Poetry Quotes

I do strongly feel that among the greatest pieces of luck for high achievement is ordeal. Certain great artists can make out without it, Titian and others, but mostly you need ordeal. My idea is this: the artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business: Beethoven's deafness, Goya's deafness, Milton's blindness, that kind of thing.

~ John Berryman

Life is unbearable pain.

~ Santosh Kalwar

August is dust here. Droughtstuns the road,but juice gathers in the berries.

~ Robert Hass

Where is my oasis? Too far fromhere for me to crawl with thesedead legs, refusing to co-operateHands and fingers clawing uselesslythrough the grains of sand...

~ Kiera Woodhull

Think neither fear nor courage saves us.Unnatural vices are fathered by our heroism. Virtues are forced upon us by our impudent crimes. These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.

~ T.s. Eliot

The moon people do not eat by swallowing food but by smelling it. Their money is poetry - actual poems, written out on pieces of paper whose value is determined by the worth of the poem itself.

~ Paul Auster

Sun-struck, stuck in mid tropic strut, it sometimes standsas if considering how to cool avian plastic,dive into the mown lagoon of lawn;how take flight on dayglow flap-doodle wings, no matterif it is ball-bald going nowhere fast.

~ Joyce Thomas

It is not what they built. It is what they knocked down.It is not the houses. It is the spaces between the houses.It is not the streets that exist. It is the streets that no longer exist.

~ James Fenton

We are spirits clad in veils.

~ Christopher Pearse Cranch

I was compared to Charles Bukowski yesterday. It was the best and worst compliment I've ever gotten.

~ Rosa Sophia

One writes a poem when one is so taken up by an emotional concept that one is unable to remain silent.

~ Stephen Dobyns

Each and every words count.Each and every thoughts count.

~ Santosh Kalwar

With slouch and swing around the ringWe trod the Fools’ Parade!We did not care: we knew we wereThe Devils’ Own Brigade:And shaven head and feet of leadMake a merry masquerade.

~ Oscar Wilde

I am republicI am maoistI am activistand I am thisand I am thatbut why?Why can't, I be

~ Santosh Kalwar

Living is the opposite of poetry. Poetry is the recollection of living, or, more often than not, the lament of having not lived. Or worse yet, merely the contemplation of living. My advice to you, Ms. Harper, is this: Live. And keep living. And never stop to look back to write about what you have lived and observed and overcome, lest you turn into a pillar of salt. This desert life is already full of such monoliths.

~ P.s. Baber

And when I stand in the receiving linelike Jackie Kennedywithout the pillbox hat,if Jackie were fat and had taken enough Klonopinto still an ox,and you whisperI think of youdon't finish withbecause I've been going to Weight Watcherson Tuesdays and wonder

~ Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno

The answer to our existence lies in existence itself.

~ Santosh Kalwar

He was weary of himself, of cold ideas and brain dreams. Life a poem? Not when you went about forever poetizing about your own life instead of living it. How innocuous it all was, and empty, empty, empty! This chasing after yourself, craftily observing your own tracks--in a circle, of course.This sham diving into the stream of life while all the time you sat angling after yourself, fishing yourself up in one curious disguise or another! If he could only be overwhelmed by something--life, love, passion--so that he could no longer shape it into poems, but had to let it shape him!

~ Jens Peter Jacobsen

Flow gently, sweet Afton,amang thy green braes,Flow gently, I'll sing theea song in thy praise;My Mary's asleepby thy murmuring stream,Flow gently, sweet Afton,disturb not her dream.Thou stock dove whose echoresounds thro' the glen,Ye wild whistly blackbirdsin yon thorny den,Thou green crested lapwingthy screaming forbear,I charge you, disturb notmy slumbering fair.How lofty, sweet Afton,thy neighboring hills,Far mark'd with the coursesof clear winding rills;There daily I wanderas noon rises high,My flocks and my Mary'ssweet cot in my eye.How pleasant thy banks and green valleys below, Where, wild in the woodlands,the primroses blow;There oft, as mild eveningweeps over the lea,The sweet-scented birk shadesmy Mary and me.Thy crystal stream, Afton,how lovely it glides,And winds by the cot wheremy Mary resides;How wanton thy watersher snowy feet lave,As, gathering sweet flowerets,she stems thy clear wave.Flow gently, sweet Afton,amang thy green braes,Flow gently, sweet river,the theme of my lays; My Mary's asleepby thy murmuring stream,Flow gently, sweet Afton,disturb not her dreams.

