Best 1314 quotes in «poet quotes» category

In one creative thought a thousand forgotten nights of love come to life again and fill it with majesty and exaltation. And those who come together in the nights and are entwined in rocking delight perform a solemn task and gather sweetness, depth, and strength for the song of some future poet, who will appear in order to say ecstasies that are unsayable.

Inscriptions here of various Names I view'd, The greater part by hostile time subdu'd; Yet wide was spread their fame in ages past, And Poets once had promis'd they should last.

In the days of Prismatic Color not in the days of Adam and Eve, but when Adam was alone; when there was no smoke and color was fine, not with the refinement of early civilization art, but because of its originality; with nothing to modify it but the mist that went up, obliqueness was a variation of the perpendicular, plain to see and to account for: it is no longer that; nor did the blue-red-yellow band of incandescence that was color keep its stripe

In The End The Words Are The All And The Nothing.

In the forty minutes I watched the muskrat, he never saw me, smelled me, or heard me at all. When he was in full view of course I never moved except to breathe. My eyes would move, too, following his, but he never noticed. Only once, when he was feeding from the opposite bank about eight feet away did he suddenly rise upright, all alert- and then he immediately resumed foraging. But he never knew I was there. I never knew I was there, either. For that forty minutes last night I was as purely sensitive and mute as a photographic plate; I received impressions, but I did not print out captions. My own self-awareness had disappeared; it seems now almost as though, had I been wired to electrodes, my EEG would have been flat. I have done this sort of thing so often that I have lost self-consciousness about moving slowly and halting suddenly. And I have often noticed that even a few minutes of this self-forgetfulness is tremendously invigorating. I wonder if we do not waste most of our energy just by spending every waking minute saying hello to ourselves. Martin Buber quotes an old Hasid master who said, “When you walk across the field with your mind pure and holy, then from all the stones, and all growing things, and all animals, the sparks of their souls come out and cling to you, and then they are purified and become a holy fire in you.

In the hours waking, when we're still all still, and you can hear the floorboards creaking, and you can feel the shades blow in, the night we slept with, we'll never kiss like that again. Our lips, will sever, our memories, will dissipate, and our shadows will be swallowed by the sky.

In the very end, all we have left to atone for our faults are words.

In this story I am the poet You're the poetry.

In you I see an immaculate woman full of feminine grace and untarnished beauty.

In younger years, he’d wonder whether he was more doctor or writer. Since the dark period back home, he questioned if he was really either—witnessing death all around him had robbed him of both.

I prefer people to consider me by who I am and what I do and not by how I look!

I plan to be a sinner tonight. Could've been something else, but looked way too good in my red dress to be anything Christian.

Irish improves a poet.

I should’ve probably warned you: once you end a relationship with an artist, you are perpetually reminded of them. They have now ruined classical music and jazz for you. They have ruined books and poetry. You should just forget about galleries and museums. But you know what the worst part is? It’s how they witnessed and observed you, making you feel like the only person in the room. And you secretly loved being looked at, being worshipped. So now you avoid mirrors. Because when you look at yourself, you remember me.

Is a poet someone who only wants to describe things, while a philosopher is someone who wants to describe things so that they will reflect and even explain the differences and forces that relate them all and hold them all together? Or sometimes tear them apart.

I should think a poet president would be able to create a delectable confluence of various spaces. A poet is most political.

It always felt as though there were a shaken beehive living in my chest. I could never rest.

I stopped losing my sleep over you... Now i lie awake in search of me!!

It looked as though the leaves of the autumn forest had taken flight, and were pouring down the valley like a waterfall, like a tidal wave, all the leaves of the hardwoods from here to Hudson’s Bay. It was as if the season’s colors were draining away like lifeblood, as if the year were molting and shedding. The year was rolling down, and a vital curve had been reached, the tilt that gives way to headlong rush. And when the monarch butterflies had passed and were gone, the skies were vacant, the air poised. The dark night into which the year was plunging was not a sleep but an awakening, a new and necessary austerity, the sparer climate for which I longed. The shed trees were brittle and still, the creek light and cold, and my spirit holding its breath.

I think Wordsworth was as surprised to see me as I was him. It can't be usual to go to your favorite memory only to find someone already there, admiring the view ahead of you.

It is almost as though something else is breathing quite close by, invisibly. The mystery of the names… Albizzia. Gleditsia. Aucuba japonica. And I am listening, seeing. Seeing, like someone twice alive.

It is clear enough that not every something can be elevated to the rank of a thing - otherwise everything and everyone would be speaking once more, and the chatter would spread from humans to things. Rilke privileges two categories of 'entities' [Seienden), to express it in the papery diction of philosophy, that are eligible for the lofty task of acting as message-things - artifices and living creatures - with the latter gaining their particular quality from the former, as if animals were being's highest works of art before humans. Inherent to both is a message energy that does not activate itself, but requires the poet as a decoder and messenger.

It is true that a mathematician who is not somewhat of a poet, will never be a perfect mathematician.

It made me happy that poems are referred to in the present tense even when the poet is in the past tense.

Touch her and I will shred you to scraps and then burn what remains of you until the fat bubbles out. Well, that really painted a picture. Delightful, Raolcan. You should be a poet in your spare time.

It’s a disease, writing. Stalking its victim day and night In the mind all the time Words Stories Poems There is no single solitary cure but to keep writing.

