Famous Quotes

For it is up to you and meto take solacein nostalgia's armsand our abilityto create the everlastingfrom fleeting moments.

~ Sanober Khan

I rhymeTo see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

~ Seamus Heaney

love wounds me with soft pillows with tender lips and fingers

~ Sanober Khan

I can't even make up a rhyme about an umbrella, let alone death and life and eternal peace.

~ Knut Hamsun

THERE is something in the autumn that is native to my blood— Touch of manner, hint of mood; And my heart is like a rhyme, With the yellow and the purple and the crimson keeping time.

~ Bliss Carman

One breath taken completely; one poem, fully written, fully read - in such a moment, anything can happen.

~ Jane Hirshfield

There is also a third kind of madness, which is possession by the Muses, enters into a delicate and virgin soul, and there inspiring frenzy, awakens lyric....But he, who, not being inspired and having no touch of madness in his soul, comes to the door and thinks he will get into the temple by the help of art--he, I say, and his poetry are not admitted; the sane man is nowhere at all when he enters into rivalry with the madman.

~ Plato

Four billion people on this earthbut my imagination is still the same.It's bad with large numbers.It's still taken by particularity.It flits in the dark like a flashlight,illuminating only random faceswhile all the rest go by,never coming to mind and never really missed.

~ Wisława Szymborska

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

it's so easy to be a poetand so hard to be a man.

~ Charles Bukowski

Had we but world enough, and time

~ Andrew Marvell

And all at once the heavy nightFell from my eyes and I could see, --A drenched and dripping apple-tree,A last long line of silver rain,A sky grown clear and blue again.And as I looked a quickening gustOf wind blew up to me and thrustInto my face a miracleOf orchard-breath, and with the smell, --I know not how such things can be! --I breathed my soul back into me.Ah! Up then from the ground sprang IAnd hailed the earth with such a cryAs is not heard save from a manWho has been dead, and lives again.About the trees my arms I wound;Like one gone mad I hugged the ground;I raised my quivering arms on high;I laughed and laughed into the sky

~ Edna St. Vincent Millay

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;Coral is far more red than her lips' red;If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,But no such roses see I in her cheeks;And in some perfumes is there more delightThan in the breath that from my mistress reeks.I love to hear her speak, yet well I knowThat music hath a far more pleasing sound;I grant I never saw a goddess go;My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground: And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare As any she belied with false compare.

~ William Shakespeare

And then she would smile, to show me how, and it was the saddest smile I ever saw.

~ Charles Bukowski

I loved a woman whose beauty Like the moon moved all the humming heavens to music till the stars with their tiny teeth burst into song and I fell on the ground before her while the sky hardened and she laughed and turned me down softly, I was so young.

~ Peter Meinke

A poem should not meanBut be.

~ Archibald Macleish

When a group of people get up from a table, the table doesn’tknow which way any of them will go.

~ Galway Kinnell

And here, in thought, to thee-In thought that can alone, Ascend thy empire and so be A partner of thy throne, By winged Fantasy, My embassy is given, Till secrecy shall knowledge be In the environs of Heaven.

~ Edgar Allan Poe

I don't feel strong anymoreI feel like falling to my knees.Things aren't the way they were before,They're not the way they're supposed to be.

~ Atarah L. Poling

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

Science is the poetry of reality.

~ Richard Dawkins

Oh! That was poetry! said Pippin. Do you really mean to start before the break of day?

~ J.r.r. Tolkien

How can I find the words? Poets have taken them all and left me with nothing to say or doExcept to teach me for the first time what they meant.

~ Dorothy L. Sayers

Be there a picnic for the devil,an orgy for the satyr,and a wedding for the bride.

~ Roman Payne

Las lágrimas que no se lloranesperan en pequeños lagos?O serán ríos invisiblesque corren hacia la tristeza?

~ Pablo Neruda

July 4th fireworks exhale over the Hudson sadly.It is beautiful that they have to disappear.It's like the time you said I love you madly.That was an hour ago. It's been a fervent year.

~ Frederick Seidel

Spilling a Secret What its size, will have varying consequences. It’s not possible to predict what will happen if you open the gunnysack, let the cat escape. A liberated feline might purr on your lap, or it might scratch your eyes out. You can’t tell until you loosen the knot. Do you chance losing a friendship, if that friend’s well-being will only be preserved by betraying sworn-to silence trust? Once the seam is ripped, can it be mended again? And if that proves impossible, will you be okay when it all falls to pieces?

~ Ellen Hopkins

We don't read and write poetry because it's cute.

~ Tom Schulman

...they come to us, these restless dead,Shrouds woven from the words of men,With trumpets sounding overhead(The walls of hope have grown so thinAnd all our vaunted innocenceHas withered in this endless frost)That promise little recompenseFor all we risk, for all we've lost...

~ Mira Grant

So much dependsupona blue carsplattered with mudspeeding down the road.

~ Sharon Creech

Love WasLove Will BeBut Most of All,Love is.Life Cannot Be Without ItIt is found in the WombIn The WoodsIn The Stars.To Be or Not to BeTo Love, or not to LoveThey Are Equal.My Soul Whispers Into the Spaces.Yes.

~ Cindy Martinusen Coloma

Life is a poem most people never read.

~ Laurence Overmire

some see things as they are: others as they are” (p.82) ~CXCI

~ Manav Sachdeva Maasoom

Crystal ball and candle light, I want your dance tonight. Show me the power of love as we stand together in the middle of the night.

~ Santosh Kalwar

We may kill each other someday.

~ Santosh Kalwar

Try to be thoughtful, don't make the poor man say it;see how human he is,he has children of his own,it is your job to ask:And now he can never not nod.And now he can never say no.And now he can never not say.

~ Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno

When there's a moon the shadows in the house grow larger;invisible hands draw back the curtains,a pallid finger writes forgotten words on dustof the piano...

~ Yiannis Ritsos

Again I resume the longlesson: how small a thingcan be pleasing, how littlein this hard world it takesto satisfy the mindand bring it to its rest.

~ Wendell Berry

Without thinking, I knelt in the grass, like someone meaning to pray. When I tried to stand again, I couldn't move,my legs were utterly rigid. Does grief change you like that?Through the birches, I could see the pond.The sun was cutting small white holes in the water.I got up finally; I walked down to the pond. I stood there, brushing the grass from my skirt, watching myself,like a girl after her first loverturning slowly at the bathroom mirror, naked, looking for a sign.But nakedness in women is always a pose.I was not transfigured. I would never be free.

~ Louise Glück

beauty’ is related not to ‘loveliness’ but to a state in which reality plays a part.

~ William Carlos Williams