~ Robert Burns

If rape or arson, poison or the knifeHas wove no pleasing patterns in the stuffOf this drab canvas we accept as life -It is because we are not bold enough!

~ Charles Baudelaire

And so I pray I am today as honestwith myself, with life all around me and below and above me,with all who I encounter.

~ Jimmy Santiago Baca

I am she who lifts the mountainsWhen she goes to hunt,Who wears mamba for a headbandAnd a lion for a belt.Beware!I swallow elephants wholeAnd pick my teeth with rhinoceros horns,I drink up rivers to get at the hippos.Let them hear my words!Nhamo is comingAnd her hunger is great.I am she who tosses treesInstead of spears.The ostrich is my pillowAnd the elephant is my footstool!I am NhamoWho makes the river my highwayAnd sends crocodiles scurrying into the reeds!

~ Nancy Farmer

Don't patronize the chain bookstores. Every time I see some author scheduled to read and sign his books at a chain bookstore, I feel like telling him he's stabbing the independent bookstores in the back.

~ Lawrence Ferlinghetti

At the round earth's imagined corners blowYour trumpets, angels, and arise, ariseFrom death, you numberless infinitiesOf souls, and to your scattered bodies go ;All whom the flood did, and fire shall o'erthrow,All whom war, dea[r]th, age, agues, tyrannies,Despair, law, chance hath slain, and you, whose eyesShall behold God, and never taste death's woe.But let them sleep, Lord, and me mourn a space ;For, if above all these my sins abound,'Tis late to ask abundance of Thy grace,When we are there. Here on this lowly ground,Teach me how to repent, for that's as goodAs if Thou hadst seal'd my pardon with Thy blood.

~ John Donne

Everything has its poetry. 94

~ Joseph Joubert

This dream the world is having about itselfincludes a trace on the plains of the Oregon trail,a groove in the grass my father showed us allone day while meadowlarks were trying to tellsomething better about to happen.

~ William Stafford

Talent is a faucet. When it is on, one must write. Inspiration is a farce that poets have invented to give themselves importance.

~ Jean Anouilh

If I'm still wistful about On the Road, I look on the rest of the Kerouac oeuvre--the poems, the poems!--in horror. Read Satori in Paris lately? But if I had never read Jack Kerouac's horrendous poems, I never would have had the guts to write horrendous poems myself. I never would have signed up for Mrs. Safford's poetry class the spring of junior year, which led me to poetry readings, which introduced me to bad red wine, and after that it's all just one big blurry condemned path to journalism and San Francisco.

~ Sarah Vowell

If words allow themselves to be handled, it is with the help of infinite carefulness. One has to welcome them, listen to the, before asking any service of them. Words are living things closely involved with human life.

~ Paul Nougé

Landscape is my religion....God in a green legend, I lean over the poolIn a testament of leaves. I dangle my twinkling mood Before me in a cool cave roofed with branchesAnd floored with a skin of water.

~ Norman Maccaig

the poet I saw once...but whose words have long beenin my mind, windows of invincible candles...

~ Nathalie Handal

It is ferocious, life, but it must eat . . .

~ Lucia Perillo

My art unkind, my energy all gone blind;The limbs uneven, the face shallower,Because those who I see are not seen,Those who see me are rude indeed. So blow, blow dear winter, just blow along me!

~ Santosh Kalwar

it isn't that we're alone or not alonewhose voice do you want mine? yours?

~ Ikkyu

Freedom is the dream you dreamWhile putting thought in chains again --

~ Giacomo Leopardi

There’s no money in poetry, but there’s no poetry in money, either

~ Robert Graves

Each arrow you shoot offcarries its own targetinto the decidedlysecrettangle

~ Paul Celan

Amé, fuí amado, el sol acarició mi faz.¡Vida, nada me debes! ¡Vida, estamos en paz!I loved, I was loved, the sun stroked my face.Life, you owe me nothing! Life, we are at peace!

~ Amado Nervo

rush of pine scent (once upon a time),the unlicensed convictionthere ought to be another wayof sayingthis.

~ Paul Celan

Mute in that golden silence hung with green,Come down from heaven and bring me in your eyesRemembrance of all beauty that has been,And stillness from the pools of Paradise.

~ Siegfried Sassoon