I think it’s vital. It’s odd to me because many people say we live in these awful times and we need culture and art especially in times like these, in these dire times. Well, first of all, I don’t think these times are more dire than other times. People who say that just need to go back and read Herodotus, read any book of history, read a biography of Attila the Hun. If people are going to wring their hands over these troubled times, I would think that humor should be indispensable. I find it strange that –at least in my take on it—the people who are the most alarmed about the dire times we live in are the ones who seem to be humorless, in their taste for poetry anyway. Humor is just an ingredient.

It is a dangerous thing to substitute reading or writing for living. Live first, then write.

It is not certain whether the effects of totalitarianism upon verse need be so deadly as its effects on prose. There is a whole series of converging reasons why it is somewhat easier for a poet than a prose writer to feel at home in an authoritarian society.[...]what the poet is saying- that is, what his poem "means" if translated into prose- is relatively unimportant, even to himself. The thought contained in a poem is always simple, and is no more the primary purpose of the poem than the anecdote is the primary purpose of the picture. A poem is an arrangement of sounds and associations, as a painting is an arrangement of brushmarks. For short snatches, indeed, as in the refrain of a song, poetry can even dispense with meaning altogether.

I turned myself into an artist because then my life would be about creating meaning out of ugliness and that would be my life, and it was noble. It was the beginning of a journey, the creating of the world every single day and I was not bored. I was ecstasy and creation and nothingness turned into melodies and I was dancing with the spirits.

It's like the difference between looking at a person and looking through their eyes." "That's how I feel about eating," Sirine interjects, and some of them laugh. Aziz lifts his chin and lowers his eyes silkily. "Please tell us more." "Well, I mean..." She fumbles for words and tears apart a slice of bread, trying to think what she means. "Something like... tasting a piece of bread that someone bought is like looking at that person, but tasting a piece of bread that they baked is like looking out of their eyes." "Fabulous metaphor," Aziz says. Nathan lifts his head. "That's giving other people power over you." "No more than usual," Aziz says. "Somebody's always going to have the power, and somebody's always got to bake the bread." He turns and smiles suavely at Sirine. "You've got the soul of a poet! Cooking and tasting is a metaphor for seeing. Your cooking reveals America to us non-Americans. And vice versa." "Chef isn't an American cook," Victor Hernandez says. "Not like the way Americans do food- just dumping salt into the pot. All the flavors go in the same direction. Chef cooks like we do. In Mexico, we put cinnamon in with the chocolate and pepper in the sweetcakes, so things pull apart, you know, make it bigger?

It's okay darling, creative people are called crazy all the time.

It takes a deep and abiding love for yourself to have the patience to wait for the companion who is mentally healthy enough to see the beauty in your heart. No filters required.

it was dawning on me how uphill a poet's path was, and I confessed to her that if I had to be the choice between being happy or being a poet, I'd choose to be happy.

I've been fed to the wolves, my soul experiencing near death so many times. Having a little hardship is a far easier path than being completely fucked by life. But these words, these goddamm words save me everytime. A little slice of poetic notion, a little reminder in pain there is life.

It was your personality that consumed me. You became my favorite. My favorite of them all…

I’ve learned that I am not just a poet, that poets are not just poets. If I could tell my younger self one thing about being a poet...I’d tell her that we contain multitudes.” @Nic_Sealey

I've written you sixty-seven love poems. Here’s another one for you. But really, for me. These poems are the candles that I light with the fire you have ignited in me. I place this candle here and another there so even if the stars have argued with the moon and are sulking away in a corner, you can still find your way to me. Sixty-eight poems now. What does the future hold for us? Joy? Disappointment? Gentle caresses? And subtle neglect? I hope the good is more than the bad. Much more. For what is the point of love if by lighting these candles our own flame loses its brightness? I know the good is more than the bad. Much more. I cannot wait to write you sixty-nine.

I wait on my fix: I am a poetry junkie.

I’ve never pondered my own life until I started watching fictional ones fight for theirs.

I wake up in strange beds and in unknown rooms. I wander in dark alleys and crooked roads. Some days I don't even see the sun. Some nights the moon hides from me. I am the wanderer and wandering is my destiny!

I was born one thousand times and all the while it was you I met again to only meet again under the thousand stars that divide us and connect us.

I want to think about trees. Trees have a curious relationship to the subject of the present moment. There are many created things in the universe that outlive us, that outlive the sun, even, but I can’t think about them. I live with trees. There are creatures under our feet, creatures that live over our heads, but trees live quite convincingly in the same filament of air we inhabit, and in addition, they extend impressively in both directions, up and down, shearing rock and fanning air, doing their real business just out of reach.

I want you to believe in love like you believe in oxygen, then stop looking to others to make your chest rise.

I was a poet when I loved him.

I was born with my eyes turned inward.

I was made of sadness, still you called me poetry.

I was told if I fell in love with a poet I would become immortal, so I decided to become the poet and make all those who touched my soul, eternal. I write friends and lovers into my stories, weaving them into fragments of sonnets and prose, the nectar of my poetry. My muses, perennial… Evergreen.

I was a poet. I had no expectations other than creating a world of art with words that would live on long after I was gone.

I was in no tent under leaves, sleepless and glad. There was no moon at all; along the world’s coasts the sea tides would be springing strong. The air itself also has lunar tides; I lay still. Could I feel in the air an invisible sweep and surge, and an answering knock in the lungs? Or could I feel the starlight? Every minute on a square mile of this land one ten thousandth of an ounce of starlight spatters to earth. What percentage of an ounce did that make on my eyes and cheeks and arms, tapping and nudging as particles, pulsing and stroking as waves?