Poetry Quotes

Be there a picnic for the devil,an orgy for the satyr,and a wedding for the bride.

~ Roman Payne

Las lágrimas que no se lloranesperan en pequeños lagos?O serán ríos invisiblesque corren hacia la tristeza?

~ Pablo Neruda

July 4th fireworks exhale over the Hudson sadly.It is beautiful that they have to disappear.It's like the time you said I love you madly.That was an hour ago. It's been a fervent year.

~ Frederick Seidel

Spilling a Secret What its size, will have varying consequences. It’s not possible to predict what will happen if you open the gunnysack, let the cat escape. A liberated feline might purr on your lap, or it might scratch your eyes out. You can’t tell until you loosen the knot. Do you chance losing a friendship, if that friend’s well-being will only be preserved by betraying sworn-to silence trust? Once the seam is ripped, can it be mended again? And if that proves impossible, will you be okay when it all falls to pieces?

~ Ellen Hopkins

We don't read and write poetry because it's cute.

~ Tom Schulman

...they come to us, these restless dead,Shrouds woven from the words of men,With trumpets sounding overhead(The walls of hope have grown so thinAnd all our vaunted innocenceHas withered in this endless frost)That promise little recompenseFor all we risk, for all we've lost...

~ Mira Grant

So much dependsupona blue carsplattered with mudspeeding down the road.

~ Sharon Creech

Love WasLove Will BeBut Most of All,Love is.Life Cannot Be Without ItIt is found in the WombIn The WoodsIn The Stars.To Be or Not to BeTo Love, or not to LoveThey Are Equal.My Soul Whispers Into the Spaces.Yes.

~ Cindy Martinusen Coloma

Life is a poem most people never read.

~ Laurence Overmire

some see things as they are: others as they are” (p.82) ~CXCI

~ Manav Sachdeva Maasoom

Crystal ball and candle light, I want your dance tonight. Show me the power of love as we stand together in the middle of the night.

~ Santosh Kalwar

We may kill each other someday.

~ Santosh Kalwar

Try to be thoughtful, don't make the poor man say it;see how human he is,he has children of his own,it is your job to ask:And now he can never not nod.And now he can never say no.And now he can never not say.

~ Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno

When there's a moon the shadows in the house grow larger;invisible hands draw back the curtains,a pallid finger writes forgotten words on dustof the piano...

~ Yiannis Ritsos

Again I resume the longlesson: how small a thingcan be pleasing, how littlein this hard world it takesto satisfy the mindand bring it to its rest.

~ Wendell Berry

Without thinking, I knelt in the grass, like someone meaning to pray. When I tried to stand again, I couldn't move,my legs were utterly rigid. Does grief change you like that?Through the birches, I could see the pond.The sun was cutting small white holes in the water.I got up finally; I walked down to the pond. I stood there, brushing the grass from my skirt, watching myself,like a girl after her first loverturning slowly at the bathroom mirror, naked, looking for a sign.But nakedness in women is always a pose.I was not transfigured. I would never be free.

~ Louise Glück

beauty’ is related not to ‘loveliness’ but to a state in which reality plays a part.

~ William Carlos Williams

More or Less Love Poems #11:No babeWe'd neverSwing together butthe syncopationwould be something wild

~ Diane Di Prima

Freud thought that a psychosis was a waking dream, and that poets were daydreamers too, but I wonder if the reverse is not as often true, and that madness is a fiction lived in like a rented house

~ William H. Gass

Always our wars have been our confessions of weakness

~ Muriel Rukeyser

Pensive they sit, and roll their languid eyes.

~ John Keats

Poetry is an intimate act. It's about bringing forth something that's inside you--whether it is a memory, a philosophical idea, a deep love for another person or for the world, or an apprehension of the spiritual. It's about making something, in language, which can be transmitted to others--not as information, or polemic, but as irreducible art.

~ Dorianne Laux

The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

After the leaves have fallen, we returnTo a plain sense of things. It is as ifWe had come to an end of the imagination,Inanimate in an inert savoir.

~ Wallace Stevens

Stars in the night,' he said. 'Something something something something, some delight

~ Philippa Gregory

A pear should come to the table popped with juice,Ripened in warmth and served in warmth. On termsLike these, autumn beguiles the fatalist.

~ Wallace Stevens

I began composing the next poem, the one that was to be written next. Not the last poem of those I had read, but the poem written in the head of someone who may never have existed but who had certainly written another poem nonetheless, and just never had the chance to commit it to ink and the page.

~ Steve Erickson

When someone offers you lines like that, he must be Mephistopheles and you must be Faust. You know you shouldn't succumb to such language, but you succumb.

~ William Logan

How far away the stars seem, and how farIs our first kiss, and ah, how old my heart!

~ W.b. Yeats

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bedAnd sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.(I think I made you up inside my head.)

~ Sylvia Plath

Once in a while i am struckall over again... by just how blue the sky appears .. on wind-played autumn mornings, blue enoughto bruise a heart.

~ Sanober Khan

At the edge of madness you howl diamonds and pearls.

~ Aberjhani

I think here I will leave you. It has come to seemthere is no perfect ending.Indeed, there are infinite endings.Or perhaps, once one begins,there are only endings.

~ Louise Glück

Xs and OsLove is a gameof tic-tac-toe,constantly waiting,for the next x or o.

~ Lang Leav

I don’t need your praiseto survive. I was here first, before you were here, beforeyou ever planted a garden.And I’ll be here when only the sun and moonare left, and the sea, and the wide field.I will constitute the field.

~ Louise Glück

To see the Summer SkyIs Poetry, though never in a Book it lie—True Poems flee—

~ Emily Dickinson

What is this life if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare.No time to stand beneath the boughsAnd stare as long as sheep or cows...

~ W.h. Davies

I shivered in thosesolitudeswhen I heardthe voiceofthe saltin the desert.

~ Pablo Neruda

I sleep with thee, and wake with thee,And yet thou are not there;I fill my arms with thoughts of thee,And press the common air.

~ John Clare

Your politics are so far right,They're wrong.

~ Harry Whitewolf