Verse Quotes

No one here gets out alive.

~ Jim Morrison

Take care of the sense and the sounds will take care of themselves.

~ Lewis Carroll

Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us be thankful, and so worship God acceptably with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire.

~ Anonymous

This day I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live 20 and that you may love the LORD your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him. For the LORD is your life, and he will give you many years in the land he swore to give to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.Deuteronomy 30:19-20 (NIV)

~ Anonymous

Your words on the screen are my color palette I dip my brush into your words and paint youOn the sky, on the ceiling, on the snow; on the tabletOf things eternal : love truth beauty happiness

~ Richard L. Ratliff

One thing you cannot know: The sudden extinction of every alternative, The unexpected crash of the iron cataract. You do not know what hope is, until you have lost it. You only know what it is not to hope: You do not know what it is to have hope taken from you Or to fling it away, to join the legion of the hopeless Unrecognized by other men, though sometimes by each other.

~ T.s. Eliot

I live not in myself, but I becomePortion of that around me: and to meHigh mountains are a feeling, but the humof human cities torture.

~ George Gordon Byron

In the boundaryless forests, there’re dancers of nude.Yet in the confines of pasture, there’s promise of food.On which is your side?Ô, but tarry and bide,ere you decide,in both do confide.

~ Roman Payne

I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. There are no such truths; there is nothing about death that Swinburne and Landor knew but Epicurus and Heidegger failed to grasp. Rather, it is because I would have lived more fully if I had been able to rattle off more old chestnuts — just as I would have if I had made more close friends.

~ Richard M. Rorty

Did I live the spring I’d sought?It’s true in joy, I walked along,took part in dance, and sang the song.and never tried to bind an hourto my borrowed garden bower;nor did I once entreata day to slumber at my feet.Yet days aren’t lulled by lyric song,like morning birds they pass along,o’er crests of trees, to none belong;o’er crests of trees of drying dew,their larking flight, my hands, eschewThus I’ll say it once and true…From all that I saw, and everywhere I wandered,I learned that time cannot be spent,It only can be squandered.

~ Roman Payne

Let my toes teach the shore how to feel a tranquil lifethrough the wetness of sands Let my heart latch the doorof blackness, as all my pain now blue sky understands

~ Munia Khan

I am looking at him, I am witnessing a unique physiological phenomenon: John Shade perceiving and transforming the world, taking it in and taking it apart, re-combining its elements in the very process of storing them up so as to produce at some unspecified date an organic miracle, a fusion of image and music, a line of verse.

~ Vladimir Nabokov

You are more likely to find three TVs inside a randomly selected house than you are to find a single book that is or was not read to pass an exam, to please God, or to be a better cook.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Science have proof that women talk more than men, it's a fact.

~ Deyth Banger

I only wrote prose before I met you. My musings were superfluous and serious as well. But now the words dance with me. I sing with them and we create poetry.

~ Kamand Kojouri

Every morningbefore the birds starttrilling me their stories,I give birth to a new lovethrough my same old heartwhen a lake’s placidityfinds life in the swans breathOnly for you...From the poem 'Only For You

~ Munia Khan

Night after night on starry wingsNight lovers soared so highMiles apart, across the oceansTheir love forgot to sighIn heavenly flight’s timelessnessThat highest height treasuredInto the deepest of all bluesTheir depth of love measured.From the poem 'The Ballad of Night Lovers

~ Munia Khan

Death is buried there into death Hunger strikes on its own last breathNo spine to shiver, no heart talks At life’s craving poverty mocksFrom the poem 'Exhumation

~ Munia Khan

And yet methinks the older that one growsInclines us more to laugh than scold, though laughterLeaves us so doubly serious shortly after.

~ George Gordon Byron

...and when we die we die alone I cry, I cry aloneLike a piece of stone I am thrown into the wavy ocean of lifeto atone...to atoneOnly to atone...

~ Munia Khan

What is this lovethat makes me see beauty,and makes every beautiful thing bring you back to me?What is this lovethat makes me declare 'I love you'even though I uttered itonly a moment ago?What is this love that keeps growing even when my chest is soreand it hurts to love you any more?Tell me:How am I to find what this love iswhen it was the one to find you, me, this verse, and this universe?

~ Kamand Kojouri

All that can best be expressed in words should be expressed in verse, but verse is a slow thing to create; nay, it is not really created: it is a secretion of the mind, it is a pearl that gathers round some irritant and slowly expresses the very essence of beauty and of desire that has lain long, potential and unexpressed, in the mind of the man who secretes it. God knows that this Unknown Country has been hit off in verse a hundred times...Milton does it so well in the Fourth Book of Paradise Lost that I defy any man of a sane understanding to read the whole of that book before going to bed and not to wake up next morning as though he had been on a journey.

