Famous Quotes

Who could have foretoldthe heart grows oldfrom touching others

~ Leonard Cohen

I am obnoxious to each carping tongue/ Who says my hand a needle better fits./ A poet's pen all scorn I should thus wrong/ For such despite they cast on female wits;/ If what I do prove well, it won't advance,/ They'll say it's stolen, or else, it was by chance.

~ Anne Bradstreet

And marbled clouds go scudding byThe many-steepled London sky.

~ John Betjeman

Self love is an oceanand your heart is a vessel. Make it full,and any excess will spill overinto the lives of the peopleyou hold dear. But you must come first.

~ Beau Taplin

Fare well we call to hearth and hallThough wind may blow and rain may fallWe must away ere break of dayOver the wood and mountain tallTo Rivendell where Elves yet dwellIn glades beneath the misty fellThrough moor and waste we ride in hasteAnd wither then we cannot tellWith foes ahead behind us dreadBeneath the sky shall be our bedUntil at last our toil be spedOur journey done, our errand spedWe must away! We must away!We ride before the break of day!

~ J.r.r. Tolkien

Nothing is more natural than mutual misunderstanding; the contrary is always surprising. I believe that one never agrees on anything except by mistake, and that all harmony among human beings is the happy fruit of an error.

~ Paul Valéry

Even this late it happens:the coming of love, the coming of light.

~ Mark Strand

Everything comes down so pasteurizedeverything comes down 16 degreesthey say your amplifier is too loudturn your amplifier downare we high all alone on our kneesmemory is just hips that swinglike a clockthe past projects fantastic scenestic/toc tic/toc tic/tocfuck the clock!

~ Patti Smith

You will come away bruised.You will come away bruisedbut this will give you poetry.

~ Yrsa Daley-Ward

Fireflies in the GardenBy Robert Frost 1874–1963 Here come real stars to fill the upper skies, And here on earth come emulating flies, That though they never equal stars in size, (And they were never really stars at heart) Achieve at times a very star-like start. Only, of course, they can't sustain the part.

~ Robert Frost

He drove his mind into the abyss where poetry is written.

~ George Orwell

Rem tene, verba sequentur: grasp the subject, and the words will follow. This, I believe, is the opposite of what happens with poetry, which is more a case of verba tene, res sequenter: grasp the words, and the subject will follow.

~ Umberto Eco

And must I then, indeed, Pain, live with youall through my life?-sharing my fire, my bed,Sharing-oh, worst of all things!-the same head?-And, when I feed myself, feeding you too?

~ Edna St. Vincent Millay

It was not death, for I stood up,And all the dead lie down;It was not night, for all the bellsPut out their tongues, for noon.It was not frost, for on my fleshI felt siroccos crawl,Nor fire, for just my marble feetCould keep a chancel cool.And yet it tasted like them all;The figures I have seenSet orderly, for burial,Reminded me of mine,As if my life were shavenAnd fitted to a frame,And could not breathe without a key;And I was like midnight, some,When everything that ticked has stopped,And space stares, all around,Or grisly frosts, first autumn morns,Repeal the beating ground.But most like chaos,--stopless, cool,Without a chance or spar,--Or even a report of landTo justify despair.

~ Emily Dickinson

I lock my door upon myself, And bar them out; but who shall wall Self from myself, most loathed of all?

~ Christina Rossetti

সারাটি রাত্রি তারাটির সাথে তারাটিরই হয় কথা,আমাদের মুখ সারাটি রাত্রি মাটির বুকের 'পরে!

~ Jibanananda Das

a bruise, bluein the muscle, youimpinge upon me.As bone hugs the ache home, soI'm vexed to love you, your bodythe shape of returns, your hair a torsoof light, your heatI must have, your openingI'd eat, each momentof that soft-finned fruit,inverted fountain in which I don't see me.

