Famous Quotes

Each month is gay,Each season nice,When eatingChicken soupWith rice

~ Maurice Sendak

Mine Enemy is growing old --I have at last Revenge --The Palate of the Hate departs --If any would avenge Let him be quick -- the Viand flits --It is a faded Meat --Anger as soon as fed is dead --'Tis starving makes it fat

~ Emily Dickinson

How long your closet held a whiff of you,Long after hangers hung austere and bare.I would walk in and suddenly the trueSharp sweet sweat scent controlled the airAnd life was in that small still living breath.Where are you? since so much of you is here,Your unique odour quite ignoring death.My hands reach out to touch, to hold what's dearAnd vital in my longing empty arms.But other clothes fill up the space, your space,And scent on scent send out strange false alarms.Not of your odour there is not a trace.But something unexpected still breaks throughThe goneness to the presentness of you.

~ Madeleine L'engle

Be my lover between two wars waged in the mirror, she said.I don't want to return now to the fortress of my father's house.Take me to your vineyard.Let me meet your mother.Perfume me with basil water.Arrange me on silver dishes, comb me, imprison me in your name,let love kill me.

~ Mahmoud Darwish

To me, fair friend, you never can be old,For as you were when first your eye I ey'd, Such seems your beauty still.

~ William Shakespeare

Of the many forms that silence takes, the most memorable is the dry husk of the cicada.

~ Jon Davis

My heart is strong, I will not fail, I won't be wronged, I will prevail.

~ Alexandra Lanc

To the sea, to the sea! The white gulls are crying,The wind is blowing, and the white foam is flying.West, west away, the round sun is falling, Grey ship, grey ship, do you hear them calling, The voices of my people that have gone before me? I will leave, I will leave the woods that bore me;For our days are ending and our years failing.I will pass the wide waters lonely sailing.Long are the waves on the Last Shore falling,Sweet are the voices in the Lost Isle calling,In Eressea, in Elvenhome that no man can discover,Where the leaves fall not: land of my people forever!

~ J.r.r. Tolkien

I wish I was either in your arms full of faith, or that a Thunder bolt would strike me.

~ John Keats

The eye--it cannot choose but see;We cannot bid the ear be still;Our bodies feel, where'er they be,Against or with our will.

~ William Wordsworth

because some thingssometimesaren't ours to hold,but just beautiful to listen to.

~ Sanober Khan

It is difficult to write a paradiso when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse.

~ Ezra Pound

Here we go mother on the shipless ocean.Pity us, pity the ocean, here we go.

~ Anne Carson

Armed I am with love. Disarmed I am.

~ Manuel Alegre

Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.

~ W.h. Auden

But writing poems and letters doesn't seem to do much good.

~ Sylvia Plath

Sometimes he did not know if he slept or just thought about sleep.

~ Mark Strand

Someday you will name me, then gently place those burning holy roses in my hair.[Songs of Longing]

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

For we cannot tarry here,We must march my darlings, we must bear the brunt of danger,We, the youthful sinewy races, all the rest on us depend, Pioneers! O pioneers!

~ Walt Whitman

I have no doubt at all the Devil grins,As seas of ink I spatter. Ye gods, forgive my literary sins --The other kind don't matter.

~ Robert W. Service

Through endless night the earth whirls toward a creation unknown...

~ Henry Miller

I don't want tobecause boysdon't write poetry.Girls do.

~ Sharon Creech

With heart at rest I climbed the citadel'sSteep height, and saw the city as from a tower,Hospital, brothel, prison, and such hells,Where evil comes up softly like a flower.Thou knowest, O Satan, patron of my pain,Not for vain tears I went up at that hour;But like an old sad faithful lecher, fainTo drink delight of that enormous trullWhose hellish beauty makes me young again.Whether thou sleep, with heavy vapors full,Sodden with day, or, new appareled, standIn gold-laced veils of evening beautiful,I love thee, infamous city! Harlots andHunted have pleasures of their own to give,The vulgar herd can never understand.

~ Charles Baudelaire

She was a Phantom of delightWhen first she gleam'd upon my sight;A lovely Apparition, sentTo be a moment's ornament:Her eyes as stars of twilight fair;Like twilight's, too, her dusky hair;But all things else about her drawnFrom May-time and the cheerful dawn;A dancing shape, an image gay,To haunt, to startle, and waylay.

~ William Wordsworth

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

~ Sanober Khan

The exceeding brightness of this early sunMakes me conceive how dark I have become.

~ Wallace Stevens

When composing a verse let there not be a hair's breath separating your mind from what you write; composition of a poem must be done in an instant, like a woodcutter felling a huge tree or a swordsman leaping at a dangerous enemy.

~ Bashō Matsuo

Love is a shadow. How you lie and cry after it

~ Sylvia Plath

We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars.

~ Jack Gilbert

And watch two men washing clothes,one makes dry clothes wet. The other makes wet clothes dry. they seem to be thwarting each other, but their work is a perfect harmony.Every holy person seems to have a different doctrine and practice, but there's really only one work.

~ Jalaluddin Rumi

Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the princess in the fairy tale 'til its appropriate liberator comes to set it free.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

It's better to swim in the sea belowThan to swing in the air and feed the crow,Says jolly Ned Teach of Bristol.

~ Benjamin Franklin

Desire, loneliness, wind in the flowering almond—surely these are the great, the inexhaustible subjectsto which my predecessors apprenticed themselves.I hear them echo in my own heart, disguised as convention.

~ Louise Glück

Sometimes it feels like someone else is wearing my body.

~ Warsan Shire

Darling, do you rememberthe man you married? Touch me, remind me who I am.

~ Stanley Kunitz

If our two loves be one, or, thou and I Love so alike, that none do slacken, none can die.

~ John Donne

And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom.

~ W.h. Auden

Ye are better than all the balladsThat ever were sung or said;For ye are living poems,And all the rest are dead.

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Fondling,' she saith, 'since I have hemm'd thee here Within the circuit of this ivory pale, I'll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer; Feed where thou wilt, on mountain or in dale: Graze on my lips, and if those hills be dry, Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.

~ William Shakespeare