Best 8159 quotes in «poetry quotes» category

I think there's a kind of desperate hope built into poetry now that one really wants, hopelessly, to save the world. One is trying to say everything that can be said for the things that one loves while there's still time.

I think the way the sun shines on you has nothing to do with the sun but everything to do with you.

I. Those of us born by water are never afraid enough of drowning. Bruises used to trophy my knees from my death-defying tree climb jumps. Growing up, my backyard was a forest of blackberry bushes. I learned early nothing sweet will come to you unthorned. II. At twelve your body becomes a currency. So Jenny and I sat down and cut up all our clothes into nothing. That year I failed math class but knew the exact number of calories in a carrot stick. I learned early being desired goes hand in hand with hunger. III. The last time I tried to scream I felt my father climbing up through my throat and into my mouth. IV. There is a certain kind of girl who reads Lolita at fourteen and finds religion. I painted my eyes black and sucked barroom cherries to red my tongue. There was a boy who promised Judas really did love Jesus. I learned early every kiss and betrayal are up for interpretation. V. I think he must have conferenced with my nightmares on exactly how to hurt me. VI. He never broke my heart. He only turned it into a compass that always points me back to him.

I think there is something broken in our generation, there are so many sad eyes on happy faces.

I thought at times that poetry might be an elegant way of screaming.

I thought a voice had to be about your fluency, your dexterity, your virtuosity. But in fact your voice could be about your failings, your falterings, your physical limits. The voices that ring hardest in our heads are not the perfect voices. They are the voices with an additional dimension, which is pain.

I thought leaving you would be easy, just walking out the door but I keep getting pinned against it with my legs around your waist and it’s like my lips want you like my lungs want air, it’s just what they where born to do so I am sitting at work thinking of you cutting vegetables in my kitchen your hair in my shower drain your fingers on my spine in the morning while we listen to Muddy Waters, I know you will never be the one I call home but the way you talk about poems like marxists talk of revolution it makes me want to keep trying. I’m still looking for reasons to love you. I’m still looking for proof you love me.

I thought I gave myself to heaven When I was going through hell, But I gave away myself and left only a shell

I thought my fireplace dead and stirred the ashes. I burned my fingers.

I thought that I needed your apology to move on. I really needed to forgive myself first.

It is a happiness to wonder;—it is a happiness to dream

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 a pity that no one in Paris bothered to quote Coleridge, who wrote, long before cubism, that the true poet is able to reduce 'succession to an instant.' Simultaneity in this sense is the property of all great poetry.

It is as if I had made you believe In me once again It is as if you knew I was your true love It was as if I didn't have to know In this life All you were to me Was that flower

It is at the edge of the petal that love waits

It is brave to be ruthless towards the mother.

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 difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.

It is far easier to move mountain than to move science by this one degree. We have the power to move mountain, if we have faith that the mountain can be moved. It is now that our faith is tested. The future of humankind hangs in the balance.

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

It is gloomy, especially in the rain, the waterways with mist rising off them, memories of past visits here and earlier loves-- ghost smudges barely glimpsed, dripping alleys, steps dissolving into water, old ladies behind curtains, eating off trays, lives that have themselves become riddles. Then it changes overnight. The salt breezes open one's nostrils to delight, the tourists are suddenly not so dowdy and badly dressed. The canals glitter that famous jade green. The motoscafi fly their tricolor pennants bravely, and the sky is once again that cerulean blue the painters loved.

It is futile to spend time telling stories about the fleetness of each day.

It is humor's job to laugh at the futility oft engendered by the improbable; but it is poetry's job to dream of the potentiality of that which is not impossible.

It is man who has introduced a little grace, beauty, unknown charm and mystery into creation by singing about it, interpreting it, by admiring it as a poet, idealizing it as an artist and by explaining it through science, doubtless making mistakes, but finding ingenious reasons, hidden grace and beauty, unknown charm and mystery in the various phenomena of Nature. God created only coarse beings, full of the germs of disease, who, after a few years of bestial enjoyment, grow old and infirm, with all the ugliness and all the want of power of human decrepitude.

