Poetry Quotes

I like for you to be still: it is as though you are absentdistant and full of sorrow as though you had diedOne word then, one smile is enoughAnd I'm happy; happy that it's not true

~ Pablo Neruda

Stasis in darkness.Then the substanceless blue

~ Sylvia Plath

Love’s language starts, stops, starts; the right words flowing or clotting in the heart.

~ Carol Ann Duffy

I have no life but this, To lead it here; Nor any death, but lest Dispelled from there; Nor tie to earths to come, Nor action new, Except through this extent, The realm of you.

~ Emily Dickinson

Green trees against the sky in the spring rain while the sky set off the spring trees in the obscuration. Red flowers dot the land in the breeze's chase while the land colored up in red after the kiss.

~ Gayle Forman

And tell me everything, tell chain by chain, and link by link, and step by step; sharpen the knives you kept hidden away, thrust them into my breast, into my hands, like a torrent of sunbursts, an Amazon of buried jaguars, and leave me cry: hours, days and years, blind ages, stellar centuries.

~ Pablo Neruda

Is there a better method of departure by night than this quiet bon voyage with an open book, the sole companion who has come to see you off, to wave you into the dark waters beyond language?

~ Billy Collins

Old age doth in sharp pains abound;We are belabored by the gout,Our blindness is a dark profound,Our deafness each one laughs about.Then reason's light with falling rayDoth but a trembling flicker cast.Honor to age, ye children pay!Alas! my fifty years are past!

~ Pierre-Jean De Béranger

In pride, in reasoning pride, our error lies;All quit their sphere and rush into the skies.Pride still is aiming at the blest abodes, Men would be angels, angels would be gods. Aspiring to be gods, if angels fell, Aspiring to be angels, men rebel.

~ Alexander Pope

I'm everyone everywhere with you without you unbound set free in limbo lost at sea.

~ Bryan Lee O'malley

My sincere thanks to friends and family, especially my mother, father, brother, and Mandy, who continue to love and support me despite my obsessions.

~ Jonathan Ball

How are you supposed to know what to read next? This is the question that keeps us up at night, so at Day One our mission is to feed an audience of literature-hungry, time-constrained readers like you with a weekly lineup of talented authors, poets, and artists that we believe you will love. And if we can identify some of the next generation of literary stars, and cultivate an appreciation for transformative poetry and fiction, then frankly we will sleep better at night.

~ Carmen Johnson

A mí me ha tocado no estar contigo, no tengo miradas para encontrarteni hay cosa en que pueda reconocerte.

~ Rubén Bonifaz Nuño

Adrijene, nemoj da se duriš!Vrati se!U redu grešila samduge godine nisam se vracala kuci,ali sam ti uvek krilada je to zato što sam bila u zatvoru!Grešila sam priznajemcesto sam tukla psa,ali sam te volela!Adrijene, nemoj da se duriš!Vrati se!

~ Jacques Prévert

Les rêves sont seuls les réalités de la vie.

~ Xavier Forneret

It is our fate to give ourselves most lavishlyto those who'd rather not be burdened with the gift

~ Rodney Hall

Ik weet nietof er woorden bestaandie de geur van je huidkunnen vangen, het beweeglijkelicht in je ogen, de warmtedie in me opspringt zodraje me aanraakt, het rullegevoel van je haaraan mijn vingertoppen,de bloemblaadjestere huidvan je oogleden tegenmijn lippen.Als daar woorden voor waren,kon ik alles snelvastleggen op papiervoor als je er niet bent(en dat is dikwijls).

~ Hanny Michaelis

Ah! The anguish, the vile rage, the despairOf not being able to expressWith a shout, an extreme and bitter shout,The bleeding of my heart.

~ Fernando Pessoa

What is this life so full of care,We don't have time to stand and stare.

~ W.h. Davies

This man has talent, that man geniusAnd here's the strange and cruel difference:Talent gives pence and his reward is gold,Genius gives gold and gets no more than pence.

~ W.h. Davies

Only--but this is rare--When a beloved hand is laid in ours,When, jaded with the rush and glareOf the interminable hours, Our eyes can in another's eyes read clear,When our world-deafen'd earIs by the tones of a loved voice caress'd--A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast,And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again.The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain,And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know.A man becomes aware of his life's flow,And hears its winding murmur; and he seesThe meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze.

~ Matthew Arnold

Memory revises me.

~ Li-Young Lee

brave love, dreamnot of staunching such strict flame, but come,lean to my wound; burn on, burn on.

