Famous Quotes

He was weary of himself, of cold ideas and brain dreams. Life a poem? Not when you went about forever poetizing about your own life instead of living it. How innocuous it all was, and empty, empty, empty! This chasing after yourself, craftily observing your own tracks--in a circle, of course.This sham diving into the stream of life while all the time you sat angling after yourself, fishing yourself up in one curious disguise or another! If he could only be overwhelmed by something--life, love, passion--so that he could no longer shape it into poems, but had to let it shape him!

~ Jens Peter Jacobsen

Flow gently, sweet Afton,amang thy green braes,Flow gently, I'll sing theea song in thy praise;My Mary's asleepby thy murmuring stream,Flow gently, sweet Afton,disturb not her dream.Thou stock dove whose echoresounds thro' the glen,Ye wild whistly blackbirdsin yon thorny den,Thou green crested lapwingthy screaming forbear,I charge you, disturb notmy slumbering fair.How lofty, sweet Afton,thy neighboring hills,Far mark'd with the coursesof clear winding rills;There daily I wanderas noon rises high,My flocks and my Mary'ssweet cot in my eye.How pleasant thy banks and green valleys below, Where, wild in the woodlands,the primroses blow;There oft, as mild eveningweeps over the lea,The sweet-scented birk shadesmy Mary and me.Thy crystal stream, Afton,how lovely it glides,And winds by the cot wheremy Mary resides;How wanton thy watersher snowy feet lave,As, gathering sweet flowerets,she stems thy clear wave.Flow gently, sweet Afton,amang thy green braes,Flow gently, sweet river,the theme of my lays; My Mary's asleepby thy murmuring stream,Flow gently, sweet Afton,disturb not her dreams.

~ Robert Burns

If rape or arson, poison or the knifeHas wove no pleasing patterns in the stuffOf this drab canvas we accept as life -It is because we are not bold enough!

~ Charles Baudelaire

And so I pray I am today as honestwith myself, with life all around me and below and above me,with all who I encounter.

~ Jimmy Santiago Baca

I am she who lifts the mountainsWhen she goes to hunt,Who wears mamba for a headbandAnd a lion for a belt.Beware!I swallow elephants wholeAnd pick my teeth with rhinoceros horns,I drink up rivers to get at the hippos.Let them hear my words!Nhamo is comingAnd her hunger is great.I am she who tosses treesInstead of spears.The ostrich is my pillowAnd the elephant is my footstool!I am NhamoWho makes the river my highwayAnd sends crocodiles scurrying into the reeds!

~ Nancy Farmer

Don't patronize the chain bookstores. Every time I see some author scheduled to read and sign his books at a chain bookstore, I feel like telling him he's stabbing the independent bookstores in the back.

~ Lawrence Ferlinghetti

At the round earth's imagined corners blowYour trumpets, angels, and arise, ariseFrom death, you numberless infinitiesOf souls, and to your scattered bodies go ;All whom the flood did, and fire shall o'erthrow,All whom war, dea[r]th, age, agues, tyrannies,Despair, law, chance hath slain, and you, whose eyesShall behold God, and never taste death's woe.But let them sleep, Lord, and me mourn a space ;For, if above all these my sins abound,'Tis late to ask abundance of Thy grace,When we are there. Here on this lowly ground,Teach me how to repent, for that's as goodAs if Thou hadst seal'd my pardon with Thy blood.

~ John Donne

Everything has its poetry. 94

~ Joseph Joubert

This dream the world is having about itselfincludes a trace on the plains of the Oregon trail,a groove in the grass my father showed us allone day while meadowlarks were trying to tellsomething better about to happen.

~ William Stafford

Talent is a faucet. When it is on, one must write. Inspiration is a farce that poets have invented to give themselves importance.

~ Jean Anouilh

If I'm still wistful about On the Road, I look on the rest of the Kerouac oeuvre--the poems, the poems!--in horror. Read Satori in Paris lately? But if I had never read Jack Kerouac's horrendous poems, I never would have had the guts to write horrendous poems myself. I never would have signed up for Mrs. Safford's poetry class the spring of junior year, which led me to poetry readings, which introduced me to bad red wine, and after that it's all just one big blurry condemned path to journalism and San Francisco.

~ Sarah Vowell

If words allow themselves to be handled, it is with the help of infinite carefulness. One has to welcome them, listen to the, before asking any service of them. Words are living things closely involved with human life.

~ Paul Nougé

Landscape is my religion....God in a green legend, I lean over the poolIn a testament of leaves. I dangle my twinkling mood Before me in a cool cave roofed with branchesAnd floored with a skin of water.

~ Norman Maccaig

the poet I saw once...but whose words have long beenin my mind, windows of invincible candles...

~ Nathalie Handal

It is ferocious, life, but it must eat . . .

~ Lucia Perillo

My art unkind, my energy all gone blind;The limbs uneven, the face shallower,Because those who I see are not seen,Those who see me are rude indeed. So blow, blow dear winter, just blow along me!

