Words Quotes

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

~ W.h. Auden

There is no Frigate like a Book To take us Lands awayNor any Coursers like a Page Of prancing Poetry – This Traverse may the poorest takeWithout oppress of Toll – How frugal is the Chariot That bears a Human soul.

~ Emily Dickinson

PHOSPHORESCENCE. Now there's a word to lift your hat to... to find that phosphorescence, that light within, that's the genius behind poetry.

~ Emily Dickinson

A poet should be so crafty with words that he is envied even for his pains.

~ Criss Jami

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.

~ Gaston Bachelard

You see how I tryTo reach with wordsWhat matters mostAnd how I fail.

~ Czesław Miłosz

He ate and drank the precious words,His spirit grew robust;He knew no more that he was poor,Nor that his frame was dust.He danced along the dingy days,And this bequest of wingsWas but a book. What libertyA loosened spirit brings!

~ Emily Dickinson

My head is full of fireand grief and my tongueruns wild, piercedwith shards of glass.

~ Federico García Lorca

So I find words I never thought to speakIn streets I never thought I should revisitWhen I left my body on a distant shore.

~ T.s. Eliot

Stranger, pause and look;From the dust of agesLift this little book,Turn the tattered pages,Read me, do not let me die!Search the fading letters findingSteadfast in the broken bindingAll that once was I!

~ Edna St. Vincent Millay

I see all of us reading ourselves away from ourselves, straining in circles of light to find more light until the line of words becomes a trail of crumbs that we follow across a page of fresh snow

~ Billy Collins

The poet must always, in every instance, have the vibrant word... that by it's trenchancy can so wound my soul that it whimpers.... One must know and recognize not merely the direct but the secret power of the word; one must be able to give one's writing unexpected effects. It must have a hectic, anguished vehemence, so that it rushes past like a gust of air, and it must have a latent, roistering tenderness so that it creeps and steals one's mind; it must be able to ring out like a sea-shanty in a tremendous hour, in the time of the tempest, and it must be able to sigh like one who, in tearful mood, sobs in his inmost heart.

~ Knut Hamsun

Dreams, books, are each a world; and books, we know,Are a substantial world, both pure and good:Round these, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood,Our pastime and our happiness will grow.

~ William Wordsworth

Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and falls again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet.

~ Virginia Woolf

A tough life needs a tough language—and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is.

~ Jeanette Winterson

I stalk certain words... I catch them in mid-flight, as they buzz past, I trap them, clean them, peel them, I set myself in front of the dish, they have a crystalline texture to me, vibrant, ivory, vegetable, oily, like fruit, like algae, like agates, like olives... I stir them, I shake them, I drink them, I gulp them down, I mash them, I garnish them... I leave them in my poem like stalactites, like slivers of polished wood, like coals, like pickings from a shipwreck, gifts from the waves... Everything exists in the word.

~ Pablo Neruda

My words are the garment of what I shall never be Like the tucked sleeve of a one-armed boy.

~ W.s. Merwin

O words are poor receipts for what time hath stole away

~ John Clare

A precious, mouldering pleasure ’t is To meet an antique book, In just the dress his century wore; A privilege, I think.

~ Emily Dickinson

The true poem rests between the words.

~ Vanna Bonta

I am not a finished poem, and I am not the song you’ve turned me into. I am a detached human being, making my way in a world that is constantly trying to push me aside, and you who send me letters and emails and beautiful gifts wouldn’t even recognise me if you saw me walking down the street where I live tomorrowfor I am not a poem. I am tired and worn out and the eyes you would see would not be painted or inspiredbut empty and weary from drinking too much at all timesand I am not the life of your party who sings and has glorious words to speakfor I don’t speak muchat alland my voice is raspy and unsteady from unhealthy living and not much sleep and I only use it when I sing and I always sing too muchor not at alland never when people are around because they expect poems and symphonies and I am nota poembut an elegyat my bestbut unedited and uncut and not a lot of people want to work with me because there’s only so much you can do with an audio take, with the plug-ins and EQs and I was born distorted, disordered, and I’m pretty fine with that,but others are not.

~ Charlotte Eriksson

Where do the words gowhen we have said them?

~ Margaret Atwood

Not words. nor laughter. but rather someonewho will fall in lovewith your silence.

~ Sanober Khan

I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silenced. All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words.

~ Jeanette Winterson

Equally, the surrealists consider words as witnesses of life acting in a direct way in human affairs. To use words properly it was necessary to treat them with respect, for they were the intermediaries between oneself and the rest of creation. To abuse them was immediately to set oneself adrift from true being. Words need to be coaxed to reveal a little of their true nature, so as to close the breach that exists between the writer and the universe. The world is not something alien against which man is in conflict. Rather man and cosmos exist in reciprocal motion. We are not cast adrift in an alien or meaningless environment. The universe is intimate with us and, as Breton insisted, it is a cryptogram to be deciphered.

~ Michael Richardson

How weightlesswords are when nothing will do.

~ Philip Levine

Most of my friends like words too well. They set them under the blinding light of the poem and try to extract every possible connotation from each of them, every temporary pun, every direct or indirect connection - as if a word could become an object by mere addition of consequences. Others pick up words from the streets, from their bars, from their offices and display them proudly in their poems as if they were shouting, See what I have collected from the American language. Look at my butterflies, my stamps, my old shoes! What does one do with all this crap?

~ Jack Spicer

I have no words — alas! — to tellThe loveliness of loving well!

~ Edgar Allan Poe

Whatever you get out of poetry - take it. take it. take it. Words are better off felt than understood.

~ Sanober Khan

Words are what sticks to the real. We use them to push the real, to drag the real into the poem. They are what we hold on with, nothing else. They are as valuable in themselves as rope with nothing to be tied to.

~ Jack Spicer

It was language I loved, not meaning. I liked poetry better when I wasn't sure what it meant. Eliot has said that the meaning of the poem is provided to keep the mind busy while the poem gets on with its work -- like the bone thrown to the dog by the robber so he can get on with his work. . . . Is beauty a reminder of something we once knew, with poetry one of its vehicles? Does it give us a brief vision of that 'rarely glimpsed bright face behind/ the apparency of things'? Here, I suppose, we ought to try the impossible task of defining poetry. No one definition will do. But I must admit to a liking for the words of Thomas Fuller, who said: 'Poetry is a dangerous honey. I advise thee only to taste it with the Tip of thy finger and not to live upon it. If thou do'st, it will disorder thy Head and give thee dangerous Vertigos.

~ P.k. Page

Language has not the power to speak what love inditesThe soul lies buried in the Ink that writes

~ John Clare

A way of using words to say things which could not possibly be said in any other way, things which in a sense do not exist till they are born … in poetry.

~ Cecil Day-Lewis

...if you do not even understand what words say, how can you expect to pass judgement on what words conceal?

~ H.d.

Slogans are mere wordsuck...

~ Gabriel Thy

O friend unseen, unborn, unknown,Student of our sweet English tongue,Read out my words at night, alone:I was a poet, I was young.Since I can never see your face,And never shake you by the hand,I send my soul through time and spaceTo greet you. You will understand.

~ James Elroy Flecker

The crazy thing about poetry is how its simplicity makes it complicated.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light. Human words have no main switch. But all those little kidnaps in the dark. And then the luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of them that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate...

~ Anne Carson

If words allow themselves to be handled, it is with the help of infinite carefulness. One has to welcome them, listen to the, before asking any service of them. Words are living things closely involved with human life.

~ Paul Nougé

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