Remember BarbaraIt rained all day on Brest that dayAnd you walked smilingFlushed enraptured streaming-wetIn the rainRemember BarbaraIt rained all day on Brest that dayAnd I ran into you in Siam StreetYou were smilingAnd I smiled tooRemember BarbaraYou whom I didn't knowYou who didn't know meRememberRemember that day stillDon't forgetA man was taking cover on a porchAnd he cried your nameBarbaraAnd you ran to him in the rainStreaming-wet enraptured flushedAnd you threw yourself in his armsRemember that BarbaraAnd don't be mad if I speak familiarlyI speak familiarly to everyone I loveEven if I've seen them only onceI speak familiarly to all who are in loveEven if I don't know themRemember BarbaraDon't forgetThat good and happy rainOn your happy faceOn that happy townThat rain upon the seaUpon the arsenalUpon the Ushant boatOh BarbaraWhat shitstupidity the warNow what's become of youUnder this iron rainOf fire and steel and bloodAnd he who held you in his armsAmorouslyIs he dead and gone or still so much aliveOh BarbaraIt's rained all day on Brest todayAs it was raining beforeBut it isn't the same anymoreAnd everything is wreckedIt's a rain of mourning terrible and desolateNor is it still a stormOf iron and steel and bloodBut simply cloudsThat die like dogsDogs that disappearIn the downpour drowning BrestAnd float away to rotA long way offA long long way from BrestOf which there's nothing left.

~ Jacques Prévert

Jacques Prévert Barbara English Jacques Poetry Prevert

no poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it.

~ W.h. Auden

W.h. Auden Poetry Poets

I will go to campus alone dressed in antique silk slips and beat-up cowboy boots and gypsy beads, and I will study poetry. I will sit on the edge of the fountain in the plaza and write.

~ Francesca Lia Block

Francesca Lia Block Berkeley Poetry Writing

A poem is a meteor.

~ Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens Poem Poetry Poets Wallace Stevens

IMPROVIDENCEThe other lives I might have ledAll now might as well beDead. Survived by no one.Barren, without issue of any sort:This withered bud, failedIn art and love. With no time leftTo change my course. But time enoughfor infinite remorse.

~ John Tottenham

John Tottenham Improvidence Poetry

Poets, like fighters, both reap the benefits of roadwork.

~ Cameron Conaway

Cameron Conaway Fighting Poetry Training Writing

When words lose their meaning, physical force takes over.

~ W.h. Auden

W.h. Auden Poetry Writing

…be awake to the Life that is loving you andsing your prayer, laugh your prayer, dance your prayer, runand weep and sweat your prayer,sleep your prayer, eat your prayer, paint, sculpt, hammer, and read your prayer, sweep, dig, rake, drive and hoe your prayer,garden and farm and build and clean your prayer,wash, iron, vacuum, sew, embroider and pickle your prayer,compute, touch, bend and fold but never deleteor mutilate your prayer.Learn and play your prayer, work and rest your prayer,fast and feast your prayer, argue, talk, whisper, listen and shout your prayer,groan and moan and spit and sneeze your prayer,swim and hunt and cook your prayer,digest and become your prayer,release and recover your prayer,breathe your prayer, be your prayer

~ Alla Renée Bozarth

Alla Renée Bozarth Poetry Prayer Praying Spirituality

We must experience certain things in life, even in our childhood, so we can later look back and value the journey.

~ Tanya R. Liverman

Tanya R. Liverman Inspiration Inspirational Poetry

Мы не умеем прощаться,-Всё бродим плечо к плечу.Уже начинает смеркаться,Ты задумчив, а я молчу.В церковь войдем, увидимОтпеванье, крестины, брак,Не взглянув друг на друга, выйдем...Отчего всё у нас не так?Или сядем на снег примятыйНа кладбище, легко вздохнем,И ты палкой чертишь палаты,Где мы будем всегда вдвоем.

~ Анна Ахматова

Анна Ахматова Poetry

Everyone should be forcibly transplanted to another continent from their family at the age of three.

