Famous Quotes

Come boy, and pour for me a cupOf old Falernian. Fill it upWith wine, strong, sparkling, bright, and clear;Our host decrees no water here.Let dullards drink the Nymph's pale brew,The sluggish thin their blood with dew.For such pale stuff we have no use;For us the purple grape's rich juice.Begone, ye chilling water sprite;Here burning Bacchus rules tonight!

~ Catullus

I believe in being a poet in all moments of life. Being a poet means being human. I know some poets whose daily behavior has nothing to do with their poetry. In other words, they are only poets when they write poetry. Then it is finished and they turn into greedy, indulgent, oppressive, shortsighted, miserable, and envious people. Well, I cannot believe their poems

~ فروغ فرخزاد

Within my reflection I see tears, for what I see is the truth, are my greatest fears.

~ Atarah L. Poling

Les enfants qui s'aiment s'embrassent deboutContre les portes de la nuitEt les passants qui passent les désignent du doigtMais les enfants qui s'aimentNe sont là pour personneEt c'est seulement leur ombreQui tremble dans la nuitExcitant la rage des passantsLeur rage, leur mépris, leurs rires et leur envieLes enfants qui s'aiment ne sont là pour personneIls sont ailleurs bien plus loin que la nuitBien plus haut que le jourDans l'éblouissante clarté de leur premier amour

~ Jacques Prévert

Only times and places, only names and ghosts.

~ Aldous Huxley

I see a bird carrying me and carrying you, with us as its wings, beyond the dream, to a journey that has no end and no beginning, no purpose and no goal. I do not speak to you, and you do not speak to me; we listen only to the music of silence. Silence is the friend's trust of friend, imagination's self-confidence between rain and rainbow. A rainbow is inspiration provoking the poet, uninvited, the infatuation of the poet with the prose of the Quran. Which of your Lord's blessings do you disown? We are absent, you and I; we are present, you and I. And absent. Which of your Lord's blessings do you disown?

~ Mahmoud Darwish

New York! I say New York, let black blood flow into your blood.Let it wash the rust from your steel joints, like an oil of life Let it give your bridges the curve of hips and supple vines. Now the ancient age returns, unity is restored, The recociliation of the Lion and Bull and Tree Idea links to action, the ear to the heart, sign to meaning. See your rivers stirring with musk alligators And sea cows with mirage eyes. No need to invent the Sirens. Just open your eyes to the April rainbow And your eyes, especially your ears, to God Who in one burst of saxophone laughter Created heaven and earth in six days, And on the seventh slept a deep Negro sleep.

~ Léopold Sédar Senghor

Saki says that youth is like hors d'oeuvres: you are so busy thinking of the next courses you don't notice it. When you've had them, you wish you'd had more hors d'oeuvres.

~ Philip Larkin

Sexual intercourse began in nineteen sixty-three (Which was rather late for me) between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles' first LP.

~ Philip Larkin

…wisely mingled poetry and prose.

~ Louisa May Alcott

The first fact of the world is that it repeats itself. I had been taught to believe that the freshness of children lay in their capacity for wonder at the vividness and strangeness of the particular, but what is fresh in them is that they still experience the power of repetition, from which our first sense of the power of mastery comes. Though predictable is an ugly little world in daily life, in our first experience of it we are clued to the hope of a shapeliness in things. To see that power working on adults, you have to catch them out: the look of foolish happiness on the faces of people who have just sat down to dinner is their knowledge that dinner will be served. Probably, that is the psychological basis for the power and the necessity of artistic form...Maybe our first experience of form is the experience of our own formation...And I am not thinking mainly of poems about form; I’m thinking of the form of a poem, the shape of its understanding. The presence of that shaping constitutes the presence of poetry.

~ Robert Hass

someone's senta loving notein lines of returning geeseand as the moon fillsmy western chamberas petals danceover the flowing streamagain I think of youthe two of usliving a sadnessaparta hurt that can't be removedyet when my gaze comes downmy heart stays up

~ Orson Scott Card

... unfools of unbeing ... means quite clearly people who are too stereotyped to be eccentric – people who are too dead spiritually to exist at all and who call alive individual fools

~ Norman Friedman

Mon Dieu, la vie est par trop moche.

