Famous Quotes

That is what you meant to me: a light that shone through the darkness.” (Your smile, p. 56)

~ Chimnese Davids

Remembrance and reflection how allied!What thin partitions Sense from Thought divide!

~ Alexander Pope

That's what I want, that kind of recklessness where the poem is even ahead of you. It's like riding a horse that's a little too wild for you, so there's this tension between what you can do and what the horse decides it's going to do.

~ Li-Young Lee

What is madness but nobility of the soul at odds with circumstance.

~ Theodore Roethke

...the wet brush of snowflakes was like your kisses everywhere ...

~ John Geddes

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

. . . chasing after words like trying to grab the tails of comets.

~ Libba Bray

For you may palm upon us new for old:All, as they say, that glitters, is not gold.

~ John Dryden

My heart is small, like a love of buttons or black pepper.

~ S. Jane Sloat

Know that I loved you and that I belonged to you. And I wouldn't have had it any other way.

~ Mia Hollow

Robots are like Mars: they needgirls. Boys won't do,the memesoup is all wrong. They stompwhen they should kissand they're none too keenon having things shoved inside them...It's not a robotuntil you put a girl inside. Sometimes I feel like that. A junkyard the Company forgot to put a girl in.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

I ask for nothing. / In return I give All. / There is no earning my Love. / No work needed, no effort / Save to listen to what is already heard, / To see what is already seen. / To know what is already known. / Do I seem to ask too little? / Would you give although I ask not? / Then this you can give me and I will accept. / I will take your heart. / You will find it waiting for you / When you return.

~ Ki Longfellow

Don't you just love poetry that gives you a crinkly feeling up and down your back?

~ L.m. Montgomery

Poetry isn't like any writing I've ever heard before. I don't understand all of it, just bits of images, sentences that appear half-finished, all fluttering together like brightly colored ribbons in the wind.

~ Lauren Oliver

I - will have poetry in my life. And adventure. And love. Love above all.

~ Marc Norman

If I bet on humanity, I'd never cash a ticket.

~ Charles Bukowski

The future says:Dear mortals;I know you are busy with your colourful lives;I have no wish to waste the little time that remainsOn arguments and heated debates;But before I can appearPlease, close your eyes, sit stillAnd listen carefullyTo what I am about to say;I haven't happened yet, but I will.I can't pretend it's going to beBusiness as usual.Things are going to change.I'm going to be unrecognisable.Please, don't open your eyes, not yet.I'm not trying to frighten you.All I ask is that you think of meNot as a wish or a nightmare, but as a storyYou have to tell yourselves -Not with an endingIn which everyone lives happily ever after,Or a B-movie apocalypse,But maybe starting with the line'To be continued...'And see what happens next.Remember this; I am notWritten in stoneBut in time - So please don't shrug and sayWhat can we do?It's too late, etc, etc, etc.Dear mortals,You are such strange creaturesWith your greed and your kindness,And your hearts like broken toys;You carry fear with you everywhereLike a tiny godIn its box of shadows.You love festivals and musicAnd good food.You lie to yourselvesBecause you're afraid of the dark.But the truth is: you are in my handsAnd I am in yours.We are in this together,Face to face and eye to eye;We're made for each other.Now those of you who are still here;Open your eyes and tell me what you see.

~ Nick Drake

Il était tard; ainsi qu'une médaille neuveLa pleine lune s'étalait,Et la solennité de la nuit, comme un fleuveSur Paris dormant ruisselait.

~ Charles Baudelaire

As a poet and as a mathematician, he would reason well; as a mere mathematician, he could not have reasoned at all.

~ Edgar Allan Poe

I think it was Milosz, the Polish poet, who when he lay in a doorway and watched the bullets lifting the cobbles out of the street beside him realised that most poetry is not equipped for life in a world where people actually die. But some is.