~ Philip Larkin

Philip Larkin Family Letters To Monica Philip Larkin Poem Poet Poetry Youth

Dear, I can't write, it's all a fantasy: a kind of circling obsession.

~ Philip Larkin

Philip Larkin Letters Letters To Monica Philip Larkin Poetry Writing

]Sardisoften turning her thoughts here]you like a goddessand in your song most of all she rejoiced.But now she is conspicuous among Lydian womenas sometimes at sunsetthe rosyfingered moonsurpasses all the stars. And her lightstretches over salt seaequally and flowerdeep fields.And the beautiful dew is poured outand roses bloom and frailchervil and flowering sweetclover.But she goes back and forth rememberinggentle Atthis and in longingshe bites her tender mind

~ Sappho

Sappho Beauty Imagery Poetry

I never heard sound and thrill of my painful heart until that very day she touched it.

~ Santosh Kalwar

Santosh Kalwar Emotion Heart Inspirational Life Lessons Painful Poetry Touch

]sing to usthe one with violets in her lap]mostly]goes astray

~ Sappho

Sappho Beauty Imagery Poetry

Let them shoot us in the head,My blood will grow rootsand will blossom.

~ Visar Zhiti

Visar Zhiti Creativity Oppression Poetry Tyranny

There is bad in all good authors: what a pity the converse isn't true!

~ Philip Larkin

Philip Larkin Authors Letters Letters To Monica Philip Larkin Poems Poet Poetry Writing

Come boy, and pour for me a cupOf old Falernian. Fill it upWith wine, strong, sparkling, bright, and clear;Our host decrees no water here.Let dullards drink the Nymph's pale brew,The sluggish thin their blood with dew.For such pale stuff we have no use;For us the purple grape's rich juice.Begone, ye chilling water sprite;Here burning Bacchus rules tonight!

~ Catullus

Catullus Alcohol Bacchus Poetry Water Wine

I believe in being a poet in all moments of life. Being a poet means being human. I know some poets whose daily behavior has nothing to do with their poetry. In other words, they are only poets when they write poetry. Then it is finished and they turn into greedy, indulgent, oppressive, shortsighted, miserable, and envious people. Well, I cannot believe their poems

~ فروغ فرخزاد

فروغ فرخزاد Poetry Poets

Within my reflection I see tears, for what I see is the truth, are my greatest fears.

~ Atarah L. Poling

Atarah L. Poling Poetry Poetry Of Life Poetry Quotes

Les enfants qui s'aiment s'embrassent deboutContre les portes de la nuitEt les passants qui passent les désignent du doigtMais les enfants qui s'aimentNe sont là pour personneEt c'est seulement leur ombreQui tremble dans la nuitExcitant la rage des passantsLeur rage, leur mépris, leurs rires et leur envieLes enfants qui s'aiment ne sont là pour personneIls sont ailleurs bien plus loin que la nuitBien plus haut que le jourDans l'éblouissante clarté de leur premier amour

~ Jacques Prévert

Jacques Prévert First Love Francais Poetry

Only times and places, only names and ghosts.

~ Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley Orion Poetry

I see a bird carrying me and carrying you, with us as its wings, beyond the dream, to a journey that has no end and no beginning, no purpose and no goal. I do not speak to you, and you do not speak to me; we listen only to the music of silence. Silence is the friend's trust of friend, imagination's self-confidence between rain and rainbow. A rainbow is inspiration provoking the poet, uninvited, the infatuation of the poet with the prose of the Quran. Which of your Lord's blessings do you disown? We are absent, you and I; we are present, you and I. And absent. Which of your Lord's blessings do you disown?