~ Aldous Huxley

If we knew how to find the lost, we would know how to rediscover the parts of our mindsleft behindin battle.

~ Margarita Engle

I can speak of you now to anyone because I’ve stopped wanting anything like what I once wanted from you.

~ Carol Guess

...the collective wisdom of humanity [is] enshrined in its poetry.

~ Robyn Donald

bad breath and butt smell; that is prison, in a nutshell.

~ Raegan Butcher

I am not obsessing.I am just sitting hereperforating this post-itwith a push-pin.

~ Ada Limon

Live for everything, or die for nothing

~ Nate Spears

The secret to life is to live as though you know the secret. Barbara Botch

~ Barbara Botch

Where to start?Everything cracks and shakes,The air trembles with similes,No one world's better than another;the earth moans with metaphors.

~ Osip Mandelstam

If onlyyou could have witnessed howmuch I have changed: sit alonein a disused theatre and feel whatI have felt, see how the world hastransformed me, like the metamorphosisof a caterpillar.

~ Kiera Woodhull

I do strongly feel that among the greatest pieces of luck for high achievement is ordeal. Certain great artists can make out without it, Titian and others, but mostly you need ordeal. My idea is this: the artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business: Beethoven's deafness, Goya's deafness, Milton's blindness, that kind of thing.

~ John Berryman

Life is unbearable pain.

~ Santosh Kalwar

August is dust here. Droughtstuns the road,but juice gathers in the berries.

~ Robert Hass

Where is my oasis? Too far fromhere for me to crawl with thesedead legs, refusing to co-operateHands and fingers clawing uselesslythrough the grains of sand...

~ Kiera Woodhull

Think neither fear nor courage saves us.Unnatural vices are fathered by our heroism. Virtues are forced upon us by our impudent crimes. These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.

~ T.s. Eliot

The moon people do not eat by swallowing food but by smelling it. Their money is poetry - actual poems, written out on pieces of paper whose value is determined by the worth of the poem itself.

~ Paul Auster

Sun-struck, stuck in mid tropic strut, it sometimes standsas if considering how to cool avian plastic,dive into the mown lagoon of lawn;how take flight on dayglow flap-doodle wings, no matterif it is ball-bald going nowhere fast.

~ Joyce Thomas

It is not what they built. It is what they knocked down.It is not the houses. It is the spaces between the houses.It is not the streets that exist. It is the streets that no longer exist.

~ James Fenton

We are spirits clad in veils.

~ Christopher Pearse Cranch

I was compared to Charles Bukowski yesterday. It was the best and worst compliment I've ever gotten.

~ Rosa Sophia

One writes a poem when one is so taken up by an emotional concept that one is unable to remain silent.

~ Stephen Dobyns

Each and every words count.Each and every thoughts count.

~ Santosh Kalwar

With slouch and swing around the ringWe trod the Fools’ Parade!We did not care: we knew we wereThe Devils’ Own Brigade:And shaven head and feet of leadMake a merry masquerade.

~ Oscar Wilde

I am republicI am maoistI am activistand I am thisand I am thatbut why?Why can't, I be

~ Santosh Kalwar

Living is the opposite of poetry. Poetry is the recollection of living, or, more often than not, the lament of having not lived. Or worse yet, merely the contemplation of living. My advice to you, Ms. Harper, is this: Live. And keep living. And never stop to look back to write about what you have lived and observed and overcome, lest you turn into a pillar of salt. This desert life is already full of such monoliths.

~ P.s. Baber

And when I stand in the receiving linelike Jackie Kennedywithout the pillbox hat,if Jackie were fat and had taken enough Klonopinto still an ox,and you whisperI think of youdon't finish withbecause I've been going to Weight Watcherson Tuesdays and wonder

~ Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno

The answer to our existence lies in existence itself.

~ Santosh Kalwar