~ Ted Hughes

A skillful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect. If his very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition there should be no words written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design. And by such means, with such care and skill, a picture is at length painted which leaves in the mind of him who contemplates it with a kindred art, a sense of the fullest satisfaction. The idea of the tale has been presented unblemished because undisturbed: and this is an end unattainable by the novel. Undue brevity is just as exceptionable here as in the poem; but undue length is yet more to be avoided.

~ Edgar Allan Poe

She has learned to love. To fear. To hate. And then to love again. Through it all, she writes.” ~Once Upon A Time There Was A Girl

~ Kimberly Kinrade

. . . We love fog becauseit shifts old anomalies into the elementssurrounding them. It gives relief from a way of seeing

~ Eavan Boland

Falling in love was easy-when romantic attraction was combined with hungry, unsated desire, they formed a glamorous, glittering bauble as fragile as it was alluring, a bauble that could shatter as soon as it was grasped.Tenderness was a different story. It had staying power and the promise of a future.

~ Robyn Donald

A poet could kill the dead.

~ Cameron Conaway

I love my love with a b because she is peculiar.

~ Gertrude Stein

We made love outdoorsWithout a roof, I like most, Without stove, to make love, assuming the weather be fair and balmy, and the earth beneath be clean. Our souls intertwined and gushing of dew.

~ Roman Payne

My best testimonies are from the times I thought I couldn't survive.

~ Tanya R. Liverman

Across the centuries the moral systems from medival chivalry to Bruce Springsteen love anthems have worked the same basic way. They take immediate selfish interests and enmesh them within transcendent, spiritual meanings. Love becomes a holy cause, an act of self-sacrifice and selfless commitment.But texting and the utilitarian mind-set are naturally corrosive toward poetry and imagination. A coat of ironic detachment is required for anyone who hopes to withstand the brutal feedback of the marketplace. In today's world, the choice of a Prius can be a more sanctified act than the choice of an erotic partner.This does not mean that young people today are worse or shallower than young people in the past. It does mean they get less help. People once lived within a pattern of being, which educated the emotions, guided the temporary toward the permanent and linked everyday urges to higher things. The accumulated wisdom of the community steered couples as they tried to earn each other's commitment.Today there are fewer norms that guide that way. Today's technology seems to threaten the sort of recurring and stable reciprocity that is the building block of trust.

~ David Brooks

You can make a difference in another person's life and not realize it, just by giving them One Moment of your time, One Memory to recall, One Motion that tells them they are not alone! OM!

~ Deb Simpson

That night we made love the real way which we had not yet attemptedalthough married six months.Big mystery. No one knew where to put their leg and to this day I'm not surewe got it right.He seemed happy. You're like Venice he said beautifully.Early next dayI wrote a short talk (On Defloration) which he stole and had publishedin a small quarterly magazine.Overall this was a characteristic interaction between us.Or should I say ideal.Neither of us had ever seen Venice.

~ Anne Carson

I do not write to you, but of you,/because the paper that we write on/is our perishable skin.

~ Melissa Lee-Houghton

So very lovely His blood on her swollen lips His first vampireSo very lovely He would have to remember Each salacious cutHe took her slowly Bled her of secrets and screams He smiled contemplating That vampires bled just like whores.

~ Wrath James White

Every poet... finds himself born in the midst of prose. He has to struggle from the littleness and obstruction of an actual world into the freedom and infinitude of an ideal.

~ Thomas Carlyle

A garden should make you feel you've entered privileged space -- a place not just set apart but reverberant -- and it seems to me that, to achieve this, the gardener must put some kind of twist on the existing landscape, turn its prose into something nearer poetry.

~ Michael Pollan

Why are there trees I never walk under but large and melodious thoughts descend upon me?

~ Walt Whitman

I yearn to make these scars disappearAnd to forget about the past.To throw away all of my fearsAnd to be happy at last.

~ Atarah L. Poling

We must listen to poets.

~ Gaston Bachelard

The new world is as yetbehind the veil of destinyIn my eyes, howeverits dawn has been unveiled

~ Muhammad Iqbal

I write in order to comprehend, not to express myself.

~ Anna Kamieńska