~ Mahmoud Darwish

Mahmoud Darwish Poetry

New York! I say New York, let black blood flow into your blood.Let it wash the rust from your steel joints, like an oil of life Let it give your bridges the curve of hips and supple vines. Now the ancient age returns, unity is restored, The recociliation of the Lion and Bull and Tree Idea links to action, the ear to the heart, sign to meaning. See your rivers stirring with musk alligators And sea cows with mirage eyes. No need to invent the Sirens. Just open your eyes to the April rainbow And your eyes, especially your ears, to God Who in one burst of saxophone laughter Created heaven and earth in six days, And on the seventh slept a deep Negro sleep.

~ Léopold Sédar Senghor

Léopold Sédar Senghor Africa New York City Poetry

Saki says that youth is like hors d'oeuvres: you are so busy thinking of the next courses you don't notice it. When you've had them, you wish you'd had more hors d'oeuvres.

~ Philip Larkin

Philip Larkin Letters Letters To Monica Poet Poetry Writing Youth

Sexual intercourse began in nineteen sixty-three (Which was rather late for me) between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles' first LP.

~ Philip Larkin

Philip Larkin Poetry Sex

…wisely mingled poetry and prose.

~ Louisa May Alcott

Louisa May Alcott Little Women Louisa May Alcott Poetry Prose

The first fact of the world is that it repeats itself. I had been taught to believe that the freshness of children lay in their capacity for wonder at the vividness and strangeness of the particular, but what is fresh in them is that they still experience the power of repetition, from which our first sense of the power of mastery comes. Though predictable is an ugly little world in daily life, in our first experience of it we are clued to the hope of a shapeliness in things. To see that power working on adults, you have to catch them out: the look of foolish happiness on the faces of people who have just sat down to dinner is their knowledge that dinner will be served. Probably, that is the psychological basis for the power and the necessity of artistic form...Maybe our first experience of form is the experience of our own formation...And I am not thinking mainly of poems about form; I’m thinking of the form of a poem, the shape of its understanding. The presence of that shaping constitutes the presence of poetry.

~ Robert Hass

Robert Hass Form Poetry Writers On Writing

someone's senta loving notein lines of returning geeseand as the moon fillsmy western chamberas petals danceover the flowing streamagain I think of youthe two of usliving a sadnessaparta hurt that can't be removedyet when my gaze comes downmy heart stays up

~ Orson Scott Card

Orson Scott Card Love Poetry

... unfools of unbeing ... means quite clearly people who are too stereotyped to be eccentric – people who are too dead spiritually to exist at all and who call alive individual fools

~ Norman Friedman

Norman Friedman Individuals Poetry Spirituality Stereotypes

Mon Dieu, la vie est par trop moche.

~ Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley Poetry The Walk

If we knew how to find the lost, we would know how to rediscover the parts of our mindsleft behindin battle.

~ Margarita Engle

Margarita Engle Margarita Engle Poetry The Surrender Tree War

I can speak of you now to anyone because I’ve stopped wanting anything like what I once wanted from you.

~ Carol Guess

Carol Guess Carol Guess Poetry

...the collective wisdom of humanity [is] enshrined in its poetry.

~ Robyn Donald

Robyn Donald Poetry Tiger Tiger

bad breath and butt smell; that is prison, in a nutshell.

~ Raegan Butcher

Raegan Butcher Humor Poetry Prison Prisoners

I am not obsessing.I am just sitting hereperforating this post-itwith a push-pin.

~ Ada Limon

Ada Limon Ada Limon Lucky Wreck Poetry

Live for everything, or die for nothing

~ Nate Spears

Nate Spears Nate Spears Passage Poet Poetry Quote

The secret to life is to live as though you know the secret. Barbara Botch

~ Barbara Botch

Barbara Botch Inspirational Poetry

Where to start?Everything cracks and shakes,The air trembles with similes,No one world's better than another;the earth moans with metaphors.

~ Osip Mandelstam

Osip Mandelstam Metaphor Poetry Simile

If onlyyou could have witnessed howmuch I have changed: sit alonein a disused theatre and feel whatI have felt, see how the world hastransformed me, like the metamorphosisof a caterpillar.

~ Kiera Woodhull

Kiera Woodhull Changes Growing Up Independence Poetry
Load More classy quote icon