Poetry Quotes

He is smitten on the brain, -he reads and writes verses! I caught him in the act! Fools might say he was inspired; but I know it is the first and worst symptom of lunacy. All other maniacs have lucid intervals; some are curable; but the madness of poets, dogs, and musicians, is past hope. Earth possesses no remedy, science no cure.

~ Edward John Trelawny

Answer Professor Mandell’s letter when you get a chance and the patience. Ask him not to send me any more poetry books. I already have enough for 1 year anyway. I am quite sick of it anyway. A man walks along the beach and unfortunately gets hit in the head by a cocoanut. His head unfortunately cracks open in two halves. Then his wife comes along the beach singing a song and sees the 2 halves and recognizes them and cries heart breakingly. That is exactly where I am tired of poetry. Supposing the lady just picks up the 2 halves and shouts into them very angrily “Stop that!” Do not mention this when you answer his letter, however. It is quite controversial and Mrs. Mandell is a poet besides.

~ J.d. Salinger

The responsibility of any science, any pure pursuit, is ultimately to itself, and on this point physics, philosophy, and poetry unite with Satan in their determination not to serve. Any end is higher than utility, when ends are up.

~ William H. Gass

No non-poetic account of reality can be complete.

~ John Myhill

You are the sick prince of my cerise innovations and in your drowning caresses I walk the sea

~ Frank O'hara

Searching my heart for its true sorrow, This is the thing I find to be: That I am weary of words and people, Sick of the city, wanting the sea.

~ Edna St. Vincent Millay

I will find comfort in the rhythm of the sea.

~ Charlotte Eriksson

The sea can do craziness, it can do smooth, it can lie down like silk breathing or toss havoc shoreward; it can give gifts or withhold all; it can rise, ebb, froth like an incoming frenzy of fountains, or it can sweet-talk entirely. As I can too, and so, no doubt, can you, and you.

~ Mary Oliver

Could any State on Earth Immortall be,Venice by Her rare Goverment is She;Venice Great Neptunes Minion, still a Mayd,Though by the warrlikst Potentats assayed;Yet She retaines Her Virgin-waters pure,Nor any Forren mixtures can endure;Though, Syren-like on Shore and Sea, Her FaceEnchants all those whom once She doth embrace,Nor is ther any can Her bewty prizeBut he who hath beheld her with his Eyes:Those following Leaves display, if well observed,How she long Her Maydenhead preserved,How for sound prudence She still bore the Bell;Whence may be drawn this high-fetchd parallel,Venus and Venice are Great Queens in their degree,Venus is Queen of Love, Venice of Policie.

~ James Howell

We distance ourselves for protection,Wear scarves when it’s cold. What seems most outlandish in our autobiography Is what really happened.

~ Steve Abbott

Buds in the snow—the deadly fightbetween two birds

~ Jack Kerouac

I'll be your blanket, baby. Wrap yourself up in me. Let me give you shelter, in the winter of this world.

~ John Mark Green

Isn't it true that a pleasant house makes winter more poetic, and doesn't winter add to the poetry of a house?

~ Charles Baudelaire

The summer in youcalms the winter in me.

~ Saiber

Snake's LullabyBrother, sister, flick your tongueand taste the flakes of autumn sun.Use these last few hours of goldto travel, travel toward the cold.Before your coils grow stiff and dull,your heartbeat slows to winter's lull,seek the sink of sheltered stonesthat safely cradle sleeping bones.Brother, sister, find the waysback to the deep and tranquil bays,and 'round each other twist and foldto weave a heavy cloak of cold.

~ Joyce Sidman

Snow is diamonds for a faery's feet;Blithely and bonnily she trips along,Her lips a-carol with a merry song,And in her eyes the meaning... Life is sweet!

~ Ruby Archer

Dream of the Tundra SwanDusk felland the cold came creeping,cam prickling into our hearts.As we tucked beaksinto feathers and settled for sleep,our wings knew.That night, we dreamed the journey:ice-blue sky and the yodel of flight,the sun's pale wafer,the crisp drink of clouds.We dreamed ourselves so far aloftthat the earth curved beneath usand nothing sang but a whistling vee of light.When we woke, we were covered with snow.We rose in a billow of white.

~ Joyce Sidman

Snow harder! Snow more!Snow blizzards galore!I can’t get enoughOf the fluffy white stuff!Snow! Snow! Snow!Snow a ton! Snow a heap!Snow ten feet deep!I wouldn’t cryIf it snowed til July.Snow! Snow! Snow!

