Poetry Quotes

Falling in love was easy-when romantic attraction was combined with hungry, unsated desire, they formed a glamorous, glittering bauble as fragile as it was alluring, a bauble that could shatter as soon as it was grasped.Tenderness was a different story. It had staying power and the promise of a future.

~ Robyn Donald

A poet could kill the dead.

~ Cameron Conaway

I love my love with a b because she is peculiar.

~ Gertrude Stein

We made love outdoorsWithout a roof, I like most, Without stove, to make love, assuming the weather be fair and balmy, and the earth beneath be clean. Our souls intertwined and gushing of dew.

~ Roman Payne

My best testimonies are from the times I thought I couldn't survive.

~ Tanya R. Liverman

Across the centuries the moral systems from medival chivalry to Bruce Springsteen love anthems have worked the same basic way. They take immediate selfish interests and enmesh them within transcendent, spiritual meanings. Love becomes a holy cause, an act of self-sacrifice and selfless commitment.But texting and the utilitarian mind-set are naturally corrosive toward poetry and imagination. A coat of ironic detachment is required for anyone who hopes to withstand the brutal feedback of the marketplace. In today's world, the choice of a Prius can be a more sanctified act than the choice of an erotic partner.This does not mean that young people today are worse or shallower than young people in the past. It does mean they get less help. People once lived within a pattern of being, which educated the emotions, guided the temporary toward the permanent and linked everyday urges to higher things. The accumulated wisdom of the community steered couples as they tried to earn each other's commitment.Today there are fewer norms that guide that way. Today's technology seems to threaten the sort of recurring and stable reciprocity that is the building block of trust.

~ David Brooks

You can make a difference in another person's life and not realize it, just by giving them One Moment of your time, One Memory to recall, One Motion that tells them they are not alone! OM!

~ Deb Simpson

That night we made love the real way which we had not yet attemptedalthough married six months.Big mystery. No one knew where to put their leg and to this day I'm not surewe got it right.He seemed happy. You're like Venice he said beautifully.Early next dayI wrote a short talk (On Defloration) which he stole and had publishedin a small quarterly magazine.Overall this was a characteristic interaction between us.Or should I say ideal.Neither of us had ever seen Venice.

~ Anne Carson

I do not write to you, but of you,/because the paper that we write on/is our perishable skin.

~ Melissa Lee-Houghton

So very lovely His blood on her swollen lips His first vampireSo very lovely He would have to remember Each salacious cutHe took her slowly Bled her of secrets and screams He smiled contemplating That vampires bled just like whores.

~ Wrath James White

Every poet... finds himself born in the midst of prose. He has to struggle from the littleness and obstruction of an actual world into the freedom and infinitude of an ideal.

~ Thomas Carlyle

A garden should make you feel you've entered privileged space -- a place not just set apart but reverberant -- and it seems to me that, to achieve this, the gardener must put some kind of twist on the existing landscape, turn its prose into something nearer poetry.

~ Michael Pollan

Why are there trees I never walk under but large and melodious thoughts descend upon me?

~ Walt Whitman

I yearn to make these scars disappearAnd to forget about the past.To throw away all of my fearsAnd to be happy at last.

~ Atarah L. Poling

We must listen to poets.

~ Gaston Bachelard

The new world is as yetbehind the veil of destinyIn my eyes, howeverits dawn has been unveiled

~ Muhammad Iqbal

I write in order to comprehend, not to express myself.

~ Anna Kamieńska

You are my brother and I love you. I love you worshipping in your church, kneeling in your temple, and praying in your mosque. You and I and all are children of one religion, for the varied paths of religion are but the fingers of the loving hand of the Supreme Being, extended to all, offering completeness of spirit to all, anxious to receive all.

~ Kahlil Gibran

Much Madness is Divinest Sense, to a Discerning Eye....

~ Emily Dickinson

As she bends for a Kleenex in the dark, I am thinking of other girls: the girl I loved who fell in love with a lion--she lost her head over it--we just necked a lot; of the girl who fell in love with the tightrope, got addicted to getting high wired and nothing else was enough; all the beautiful, damaged women who have come through my life and I wonder what would have happened if I'd met them sooner, what they were like before they were so badly wounded. All this time I thought I'd been kissing, but maybe I'm always doing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, kissing dead girls in hopes that the heart will start again. Where there's breath, I've heard, there's hope.

