Poetry Quotes

More sailors have drowned in words than in the sea.

~ Marty Rubin

Ik vind het doodzonde van mijn tijd om me te verdiepen in de organische geesteswoekeringen van een dichter die me niets beters te melden heeft dan het niets, de leegte, het onverstaanbare. Het onverstaanbare heb ik thuis ook, als ik door de WC-deur heen probeer te praten met mijn vriendin. Het onzegbare, dat roeren wij thuis door de muesli. Ik wil poëzie die me meeneemt naar een wereld die ik nog niet ken, naar een inzicht dat ik nog niet had, naar een uitzicht dat ik nergens anders had kunnen vinden. Ik wil een gedicht dat zo goed is, dat ik bijna vergeet dat het, zoals elk gedicht, een taalbouwsel is – een volmaakt bedrieglijke travestie waar het grote niets doorheen schijnt, een van zijn eigen leugenachtigheid getuigende leugen van inkt. Ik wil een gedicht als een huis, dat me op één steen na laat geloven dat ik er werkelijk in zou kunnen wonen.

~ Ingmar Heytze

say what you mean and mean what you say

~ Angel Silva

Such a small, pure object a poem could be, made of nothing but air a tiny string of letters, maybe small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. But it could blow everybody's head off.

~ Mary Karr

It’s easier for me to make sense of it that way than it is for me to face the other way—reality. And yet, those evil spirits that were unleashed—be they fake entities from a stupid carnival ride, or cruel malevolencies from dark spiritual chasms of our universe—have stayed with me all these years

~ Tim Cummings

Poetry destroyed? Genius banished? No! Mediocrity, no: do not let envy prompt you to the thought. No; they not only live, but reign, and redeem: and without their divine influence spread everywhere, you would be in hell--the hell of your own meanness.

~ Charlotte Brontë

Music straightjackets a poem and prevents it from breathing on its own, whereas it liberates a lyric. Poetry doesn't need music; lyrics do.

~ Stephen Sondheim

If I knew what to doI'd do more than write a song for you

~ Criss Jami

Dying is a universe of its own. 

~ Arlene Ang

Voll Blüten steht der Pfirsichbaum nicht jede wächst zur Frucht sie schimmern hell wie Rosenschaum durch Blau und Wolkenflucht. Wie Blüten geh'n Gedanken auf hundert an jedem Tag -- lass' blühen, lass' dem Ding den Lauf frag' nicht nach dem Ertrag! Es muss auch Spiel und Unschuld sein und Blütenüberfluss sonst wär' die Welt uns viel zu klein und Leben kein Genuss.

~ Hermann Hesse

The heart's actionsare neither the sentence nor its reprieve. Salt hay and thistles, above the cold granite. One bird singing back to another because it can't not.

~ Jane Hirshfield

She was, in short, melted by his distress, as so often happens with the female sex. Poets have frequently commented on this. You are probably familiar with the one who said, Oh, woman in our hours of ease tum tumty tiddly something please, when something something something brow, a something something something thou.

~ P.g. Wodehouse

It was a scary thought. A man could be surrounded by poetry reading and not know it.

~ Richard Russo

Listen, we’ll come visit you. Okay? I’ll dress up as William Shakespeare, Lucent as Emily Dickinson, and beautiful ‘Ray’ as someone dashing and manly like Jules Verne or Ernest Hemingway...and we’ll write on your white-room walls. We’ll write you out of your supposed insanity. I love you, Micky Affias.-James (from Descendants of the Eminent)

~ Tim Cummings

No one can usurp the heights...But those to whom the miseries of the worldAre misery, and will not let them rest.

~ John Keats

It is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem,—a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing. The thought and the form are equal in the order of time, but in the order of genesis the thought is prior to the form.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

... in the world, it will be women, mostly colored and poor. women will have to bury children, and support themselves through grief.

~ Suheir Hammad

The subtleties of the mind cannot be transmitted in words, but can be seen in words.

~ Juefan Huihong

How do you knowyou're a girl?I'm wearing a frock.And if you take it off?I get cold, so I putit back on.If I was a boy, I don't know what I'd do.

~ Ivor Cutler

I say every dog looks like no otherbut that isn't true. Not entirely.Difference is slippery.

