Poetry Quotes

… the fisherman’s daughter grinding serenity in her coffee grinder.

~ Yiannis Ritsos

How can the confessor teach/ those who are lost and sick at heart,/ when he himself, among the sinners,/ is worst, and most forsaken?/ It is only a game we play/ with other people's sins./ Besides, everyone knows/ that everyone lies confessing.

~ Yevgeny Yevtushenko

What if the mightiest word is love, love beyond marital, filial, national. Love that casts a widening pool of light. Love with no need to preempt grievance.In today's sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun.On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp -- praise song for walking forward in that light.

~ Elizabeth Alexander

i have had my ups and downsbut wotthehell wotthehellyesterday sceptres and crownsfried oysters and velvet gownsand today i herd with bumsbut wotthehell wotthehelli wake the world from sleepas i caper and sing and leapwhen i sing my wild free tunewotthehell wotthehellunder the blear eyed mooni am pelted with cast off shoonbut wotthehell wotthehell

~ Don Marquis

How could poetry and literature have arisen from something as plebian as the cuneiform equivalent of grocery-store bar codes? I prefer the version in which Prometheus brought writing to man from the gods. But then I remind myself that…we should not be too fastidious about where great ideas come from. Ultimately, they all come from a wrinkled organ that at its healthiest has the color and consistency of toothpaste, and in the end only withers and dies.

~ Alice W. Flaherty

Thirsty for being, the poet ceaselessly reaches out to reality, seeking with the indefatigable harpoon of the poem a reality that is always better hidden, more re(g)al. The poem’s power is as an instrument of possession but at the same time, ineffably, it expresses the desire for possession, like a net that fishes by itself, a hook that is also the desire of the fish. To be a poet is to desire and, at the same time, to obtain, in the exact shape of the desire.

~ Julio Cortázar

I am talking about the responsibility of the poet, who is irresponsible by definition, an anarchist enamored of a solar order and never of the new order or whatever slogan makes five or six hundred million men march in step in a parody of order.

~ Julio Cortázar

Many have referred to [Lewis] Carroll's rhymes as nonsense, but in my childhood world — Los Angeles in the '50s — they made perfect sense.

~ Wanda Coleman

The yard was a little centre of regeneration. Here, with keen edges and smooth curves, were forms in the exact likeness of those he had seen abraded and time-eaten on the walls. These were the ideas in modern prose which the lichened colleges presented in old poetry. Even some of those antiques might have been called prose when they were new. They had done nothing but wait, and had become poetical. How easy to the smallest building; how impossible to most men.

~ Thomas Hardy

I placed a jar in Tennessee and round it was upon a hill.

~ Wallace Stevens

All that we call sacred history attests that the birth of a poet is the principal event in chronology.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I breathe in...the fragranceof love, and moist sandthe onehis roses lefton both my handsI just keep on breathingevery momentas much as I canpreserving it, in my bodyfor the dayit can’t.

~ Sanober Khan

Author's PrayerIf I speak for the dead, I mustleave this animal of my body,I must write the same poem over and overfor the empty page is a white flag of their surrender.If I speak of them, I must walkon the edge of myself, I must live as a blind manwho runs through the rooms withouttouching the furniture.Yes, I live. I can cross the streets asking What yearis it?I can dance in my sleep and laughin front of the mirror.Even sleep is a prayer, Lord,I will praise your madness, andin a language not mine, speakof music that wakes us, musicin which we move. For whatever I sayis a kind of petition and the darkest daysmust I praise.

~ Ilya Kaminsky

I love to feel the temperature drop and the wind increase just before a thunderstorm. Then I climb in bed with the thunder.

~ Amanda Mosher

Poetry is the sound of the human animal.

~ Suniti Namjoshi

Now is History as fast as the mind remembers.

~ Kirby Wright

Matched with an aged wife, I mete and doleUnequal laws unto a savage race,That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

~ Alfred Tennyson

If the incision of our words amounts to nothing but a feeling, a slow motion, it will still cut a better swath than the factory model, the corporate model, the penitentiary model, which by my lights are one and the same.

~ C.d. Wright

The inkstand is full of ink, and the paper lies white and unspotted, in the round of light thrown by a candle. Puffs of darkness sweep into the corners, and keep rolling through the room behind his chair. The air is silver and pearl, for the night is liquid with moonlight.See how the roof glitters, like ice!Over there, a slice of yellow cuts into the silver-blue, and beside it stand two geraniums, purple because the light is silver-blue, to-night.