~ Li-Young Lee

Isn’t it time that these most ancient sorrows of ours grew fruitful? Time that we tenderly loosed ourselves from the loved one, and, unsteadily, survived: the way the arrow, suddenly all vector, survives the string to be more than itself. For abiding is nowhere.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

ConnubialBecause with alarming accuracy she’d been identifying patterns I was unaware of—this tic, that tendency, like the way I've mastered the language of intimacy in order to conceal how I felt— I knew I was in danger of being terribly understood.

~ Stephen Dunn

But far more numerous was the herd of such,Who think too little, and who talk too much.

~ John Dryden

while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time.

~ Vladimir Nabokov

When you cried, I learned what helplessness tastes like. Because all I could do was swallow.

~ Penny Reid

A lover goes toward his beloved as enthusiastically as a schoolboy leaving his books, but when he leaves his girlfriend, he feels as miserable as the schoolboy on his way to school. (Act 2, scene 2)

~ William Shakespeare

I am a work in progress.

~ Violet Yates

All shadows of clouds the sun cannot hide like the moon cannot stop oceanic tide;but a hidden star can still be smiling at night's black spell on darkness, beguiling

~ Munia Khan

sometimes when everything seems atits worstwhen all conspiresand gnawsand the hours, days, weeksyearsseem wasted – stretched there upon my bedin the darklooking upward at the ceilingi get what many will consider anobnoxious thought:it’s still nice to beBukowski.

~ Charles Bukowski

We real cool. We Left school. We Lurk late. We Strike straight. We Sing sin. We Thin gin. We Jazz June. We Die soon.

~ Gwendolyn Brooks

When no one is looking,I swallow deserts and cloudsand chew on mountainsknowing they are sweet bones!When no one is lookingand I want to kiss God,I just lift my own hand to my mouth.

~ The Rubaiyat Of Hafiz

If we surrenderedto earth’s intelligencewe could rise up rooted, like trees.Instead we entangle ourselvesin knots of our own makingand struggle, lonely and confused.So like children, we begin again...to fall,patiently to trust our heaviness.Even a bird has to do thatbefore he can fly.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

You know, there are good reasons to learn how to read. Poetry isn't one of them. I mean, so what if two roads go two ways in a wood? So what? Who cares if it made all that big a difference? What difference? And why should I have to guess what the difference is? Isn't that what he's supposed to say?Why can't poets just say what they want to say and then shut up?

~ Gary D. Schmidt

Errors, like straws, upon the surface flow; He who would search for pearls, must dive below.

~ John Dryden

This poetry. I never know what I'm going to say.I don't plan it.When I'm outside the saying of it,I get very quiet and rarely speak at all.

~ Jalaluddin Rumi

Thus, though we cannot make our sun Stand still, yet we will make him run.

~ Andrew Marvell

Doubt not, O poet, but persist. Say 'It is in me, and shall out.' Stand there, balked and dumb, stuttering and stammering, hissed and hooted, stand and strive, until at last rage draw out of thee that dream-power which every night shows thee is thine own; a power transcending all limit and privacy, and by virtue of which a man is the conductor of the whole river of electricity.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

First, I thought, almost despairing,This must crush my spirit now;Yet I bore it, and am bearing-Only do not ask me how.

~ Heinrich Heine

so much dependsupona red wheelbarrowglazed with rainwaterbeside the whitechickens.

~ William Carlos Williams

I think we are in rats’ alley, Where the dead men lost their bones.

~ T.s. Eliot

Your war drum ain't / louder than this breath.

~ Suheir Hammad

I wander through each chartered street,Near where the chartered Thames does flow;A mark in every face I meet,Marks of weakness, marks of woe.In every cry of every man,In every infant’s cry of fear,In every voice, in every ban,The mind-forged manacles I hear:How the chimney-sweeper’s cryEvery blackening church appals,And the hapless soldier’s sighRuns in blood down palace-walls.But most, through midnight streets I hearHow the youthful harlot’s curseBlasts the new-born infant’s tear,And blights with plagues the marriage-hearse.

~ William Blake

The first rose on my rose-tree Budded, bloomed, and shattered, During sad days when to me Nothing mattered. Grief of grief has drained me clean; Still it seems a pity No one saw,—it must have been Very pretty.

~ Edna St. Vincent Millay