Famous Quotes

contemporary poetry is a kind of Reykjavik, a place where accessibility and intelligence have been fighting a Cold War by proxy for the last half-century.

~ Nick Hornby

I do think the barsThat kept my spirit in are burst - that IAm sailing with thee through the dizzy sky!How beautiful thou art!

~ John Keats

I love to move like a mouse inside this puzzle for the body, balancing the wish to be lost with the need to be found.

~ Billy Collins

A door jumpsout from shadows,then jumps away. Thisis what I've come to find:the back door, unlatched.Tooled by insular wind, itslams and slamswithout meaningto and without meaning.

~ Li-Young Lee

The fountains mingle with the river,And the rivers with the ocean; The winds of heaven mix forever,With a sweet emotion; Nothing in the world is single;All things by a law divine In one another's being mingle:— Why not I with thine? See! the mountains kiss high heaven, And the waves clasp one another; No sister flower would be forgiven If it disdained its brother; And the sunlight clasps the earth, And the moonbeams kiss the sea:— What are all these kissings worth, If thou kiss not me?

~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

There came one and knocked at the door of the Beloved.And a voice answered and said, 'Who is there?'The lover replied, 'It is I.''Go hence,' returned the voice;'there is no room within for thee and me.'Then came the lover a second time and knocked and again the voice demanded,'Who is there?'He answered, 'It is thou.''Enter,' said the voice, 'for I am within.

~ Jalaluddin Rumi

At the age of four, you were an artist. And at seven, you were a poet.

~ Seth Godin

I heard of a manwho says words so beautifullythat if he only speaks their namewomen give themselves to him.If I am dumb beside your bodywhile silence blossoms like tumors on our lipsit is because I hear a man climb stairsand clear his throat outside our door.

~ Leonard Cohen

Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.

~ Julian Barnes

Think of what starlight And lamplight would lack Diamonds and fireflies If they couldn’t lean against Black. . . .

~ Mary O'neill

For I dipped into the future, far as human eye could see,Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be.

~ Alfred Tennyson

I held a jewel in my fingers And went to sleep. The day was warm, and winds were prosy; I said: 'T will keep.I woke and chid my honest fingers,—The gem was gone; And now an amethyst remembrance Is all I own.

~ Emily Dickinson

Secretly, deep down, everybody on Earth believes they can write poetry, apart from the members of the Poets' Guild, who know they can't.

~ K.j. Parker

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

Poetry makes nothing happen.

~ W.h. Auden

What is this life if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare?

~ W.h. Davies

The poem must resist the intelligenceAlmost successfully.

~ Wallace Stevens

loneliness can fly a helicopter through a cut-out shapeof a helicopter the same size as the helicopterand that's it's only skilland it isn't good enoughbut it's still amazing.

~ Tao Lin

When I can feel you breathing into me i, like a stone gargoyleatop some crumbling building,spring to lifea resuscitated angel.

~ Saul Williams

You can tell it's a poem because it's swimming in a little gel pack of white space. That shows it's a poem.

~ Nicholson Baker

A song is the exultation of the mind dwelling on eternal things, bursting forth in the voice.

~ Thomas Aquinas

Balm of the summer night, balm of the ordinary,imperial joy and sorrow of human existence,the dreamed as well as the lived—what could be dearer than this, given the closeness of death?

~ Louise Glück

I had forgotten. Disgust shadows desire.Another life is never safely envied.

~ Robert Wells

I wouldn’t want to be faster or greener than now if you were with me O you were the best of all my days!

~ Frank O'hara

Air goes in and outof my nose, throat, lungs, blood, heartbrain - and so I am

~ Matthew Quick

The press of my foot to the earth springs a hundred affections,They scorn the best I can do to relate them.

~ Walt Whitman

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

High FlightOh! I have slipped the surly bonds of EarthAnd danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirthof sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred thingsYou have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swungHigh in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flungMy eager craft through footless halls of air....Up, up the long, delirious, burning blueI’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace.Where never lark, or even eagle flew —And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trodThe high untrespassed sanctity of space,- Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

~ John Gillespie Magee Jr.

In a fieldI am the absenceof field.This isalways the case.Wherever I amI am what is missing.

~ Mark Strand

The winds, the sea, and the moving tides are what they are. If there is wonder and beauty and majesty in them, science will discover these qualities... If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.

~ Rachel Carson

whatever you dobe gentle with yourself.you don’t just livein this worldor your homeor your skin.you also livein someone’s eyes.

~ Sanober Khan

Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse - and ThouBeside me singing in the Wilderness -And Wilderness is Paradise enow.

~ Omar Khayyám

Look deeper through the telescopeand do not be afraid when the starscollide towards the darkness,because sometimes the most beautifulthings begin in chaos.

~ Robert M. Drake

True Wit is Nature to advantage dress'dWhat oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd;Something whose truth convinced at sight we find,That gives us back the image of our mind.As shades more sweetly recommend the light,So modest plainness sets off sprightly wit.

~ Alexander Pope

You are that one breath. that puts all the remaining breaths. back into my body.

~ Sanober Khan

Loneliness clarifies. Here silence standsLike heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken, Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken, Luminously-peopled air ascends; And past the poppies bluish neutral distance Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence: Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.

~ Philip Larkin

All the rest is silenceOn the other side of the wall;And the silence ripeness,And the ripeness all.

~ W.h. Auden

One impulse from a vernal wood May teach you more of man, Of moral evil and of good, Than all the sages can.

~ William Wordsworth

Here is a story that’s stranger than strange. Before we begin you may want to arrange:a blanket, a cushion, a comfortable seat,and maybe some cocoa and something to eat.I’ll warn you, of course, before we commence, my story is eerie and full of suspense, brimming with danger and narrow escapes, and creatures of many remarkable shapes.Dragons and ogres and gorgons and more, and creatures you’ve not even heard of before. And faraway places? There’s plenty of those! (And menacing villains to tingle your toes.)So ready your mettle and steady your heart. It’s time for my story’s mysterious start...

~ Robert Paul Weston

Clear, unscalable, aheadRise the Mountains of Instead,From whose cold, cascading streamsNone may drink except in dreams.

~ W.h. Auden