~ Mary Jo Bang

The one who pulls the puppet strings knows fairytales can heal.

~ Sally Odgers

Don’t forget to collect the memories on your journey. Remember, if you only focus on your destination, you will miss out on the benefits of the journey.

~ Tanya R. Liverman

For it has come about, by the wise economy of nature, that our modern spirit can almost dispense with language; the commonest expressions do, since no expressions do; hence the most ordinary conversation is often the most poetic, and the most poetic is precisely that which cannot be written down.

~ Virginia Woolf

The talked about their messed-up, dysfunctional families, carefully respecting boundaries, never probing too deep in any one sitting. And they always ended up laughing. Even when the subject matter was intense or macabre, Henry’s sick and twisted and often politically incorrect sense of humor was infectious…Gloria laughed more in these first weeks at Oxford then she remembered laughing almost anywhere.

~ Andrea Kayne Kaufman

I will Basquiat the canvas of your body like a Broadway Junction wall…and Gordon Parks you for those dark midnights when your scent fades.

~ Brandi L. Bates

an English girl might well believethat time is how you spend your love.

~ Nick Laird

This is no occupation for an adult who can look other adults in the eye, carry his own weight, and count himself one of them.

~ Franz Wright

A teacher will be frustrated if she is only motivated to teach what she has learned. Yet, if she is motivated because of the students, then she will learn from them how to teach.

~ Tanya R. Liverman

Far over misty mountains coldTo dungeons deep and caverns oldWe must away, ere break of day,To find our long-forgotten gold.

~ J.r.r. Tolkien

In summer the empire of insects spreads.

~ Adam Zagajewski

the poem doesn’t have stanzas, it has a body, the poem doesn’t have lines,/ it has blood, the poem is not written with letters, it’s written/ with grains of sand and kisses, petals and moments, shouts and/ uncertainties.

~ José Luís Peixoto

Thus I, gone forth, as spiders do,In spider’s web a truth discerning,Attach one silken strand to youFor my returning.

~ E.b. White

What am I to do?What is my destiny?I have no idea, not a clueFeeling lost and empty.What is my dream?What is my future?I beg thee to listen to me,I beg thee to answer.

~ Atarah L. Poling

Good morning, daddy!Ain't you heardThe boogie-woogie rumbleOf a dream deferred?Listen closely:You'll hear their feetBeating out and beating out a -You thinkIt's a happy beat?Listen to it closely:Ain't you heardsomething underneathlike a -What did I say?Sure,I'm happy!Take it away!Dream BoogieHey, pop!Re-bop!Mop!Y-e-a-h!

~ Langston Hughes

Yet gold all is not, that doth gold seem,Nor all good knights, that shake well spear and shield:The worth of all men by their end esteem,And then praise, or due reproach them yield.

~ Edmund Spenser

BeautyIs the fume-track of necessity. This thought Is therapeutic.If, after severalApplications, you do not findRelief, consult your family physician

~ Robert Penn Warren

ONE WORDOne word— one stonein a cold river.One more stone—I'll need many stonesif I'm going to get over.

~ Olav H. Hauge

Along the field as we came byA year ago, my love and I,The aspen over stile and stoneWas talking to itself alone.'Oh who are these that kiss and pass?A country lover and his lass;Two lovers looking to be wed;And time shall put them both to bed,But she shall lie with earth above,And he beside another love.'And sure enough beneath the treeThere walks another love with me, And overhead the aspen heavesIts rainy-sounding silver leaves;And I spell nothing in their stir,But now perhaps they speak to her,And plain for her to understandThey talk about a time at handWhen I shall sleep with clover clad,And she beside another lad.

~ A.e. Housman

In the country whereto I goI shall not see the face of my friendNor her hair the color of sunburnt grasses;Together we shall not findThe land on whose hills bends the new moonIn air traversed of birds.What have I thought of love?I have said, It is beauty and sorrow.I have thought that it would bring me lost delights, and splendorAs a wind out of old time . . .But there is only the evening here,And the sound of willowsNow and again dipping their long oval leaves in the water.-- from Betrothed

~ Louise Bogan

Song of myselfA child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he. I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven. Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord, A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt, Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose? Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.

~ Walt Whitman