~ Amy Lowell

The novel is a formidable mass, and it is so amorphous - no mountain in it to climb, no Parnassus or Helicon, not even a Pisgah. It is most distinctly one of the moister areas of literature - irrigated by a hundred rills and occasionally degenerating into a swamp. I do not wonder that the poets despise it, though they sometimes find themselves in it by accident. And I am not surprised at the annoyance of the historians when by accident it finds itself among them.

~ E.m. Forster

Up the airy mountain,Down the rushy glen,We daren't go a-huntingFor fear of little men.

~ William Allingham

Then you are a poet?' she asked, fingering the flyer in her pocket.'No not at all,' he waved his hand. 'I am merely a character in a poem.

~ Karen Tei Yamashita

 ‘Paradise Lost’ was printed in an edition of no more than 1,500 copies and transformed the English language. Took a while. Wordsworth had new ideas about nature: Thoreau read Wordsworth, Muir read Thoreau, Teddy Roosevelt read Muir, and we got a lot of national parks. Took a century. What poetry gives us is an archive, the fullest existent archive of what human beings have thought and felt by the kind of artists who loved language in a way that allowed them to labor over how you make a music of words to render experience exactly and fully.

~ Robert Hass

Some plant lips on Mother Earth in a display of gratitude.Meanwhile, she is kissing the soles of your feet, recognizing the one to be worshiped is you.

~ Taylor Patton

It’s your privilege to find me incomprehensible. I gave you my minutes, let them remain ours. I hope I haunt you.

~ Theodore Roethke

Where are You Now? I was there whilst you cried,I was there to comfort you with smile,I was there to give you a hand,when all faith was lost.I was there to open doors of opportunities,I was there to share my passion for life,I was there to feed you,when you were hungry.I was there to listen to your turmoil,I was there to lift your spiritwhen you were broken.I was there when you were ill and alone.I was there when you were betrayed,lied to and ridiculed.I was there to understand,to care and to share.I was there …to play, to sing, to dance,to write, to love, to create and innovate.I was there …Where are you now? …by Natasha Parker

~ Luisa Natasha Parker

PRETENDING TO DROWNThe only regret is that I waitedlonger than a breathto scatter the sun's reflectionwith my body.New stars burst upon the waterwhen you pulled me in.On the shore, our clothesbegged us to be good boys again.Every stick our feet toucheda snapping turtle, every shadowa water moccasin.Excuses to swim closer to one another.I sank into the depths to see youas the lake saw you: cut in halfby the surface, taut legs kicking,the rest of you sky.Suddenly still, a clear viewof what you knew I wantedto see.When I resurfaced, slick grin,knowing glance; you pushed meback under.I pretended to drown,then swallowed you whole.

~ Saeed Jones

Stardust
If you came to me with a face I have not seen, with a voice I have never heard, I would still know you. Even if centuries separated us, I would still feel you. Somewhere between the sand and the stardust, through every collapse and creation, there is a pulse that echoes of you and I.
When we leave this world, we give up all our possessions and our memories. Love is the only thing we take with us. It is all we carry from one life to the next.

~ Lang Leav

I fall asleepCall it deep while all is well be-Cause my life seems like a freestyle mean-While asleep on the couch I dream it's a written piece and nowThe symphony's soundingShouting out to these feet whose leaps feel foul but quite loudBut howI'm allowed to live my dreamsMy Chimeran team brings the Siberian breedRiding reality free 'til these tires they freezeIn mires in dire need of wires, fire and heat butI love a dark, hard cold heart in the wintery breeze

~ Criss Jami

I had embraced you...long before i hugged you.

~ Sanober Khan

moonlight disappears down the hillsmountains vanish into fogand i vanish into poetry.

~ Sanober Khan

we must bringour own lightto thedarkness.

~ Charles Bukowski

Some women marry houses.

~ Anne Sexton

there is some achingthat will only heal...in the mosque of sleep.

~ Sanober Khan

Tell me..how do you stand there?filling the doorway....of my life.

~ Sanober Khan

Live as many lives as you can.

~ Sanober Khan

i want to stay curled and cosiedand chocolated....foreverin my mother’s arms.

~ Sanober Khan

To be the other womanis to be a seasonthat is always about to end,when the air is floweredwith jasmine and peach,and the weather day after dayis flawless,and the forecastis hurricane.

~ Linda Pastan

Now a promise made is a debt unpaid, and the trail has its own stern code.

~ Robert W. Service

Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.Eagerly I wished the morrow; — vainly I had sought to borrow From my books surcease of sorrow — sorrow for the lost Lenore.

~ Edgar Allan Poe