Best 1314 quotes in «poet quotes» category

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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

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 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 a poet when I loved him.

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 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 was made of sadness, still you called me poetry.

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 born with my eyes turned inward.

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?

I was transformed the day My ego shattered, And all the superficial, material Things that mattered To me before, Suddenly ceased To matter.

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 wear the universe backwards. I imagine putting stars in my coffee, and sugar in the sky. I imagine going fishing in clouds, and watching the sun hide behind lakes. I'm too busy dancing with my imagination to even tip toe with reality for a second. They say I'm going mad. They're right.

I will not stop singing the Muses who set me dancing.

I wish that I could fly into the sky and touch the clouds with my hands.

Live for everything, or die for nothing

I wonder if you ever read my poems and wish they were written for you.

Lines The lightning struck him and left a scar. The wind stopped blowing and the wheat stood up. Self-tensed self, who is this I that says I ? I had a scar in the shape of  lightning That split in half when I opened my mouth. The sun  just a circle of  heat in the sky Throwing absence in the shape of clouds Down on the field. Another life placed In the middle of  the life I called my own. A lesser god commanded the front: return. A little god knocked about in the germ. The third person put me outside my own sphere. A small god chanting lightning in the synapse. Wind blows the wheat down. He calls it prayer.

I wonder what became of you, your Johnny Rotten skin, no Emerald City eyes. You'd have been a beauty if you let inferiority steam your glasses with its candor, sans laughter.

Love doesn’t make you a poet; it makes you poetry.

Love is not leaning on each other, adjusting to fit a different size. Love is simply two hands reached out in the darkness, saying; I’ll be your light, if you’ll be mine.

Love has turned many into poets; pain has turned many into artists; charity has turned many into pacifists, and anger has turned many into activists.

Love is like a magic trick You know you are getting fooled, but still, you stand in line And pay to see it again and again.

Love is that unspoken feeling which when felt, makes you a poet, a singer, a dreamer.

Lovers dream of one more embrace. One more kiss. One act of love, no matter how small. For in loving, lover and beloved emptied themselves. Now, they look for their oasis like men engulfed in flames. Even filled to the brim, they will never satiate. For they continue to leak, these cracked vessels. How else did love seep through?

Love is wind for the soul

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends. The lunatic, the lover and the poet Are of imagination all compact: One sees more devils than vast hell can hold, That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic, Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt: The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name.

Love withers but never dies. Its tendrils are embedded on fecund soil awaiting the nourishing spring to make it sprout once more.

My girl was mad and I loved her. Upon a night, she read my poetry; and kissing me madly she cried, ‘You are a genius, my love!’ To which I replied, ‘My girl,’ whispering, ‘Every doctor in this land with a prescription pad is more of a genius than I.