the surly bonds of EarthAnd danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirthof sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred thingsYou have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swungHigh in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flungMy eager craft through footless halls of air....Up, up the long, delirious, burning blueI’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace.Where never lark, or even eagle flew —And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trodThe high untrespassed sanctity of space,- Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

~ John Gillespie Magee Jr.

In a fieldI am the absenceof field.This isalways the case.Wherever I amI am what is missing.

~ Mark Strand

The winds, the sea, and the moving tides are what they are. If there is wonder and beauty and majesty in them, science will discover these qualities... If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.

~ Rachel Carson

whatever you dobe gentle with yourself.you don’t just livein this worldor your homeor your skin.you also livein someone’s eyes.

~ Sanober Khan

Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse - and ThouBeside me singing in the Wilderness -And Wilderness is Paradise enow.

~ Omar Khayyám

Look deeper through the telescopeand do not be afraid when the starscollide towards the darkness,because sometimes the most beautifulthings begin in chaos.

~ Robert M. Drake

True Wit is Nature to advantage dress'dWhat oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd;Something whose truth convinced at sight we find,That gives us back the image of our mind.As shades more sweetly recommend the light,So modest plainness sets off sprightly wit.

~ Alexander Pope

You are that one breath. that puts all the remaining breaths. back into my body.

~ Sanober Khan

Loneliness clarifies. Here silence standsLike heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken, Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken, Luminously-peopled air ascends; And past the poppies bluish neutral distance Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence: Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.

~ Philip Larkin

All the rest is silenceOn the other side of the wall;And the silence ripeness,And the ripeness all.

~ W.h. Auden

One impulse from a vernal wood May teach you more of man, Of moral evil and of good, Than all the sages can.

~ William Wordsworth

Here is a story that’s stranger than strange. Before we begin you may want to arrange:a blanket, a cushion, a comfortable seat,and maybe some cocoa and something to eat.I’ll warn you, of course, before we commence, my story is eerie and full of suspense, brimming with danger and narrow escapes, and creatures of many remarkable shapes.Dragons and ogres and gorgons and more, and creatures you’ve not even heard of before. And faraway places? There’s plenty of those! (And menacing villains to tingle your toes.)So ready your mettle and steady your heart. It’s time for my story’s mysterious start...

~ Robert Paul Weston

Clear, unscalable, aheadRise the Mountains of Instead,From whose cold, cascading streamsNone may drink except in dreams.

~ W.h. Auden

Silver hidden in the gold,Young man hidden in the old,Laughing lord with weeping eyes,Bring king and ring before sunrise! -Hilarion, The Great and Terrible Quest

~ Margaret Lovett

How weightlesswords are when nothing will do.

~ Philip Levine

There’s gold, and it’s haunting and haunting; It’s luring me on as of old; Yet it isn’t the gold that I’m wanting So much as just finding the gold. It’s the great, big, broad land ’way up yonder, It’s the forests where silence has lease; It’s the beauty that thrills me with wonder, It’s the stillness that fills me with peace.

~ Robert W. Service

I am—yet what I am none cares or knows; My friends forsake me like a memory lost: I am the self-consumer of my woes— They rise and vanish in oblivious host, Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes And yet I am, and live—like vapours tossed Into the nothingness of scorn and noise, Into the living sea of waking dreams, Where there is neither sense of life or joys, But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems; Even the dearest that I loved the best Are strange—nay, rather, stranger than the rest.

~ John Clare

The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,White as a knuckle and terribly upset.It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quietWith the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.

~ Sylvia Plath

In visions of the night, like dropping rain, Descend the many memories of pain

~ Aeschylus

look, you know i don't wanna come on ungrateful, but that warren report, you know as well as me, just didn't make it. You know, like they might as well have asked some banana salesman from des moines, who was up in toronto on the big day, if he saw anyone around looking suspicious/...

~ Bob Dylan

I have been here before, But when or how I cannot tell: I know the grass beyond the door, The sweet keen smell, The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.

~ Dante Gabriel Rossetti

I do think that poetry is important though, if you don’t strive at it, if you don’t fill it full of stars and falseness.

~ Charles Bukowski

Welcome, thou kind deceiver!Thou best of thieves: who, with an easy key,Dost open life, and, unperceived by us,Even steal us from ourselves.

~ John Dryden

Fascists always attack minorities,Which is an irony,'Cos fascists are a minority.

~ Harry Whitewolf

here’s a toast to Alan Turingborn in harsher, darker timeswho thought outside the containerand loved outside the linesand so the code-breaker was brokenand we’re sorryyes now the s-word has been spokenthe official conscience woken– very carefully scripted but at least it’s not encrypted –and the story does suggesta part 2 to the Turing Test:1. can machines behave like humans?2. can we?

~ Matt Harvey

In a world gushing blood day and night, you never stop mopping up pain.

~ Aberjhani

Otter! Otter! Otter!Don’t lead cows to slaughter!I love you, and I knowI should’ve told you soon-aBut you didn’t buy the dolphin-safe tuna!

~ T.j. Klune

A Note Life is the only way to get covered in leaves, catch your breath on the sand, rise on wings; to be a dog, or stroke its warm fur; to tell pain from everything it's not; to squeeze inside events, dawdle in views, to seek the least of all possible mistakes. An extraordinary chance to remember for a moment a conversation held with the lamp switched off; and if only once to stumble upon a stone, end up soaked in one downpour or another, mislay your keys in the grass; and to follow a spark on the wind with your eyes; and to keep on not knowing something important.

~ Wisława Szymborska

Women Are Not RosesWomen have no beginningonly continualflows.Though rivers flowwomen are notrivers.Women are notrosesthey are not oceansor stars.i would like to tellher this buti think shealready knows.

~ Ana Castillo

The Garden En robe de parade. - SamainLike a skein of loose silk blown against a wallShe walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens,And she is dying piece-mealof a sort of emotional anaemia.And round about there is a rabbleOf the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor.They shall inherit the earth.In her is the end of breeding.Her boredom is exquisite and excessive.She would like some one to speak to her,And is almost afraid that I will commit that indiscretion.

~ Ezra Pound

A book,a book fullof human touches,of shirts,a bookwithout loneliness, with menand tools,a bookis victory.

~ Pablo Neruda

hate blows a bubble of despair intohugeness world system universe and bang-fear buries a tomorrow under woeand up comes yesterday most green and young

~ E.e. Cummings

I wrote poetry from the time I could write. That was the only way I could begin to express who I was but the poems didn't make sense to my teachers. They didn't rhyme. They were about the wind sounds, the planets' motions, never about who I was or how I felt. I didn't think I felt anything. I was this mind more than a body or a heart. My mind photographing the stars, hearing the wind.

~ Francesca Lia Block

Reclaiming the sacred in our lives naturally brings us close once more to the wellsprings of poetry.

~ Robert Bly

I sit in my treeI sing like the birdsMy beak is my penMy songs are my poems.

~ David Almond

I don't love her anymoreSoWhy should I walkNightsBy the tavernWhere I drankEvery nightThinking of her?

~ Orhan Veli Kanık