~ Daphne Gottlieb

Higgledy piggledy, my black hen,She lays eggs for gentlemen.Gentlemen come every dayTo count what my black hen doth lay.If perchance she lays too many,They fine my hen a pretty penny;If perchance she fails to lay,The gentlemen a bonus pay.Mumbledy pumbledy, my red cow,She’s cooperating now.At first she didn’t understandThat milk production must be planned;She didn’t understand at firstShe either had to plan or burst,But now the government reportsShe’s giving pints instead of quarts.Fiddle de dee, my next-door neighbors,They are giggling at their labors.First they plant the tiny seed,Then they water, then they weed,Then they hoe and prune and lop,They they raise a record crop,Then they laugh their sides asunder,And plow the whole caboodle under.Abracadabra, thus we learnThe more you create, the less you earn.The less you earn, the more you’re given,The less you lead, the more you’re driven,The more destroyed, the more they feed,The more you pay, the more they need,The more you earn, the less you keep,And now I lay me down to sleep.I pray the Lord my soul to takeIf the tax-collector hasn’t got it before I wake.

~ Ogden Nash

There is nothinggoing on. I took nothingyou wanted. You can'thave it back.

~ Daphne Gottlieb

He feeds upon her face by day and night,And she with true kind eyes looks back on him,Fair as the moon and joyful as the light:Not wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim;Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright;Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.

~ Christina Rossetti

What happens to a dream deferred?

~ Langston Hughes

But neither money nor machines can create. They shuttle tokens of energy, but they do not transform. A civilization based on them puts people out of touch with their creative powers.

~ Lewis Hyde

Song of myselfSmile O voluptuous cool-breath'd earth! Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees! Earth of departed sunset--earth of the mountains misty-topt! Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon just tinged with blue! Earth of shine and dark mottling the tide of the river! Earth of the limpid gray of clouds brighter and clearer for my sake! Far-swooping elbow'd earth--rich apple-blossom'd earth! Smile, for your lover comes.

~ Walt Whitman

Hold your venomDo you recognise the instinctin me, fellow scorpion?

~ Kiera Woodhull

The masters of information have forgotten about poetry, where words may have a meaning quite different from what the lexicon says, where the metaphoric spark is always one jump ahead of the decoding function, where another, unforeseen reading is always possible.

~ J.m. Coetzee

A young gratuitous smile; trust and distrust;Promiscuities of bed and board and road; The one assured treasureA life, in recollection, truly possessed.

~ Robert Wells

Enjoy yourselves. And Hap: Don't let Umber near the arrows and bows; he's liable to shoot himself in the nose. Dodd grinned and snapped the reins, and the carriage rolled away. Umber sniffed. One of his lesser poems. Come, Hap.

~ P.w. Catanese

They kept me in a cage for too long because now every room I am standing in is just another cell.

~ Raegan Butcher

Poetry is the language of the soul;Poetic Prose, the language of my heart.Each line must flow as in a song,and strike a chord that rings forever.To me, words are music!

~ Lori R. Lopez

Everything is nothing.

~ Azaam Yahoo

With each kiss that we shared we experienced the meaning of love. With the passing glances of passion we surrendered our hearts to the silence of the storm of intoxication. Holding on to each other till the roots of our souls have become entwined in the eternal desire of each other. Poem: The Silence of Love

~ Anthony F. Rando

I opened my veins. Unstoppablylife spurts out with no remedy.Now I set out bowls and plates.Every bowl will be shallow.Every plate will be small.And overflowing their rims,into the black earth, to nourishthe rushes unstoppablywithout cure, gushespoetry ...

~ Marina Tsvetaeva

Wherever we go we do harm, forgivingourselves as wheels do cement for wearingeach other out. We set this houseon fire, forgetting that we live within.(from To a Meadowlark

~ For M.l. Smoker

Imagination is a very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study, but by the intellect being where and what it sees, by sharing the path, or circuits of things through forms, and so making them translucid to others.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I drink from a small spring, my thirst exceeds the ocean.

~ Adam Zagajewski

Poetry is a sort of truancy, a dream within the dream of life, a wild flower planted among our wheat.

~ Michael Oakeshott

Your friends, and your associates, and the people around you, and the environment that you live in, and the speakers around you - the speakers around you - and the communicators around you, are the poetry makers.If your mother tells you stories, she is a poetry maker.If your father says stories, he is a poetry maker.If your grandma tells you stories, she is a poetry maker.And that’s who forms our poetics.

~ Juan Felipe Herrera