~ Santosh Kalwar

it isn't that we're alone or not alonewhose voice do you want mine? yours?

~ Ikkyu

Freedom is the dream you dreamWhile putting thought in chains again --

~ Giacomo Leopardi

There’s no money in poetry, but there’s no poetry in money, either

~ Robert Graves

Each arrow you shoot offcarries its own targetinto the decidedlysecrettangle

~ Paul Celan

Amé, fuí amado, el sol acarició mi faz.¡Vida, nada me debes! ¡Vida, estamos en paz!I loved, I was loved, the sun stroked my face.Life, you owe me nothing! Life, we are at peace!

~ Amado Nervo

rush of pine scent (once upon a time),the unlicensed convictionthere ought to be another wayof sayingthis.

~ Paul Celan

Mute in that golden silence hung with green,Come down from heaven and bring me in your eyesRemembrance of all beauty that has been,And stillness from the pools of Paradise.

~ Siegfried Sassoon

… the fisherman’s daughter grinding serenity in her coffee grinder.

~ Yiannis Ritsos

How can the confessor teach/ those who are lost and sick at heart,/ when he himself, among the sinners,/ is worst, and most forsaken?/ It is only a game we play/ with other people's sins./ Besides, everyone knows/ that everyone lies confessing.

~ Yevgeny Yevtushenko

What if the mightiest word is love, love beyond marital, filial, national. Love that casts a widening pool of light. Love with no need to preempt grievance.In today's sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun.On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp -- praise song for walking forward in that light.

~ Elizabeth Alexander

i have had my ups and downsbut wotthehell wotthehellyesterday sceptres and crownsfried oysters and velvet gownsand today i herd with bumsbut wotthehell wotthehelli wake the world from sleepas i caper and sing and leapwhen i sing my wild free tunewotthehell wotthehellunder the blear eyed mooni am pelted with cast off shoonbut wotthehell wotthehell

~ Don Marquis

How could poetry and literature have arisen from something as plebian as the cuneiform equivalent of grocery-store bar codes? I prefer the version in which Prometheus brought writing to man from the gods. But then I remind myself that…we should not be too fastidious about where great ideas come from. Ultimately, they all come from a wrinkled organ that at its healthiest has the color and consistency of toothpaste, and in the end only withers and dies.

~ Alice W. Flaherty

Thirsty for being, the poet ceaselessly reaches out to reality, seeking with the indefatigable harpoon of the poem a reality that is always better hidden, more re(g)al. The poem’s power is as an instrument of possession but at the same time, ineffably, it expresses the desire for possession, like a net that fishes by itself, a hook that is also the desire of the fish. To be a poet is to desire and, at the same time, to obtain, in the exact shape of the desire.

~ Julio Cortázar

I am talking about the responsibility of the poet, who is irresponsible by definition, an anarchist enamored of a solar order and never of the new order or whatever slogan makes five or six hundred million men march in step in a parody of order.

~ Julio Cortázar

Many have referred to [Lewis] Carroll's rhymes as nonsense, but in my childhood world — Los Angeles in the '50s — they made perfect sense.

~ Wanda Coleman

The yard was a little centre of regeneration. Here, with keen edges and smooth curves, were forms in the exact likeness of those he had seen abraded and time-eaten on the walls. These were the ideas in modern prose which the lichened colleges presented in old poetry. Even some of those antiques might have been called prose when they were new. They had done nothing but wait, and had become poetical. How easy to the smallest building; how impossible to most men.

~ Thomas Hardy

I placed a jar in Tennessee and round it was upon a hill.

~ Wallace Stevens

All that we call sacred history attests that the birth of a poet is the principal event in chronology.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I breathe in...the fragranceof love, and moist sandthe onehis roses lefton both my handsI just keep on breathingevery momentas much as I canpreserving it, in my bodyfor the dayit can’t.

~ Sanober Khan

Author's PrayerIf I speak for the dead, I mustleave this animal of my body,I must write the same poem over and overfor the empty page is a white flag of their surrender.If I speak of them, I must walkon the edge of myself, I must live as a blind manwho runs through the rooms withouttouching the furniture.Yes, I live. I can cross the streets asking What yearis it?I can dance in my sleep and laughin front of the mirror.Even sleep is a prayer, Lord,I will praise your madness, andin a language not mine, speakof music that wakes us, musicin which we move. For whatever I sayis a kind of petition and the darkest daysmust I praise.

~ Ilya Kaminsky

I love to feel the temperature drop and the wind increase just before a thunderstorm. Then I climb in bed with the thunder.

~ Amanda Mosher

Poetry is the sound of the human animal.

~ Suniti Namjoshi

Now is History as fast as the mind remembers.

~ Kirby Wright

Matched with an aged wife, I mete and doleUnequal laws unto a savage race,That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

~ Alfred Tennyson