~ Paul F. Kortepeter

It is growing cold. Winter is putting footsteps in the meadow. What whiteness boasts that sun that comes into this wood! One would say milk-colored maidens are dancing on the petals of orchids. How coldly burns our sun! One would say its rays of light are shards of snow, one imagines the sun lives upon a snow crested peak on this day. One would say she is a woman who wears a gown of winter frost that blinds the eyes. Helplessness has weakened me. Wandering has wearied my legs.

~ Roman Payne

Poetry is an awareness of the world, a particular way of relating to reality.

~ Andrei Tarkovsky

A vast field opened like a blossoming tulip, flowers blooming in the rippling airs of spring. High and frothy trees hugged air and sun as they gallantly cast a shade over the earth. On the horizon a florid vessel of mountains trailed to the never-ending, blue as memories distant, poised as statues embroidered into time’s eternal drift.

~ Pablo Andrés Wunderlich Padilla

Now that Karen has been resurrected, I can travel beyond the black mirror. I can discover who I have lost with thefloating hearts and severed heads of my medicine. I must now whisper my other friends back too. I’m sad they’re gone…sad and blue.

~ Nicholaus Patnaude

She lives in the poetry she cannot write.

~ Oscar Wilde

Reading the very best writers—let us say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy—is not going to make us better citizens. Art is perfectly useless, according to the sublime Oscar Wilde, who was right about everything. He also told us that all bad poetry is sincere. Had I the power to do so, I would command that these words be engraved above every gate at every university, so that each student might ponder the splendor of the insight.

~ Harold Bloom

She lives the poetry she cannot write.

~ Oscar Wilde

There is so much want. I feel it so much that I am water, a river of want, pooled in the shape of a girl named Cassia.

~ Ally Condie

The familiar song of a night-singing nightingale rises from somewhere in the garden. A nightingale that in this season of cold should not be in the garden, a nightingale that in a thousand verses of Iranian poetry, in the hours of darkness, for the love of a red rose and in sorrow of its separation from it, has forever sung and will forever sing.

~ Shahriar Mandanipour

A poem without metaphor is a gelding, useless to nightmares.

~ David Joseph Cribbin

Metaphor is a slippery eel, if it wasn't for its shock I'd stick to the easy catch of prose.

~ David Joseph Cribbin

I promise permanence. I promise persistence. I promise that falling in love was just the beginning for us.

~ Liz Newman

As artists, we create the beautyWe are too afraid to live outAnd search, but always fall just shyOf finding what life is about.

~ Justin Wetch

When Verlaine and Rimbaud were young,” [Snyder] said, they were protesting the iron-grip bourgeois rationality had on all aspects of nineteenth-century French culture— the manners, the view of reality, and the exclusion of ‘the wild’ from public life. Rationality in business and society were dominant values. ‘Deranging the senses’ was one strategy artists like Verlaine and Rimbaud employed to break free of that.“Today,” he continued, “the bourgeoisie is sociopathic, overindulged, distracted, spoiled beyond measure, and unable to restrain its gluttony, even in the face of pending planetary destruction. In the face of such a threat, it has, by necessity, become the responsibility of the artist to model health and sanity.

~ Peter Coyote

And in uttering thatExcellently executed truthYou become an artist too

~ Maddy Kobar

We cannot always cry at the right timeand who is to say which time is right?

~ Madeleine L'engle

So many questionsbut nothing to say,in this current momentwe are still so farfrom the answers.

~ Liz Newman

Some guys get fifteen years, others get life.So death for Edbut not for everyone.Cos it all depends on who you kill and where you kill them too.Like,don't shoot a white cop in Walker Country, Texas. If that's your plan, do it in Arlington, New York- no needles of electric chairs there.Just doesn't seen fair to me.

~ Sarah Crossan

There is no happiness like mine.I have been eating poetry.

~ Mark Strand

The ovation roared around him. He felt nothing in particular, hardly even the embarrassment he had feared. He had to go up again—this time without Fräulein Gasteiner, and it was a little peculiar to him to hear the noise of clapping hands and the loud shouts of Bravo. He bowed several times, turned to the door and then, just as the clapping was getting weaker, he heard a voice from slightly behind him, or to the side—he couldn't quite tell—but the words were perfectly distinct, no matter how quietly they had been said: Poor devil! He wanted to look around, but he felt that that would seem absurd.

~ Arthur Schnitzler

When we were young, we were told that poetry is about voice, about finding a voice and speaking with this voice, but the older I get I think it’s not about voice, it’s about listening and the art of listening, listening with attention. I don’t just mean with the ear; bringing the quality of attention to the world. The writers I like best are those who attend.

~ Kathleen Jamie

Falling in love with you was out of my control, but I do have a say in what happens next. And, I will choose to stay in love with you through everything this life throws at us.

~ Liz Newman