~ Sylvia Plath

SPRING POEMIt is spring, my decision, the earthferments like rising breador refuse, we are burninglast year's weeds, the smokeflares from the road, the clumped stalksglow like sluggish phoenixes / it wasn'tonly my fault / birdsongs burst fromthe feathered pods of their bodies, dandelionswhirl their blades upwards, from beneaththis decaying board a snakesidewinds, chained hidesmelling of reptile sex / the hensroll in the dust, squinting with bliss, frogbodiesbloat like bladders, contract, stringthe pond with living jellyeyes, can I be thisruthless? I plungemy hands and arms into the dirt,swim among stones and cutworms,come up rank as a fox,restless. Nights, while seedlingsdig near my headI dream of reconciliationswith those I have hurtunbearably, we move stilltouching over the greening fields, the futurewounds folded like seedsin our tender fingers, daysI go for vicious walks past the charredroadbed over the bashed stubbleadmiring the view, avoidingthose I have not hurtyet, apocalypse coiled in my tongue,it is spring, I am searchingfor the word:finishedfinishedso I can begin overagain, some yearI will take this word too far.

~ Margaret Atwood

Nobody can tell you about that sword all that there is to be told of it; for those that know of those paths of Space on which its metals once floated, till Earth caught them one by one as she sailed past on her orbit, have little time to waste on such things as magic and so cannot tell you how the sword was made, and those who know whence poetry is, and the need that man has for song, or know any one of the fifty branches of magic, have little time to waste on such things as science, and so cannot tell you whence its ingredients came. Enough that it was once beyond our Earth and was now here amongst our mundane stones; that it was once but as those stones, and now had something in it such as soft music has; let those that can define it.

~ Lord Dunsany

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.

~ Guillaume Apollinaire

How do I learn to speakwhen silence is all I know?

~ Susie Clevenger

I fain would follow love, if that could be; I needs must follow death, who calls for me; Call and I follow, I follow! let me die.

~ Alfred Tennyson

The still watersWrap my lips,Eyes, nose and ears,A clearCellophane I cannot crack.

~ Sylvia Plath

He said he'd hurt himself against a wall or had fallen down.But there was probably some other reason for the wounded, the bandaged shoulder.With a rather abrupt gesture, reaching for a shelf to bring down some photographs he wanted to look at, the bandage came came undone and a little blood ran.I did it up again, taking my time over the binding; he wasn't in pain and I liked looking at the blood. It was a thing of my love, that blood.When he left, I found, in front of his chair, a bloody rag, part of the dressing, a rag to be thrown straight into the garbage; and I put it to my lips and kept it there a long while- the blood of love against my lips.

~ Constantinos P. Cavafis

Next o'er his books his eyes began to roll,In pleasing memory of all he stole.

~ Alexander Pope

Hesitate once, hesitate twice, hesitate a hundred times before employing political standards as a device for the analysis and appreciation of poetry.

~ Christopher Hitchens

In those days I used to talk to myself as if reciting poetry.

~ Haruki Murakami

You alone in Europe are not ancient oh ChristianityThe most modern European is you Pope Pius XAnd you whom the windows observe shame keeps youFrom entering a church and confessing this morningYou read the prospectuses the catalogues the billboards that sing aloudThat's the poetry this morning and for the prose there are the newspapersThere are the 25 centime serials full of murder mysteriesPortraits of great men and a thousand different headlines(Zone)

~ Guillaume Apollinaire

I dragged myself to my feet, and with my hellhound in tow started off once more through the fastness of the wood, feeling, as the poet did before me, that my companion would be with me through the nights and through the days and down the arches of the years, and I should never be rid of him.

~ Daphne Du Maurier

...fine love poetry tends to be written when the object of one's affection is at a safe distance; also, it often reflects a love of words more than a love of women...

~ Kate Fox

Shadow is ever besieged, for that is its nature. Whilst darkness devours, and light steals. And so one sees shadow ever retreat to hidden places, only to return in the wake of the war between dark and light.

~ Steven Erikson

As often as we made love I remembered what my poet told me, that this man was born of a goddess, the force that moves the stars and the waves of the sea and couples the animals in the fields in spring, the power of passion, the light of the evening star.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Nature is bent on new beginningand death has not a chance of winning...

~ Rosy Cole

Here the phenomenologist has nothing in common with the literary critic who, as has frequently been noted, judges a work that he could not create and, if we are to believe certain facile condemnations, would not want to create. A literary critic is a reader who is necessarily severe. By turning inside out like a glove an overworked complex that has become debased to the point of being part of the vocabulary of statesmen, we might say that the literary critic and the professor of rhetoric, who know-all and judge-all, readily go in for a simplex of superiority. As for me, being an addict of felicitous reading, I only read and re-read what I like, with a bit of reader's pride mixed in with much enthusiasm.

~ Gaston Bachelard