~ Hilaire Belloc

Poetry isn’t an island, it is the bridge. Poetry isn’t a ship, it is the lifeboat. Poetry isn’t swimming. Poetry is water.

~ Kamand Kojouri

I’ve reached the vanishing point without you.Here my heartache begins with your paintrying to find an unborn startin this fatal disappearanceFrom the poem ‘Me with the Vanishing Point

~ Munia Khan

Sitting in a corner, I live like a toad Oh! How I love my room: my tiny abode! Here I wake up; and I sleep in hereThe world far away; yet virtually near Not that I'm jailed in this place of graceJust don't want to face another face

~ Munia Khan

Versifying left her cold. Poems were too close to prayer, rousing regrettable passions. Waiting for God to rescue you when it was up to you. Poetry and prayer put ideas in people's heads that got them killed, distracting them from the ruthless mechanism of the world.

~ Colson Whitehead

When the world uncovers some dark disguise,Embrace the darkness with averted eyes.

~ Thomas Ligotti

Thus it is, we sow motions of hatred out of our own impoverished understanding of love. Yet we do so in the name of love. The perplexing precipice of the illusory infirmity.

~ Steven Storm

To be wild as the waves;enshrinedby the vastness—our cosmic immemorial.Unsettled as the forest.An indomitable flickeramidst worldviews,of jaded crownsand romantic ash.

~ Steven Storm

If I die today, will you remember me tomorrow?The love I'm leaving behind, will you care to borrow? From a snake-shed-skin or from the sky unknownIn all living and the dead I'll dwell to groan

~ Munia Khan

Belief In SelfIf you quit while pursuing your dreams, you will never know how close you've come to success. It might have been hidden behind that next door you decided not to open, since the last fifty doors revealed little or nothing.

~ Kamil Ali

These (Shakespeare, Milton, and Victor Hugo) not only knit and knot the logical texture of the style with all the dexterity and strength of prose; they not only fill up the pattern of the verse with infinite variety and sober wit; but they give us, besides, a rare and special pleasure, by the art, comparable to that of counterpoint, with which they follow at the same time, and now contrast, and now combine, the double pattern of the texture and the verse.  Here the sounding line concludes; a little further on, the well-knit sentence; and yet a little further, and both will reach their solution on the same ringing syllable.  The best that can be offered by the best writer of prose is to show us the development of the idea and the stylistic pattern proceed hand in hand, sometimes by an obvious and triumphant effort, sometimes with a great air of ease and nature.  The writer of verse, by virtue of conquering another difficulty, delights us with a new series of triumphs.  He follows three purposes where his rival followed only two; and the change is of precisely the same nature as that from melody to harmony.-ON SOME TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF STYLE IN LITERATURE

~ Robert Louis Stevenson

That such a slave as this should wear a sword,Who wears no honesty. Such smiling rogues as these,Like rats, oft bite the holy cords atwainWhich are too intrinse t' unloose; smooth every passionThat in the natures of their lords rebel,Being oil to the fire, snow to the colder moods,Renege, affirm, and turn their halcyon beaksWith every gale and vary of their mastersKnowing naught, like dogs, but following.

~ William Shakespeare

Man disavows, and Deity disowns me;Hell might afford my miseries a shelter;Therefore Hell keeps her ever-hungry mouths allBolted against me.Hard lot! encompassed with a thousand dangers,Weary, faint, trembling with a thousand terrors,I'm called, if vanquished, to receive a sentenceWorse than Abiram's.Him the vindictive rod of angry JusticeSent quick and howling to the centre headlong;I, fed with judgement, in a fleshy tomb, amBuried above ground.

~ William Cowper

If I were a flower,humming bird would be my favourite beeAnd If I were blind,the light of darkness I'd love to see

~ Munia Khan

Well, the gold fish in the bowl lay upside down bloatingFull in the sky and the plains were bleached white with skeletonsVarious species grouped together accordingTo their past beliefsThe only way they ever all got together wasNot in love but shameful grief

~ Don Van Vliet

Grief brought to numbers cannot be so fierce,For, he tames it, that fetters it in verse.

~ John Donne

I could simply kill you now, get it over with, who would know the difference? I could easily kick you in, stove you under, for all those times, mean on gin, you rammed words into my belly. (p. 52)

~ Barbara Blatner

oh. she heard it too-no waters coursing, canyon empty, sun soundless- and the beast your life nowhere hiding (p. 103)

~ Barbara Blatner

...gripping the rim of the sink you claw your way to stand and cling there, quaking with will, on heron legs, and still the hot muck pours out of you. (p. 27)

~ Barbara Blatner