It is in the more muddled moments of my life, that i become painfully aware of my issues. When nothing is going right, when life gets away from me. When i feel like life is living me, instead of me, living life. It's a difficult place be, but it's also where the seeds of change, often take root. And from those roots, a wellspring of hope and positive transformation, blooms.

It is kind of ridiculous that a poet is expected to live in the real world.

It is interesting that a guy like W.E.B. Du Bois, who actually did very little, I should imagine, with his hands, wrote about "I am the smoke king." Without the labor, both free and slave, of African Americans this country would still be a wilderness.

It is more difficult for you to pretend having feelings when you don’t, than it is to me to pretend I don’t have any when I do. That is why I’d rather sleep. Not having to think. Just to feel. In the sea of illusions, every touch of yours belongs to me.

It is naive to suppose that something that has been expressed in one form can be expressed in another without significantly changing its meaning, texture or value. Much prose translates fairly well from one language to another, but we know that poetry does not; we may get a rough idea of the sense of a translated poem but usually everything else is lost, especially that which makes it an object of beauty. The translation makes it into something it was not.

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 not death that allows us to understand each other, but poetry.

It is not enough to be a man.

It is not enough to be a man... you have to become an idea... a terrible thought... a wraith- indeed- Become one with the darkness.

It is not given to each of us To be desired.

It is not growing like a tree In bulk, doth make Man better be; Or standing long an oak, three hundred year, To fall a log at last, dry, bald, and sere: A lily of a day Is fairer far in May Although it fall and die that night; It was the plant and flower of Light. In small proportions we just beauties see; And in short measures life may perfect be (Ben Jonson)

It is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem,—a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing. The thought and the form are equal in the order of time, but in the order of genesis the thought is prior to the form.

It is not the myth that falls out of date, it is the way of wording it. New voices are endlessly needed to swell their throats with song. Poetry is the unbroken lineage.

It is not our job to remain whole. We came to lose our leaves Like the trees, and be born again, Drawing up from the great roots.

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.

It is not what a poem says with its mouth, it’s what a poem does with its eyes.

It is not written that you may not grieve. It is not written that you may not shed any tears. It is not written that feeling the emotion of the hurt that touched you would only make you weak. But it is written that after the rain, you will get a wonderful rainbow. It is written that at the end of every tunnel, you will find a bright light. It is written that after a journey of a thousand steps, you will find your way to your destination. It is written that after every difficulty comes ease, After every pain comes joy, After every hurt comes understanding. It is not written that you may not grieve, But my Darling, You can’t cry every time someone asks you your name!

It is, of course, we who house poems as much as their words, and we ourselves must be the locus of poetry's depth of newness. Still, the permeability seems to travel both ways: a changed self will find new meanings in a good poem, but a good poem also changes the shape of the self.

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

it is so dark now with the sadness of people they were tricked, they were taught to expect the ultimate when nothing is promised now young girls weep alone in small rooms old men angrily swing their canes at visions as ladies comb their hair as ants search for survival history surrounds us and our lives slink away in shame.

It is so hard to stay afloat in a world that just wants to drown you.

It is spiritually beneficial to understand that if we can first accept what is happening at any moment we will experience more harmony within ourselves as a human being.

It is the fire that consumes me; It is an inexplicable love, It is the rain that calms me; It is a melody from above. It is the wind that humbles me; It is everywhere and nowhere, It is the sand that fuels me; It is the artistry of nature. I’m consumed by what I am, I’m calmed by a riotous noise, I’m humbled through arrogance, I’m fueled by what is in poise. I’ve much cherished the mystifying, I’ve heard the unreal symphonies, I’ve been moved by the inevitable, And I’ve hailed the epiphanies.

It is not your job to understand. Sick people do sick things. You do not understand the mind of an abuser, because you are not sick like one.

It is perhaps, its ability to penetrate the multidimensional layers of the human condition at all, that makes poetry and art so valuable in today's modern age.

It is right that one must come so far to see the world as it is meant to be.