Best 8159 quotes in «poetry quotes» category

What characterizes a poem is its necessary dependence on words as much as its struggle to transcend them.

Whatever is not stone is light

What is poetry? The suggestion, by the imagination, of noble grounds for the noble emotions.

What matters Death, if Freedom be not dead? No flags are fair, if Freedom's flag be furled. Who fights for Freedom, goes with joyful tread To meet the fires of Hell against him hurled.

What raises great poetry above all else--it is the entire person and also the entire world.

What was the function of poetry if not to improve the petty, cautious minds of evasive children?

Whenever I get lost in a novel I just throw a poem in. What it does is flare up, and it's so illuminated that I'm able to see where to go. I write between these illuminations.

when a poem says something that could not have been said in any other way, in music, prose, sculpture, movement or paint, then it is poetry.

When oxygen and sulphur dioxide are mixed in the presence of a filiament of platinum, they form sulphurous acid. This combination takes place only if the platinum is present; nevertheless the newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum, and the platinum itself is apparently unaffected: has remained inert, neutral, and unchanged. The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum.

When in public poetry should take off its clothes and wave to the nearest person in sight; it should be seen in the company of thieves and lovers rather than that of journalists and publishers.

When something is too beautiful or too terrible or even too funny for words, then it is time for poetry.

Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed.

When the tea is brought at five o'clock And all the neat curtains are drawn with care, The little black cat with bright green eyes Is suddenly purring there.

When the rhythm and night ride, no heart can hide.

Wordsworth went to the Lakes, but he was never a lake poet. He found in stones the sermons he had already hidden there.

Why must ancients, and provided the same talent, be better than modern authors? Free to exploit the vast realm of the simpleand the natural, they did not have to be artificial in order to be original (which every artist aspires to be).

Women are not supposed to have uteruses, especially in poems.

Write, form a rhizome, increase your territory by deterritorialization, extend the line of flight to the point where it becomes an abstract machine covering the entire plane of consistency.

Write a thousand words a day and in three years you'll be a writer!

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.

Writing was a political act and poetry was a cultural weapon.

Writing poetry is a state of free float.

Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.

Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination.

Yea, marry, now it is somewhat, for now it is rhyme; before, it was neither rhyme nor reason.

Yet poetry, though the last and finest result, is a natural fruit. As naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done. It is the chief and most memorable success, for history is but a prose narrative of poetic deeds.

You never wish on shooting stars. You wish on the ones that have the courage to shine where they are.

You can't make poetry out of thought; poetry is passion. Linear thought must be seduced by wild mind, by the fires of ecstasy.

You don't help people in your poems. I've been trying to help people all my life - that's my trouble

You snipe so steady, you snub so snide, so rip and ready to diminish and deride.

You speak As one who fed on poetry.

21. Muurahaisten sokerijalat, täyttymystahmeat. Niiden keinuvat mustat siivet, valosta varjoon soljuvat varret. Auringon myöhäiset sormet höyhenillä, niin tuuliset ja viipyilevät. Niin kuin se, mikä on kahden välillä löytää paikkansa, lepäämättä. Tai niin kuin leikki alkaa surusta, leikillä on kehä, sen keskellä aina joku, unohtunut valo hiuksillaan, muistuttaa merestä johon aurinko uppoaa niin tuulisesti, niin tuulisesti ja viipyilevästi kuin iholla rakastetun sormet. Tapaaminen joka on aina viimeinen, leikin keskellä, ulkopuolella leikin, ei surun.

2a.m and a ceiling stained with question marks.

5.57am and I’m finishing the last poem to the taste of the last cigarette. Smoke in my lungs, poetry on the paper. Inhale, exhale, it doesn’t get much easier.

...4-5-6: when time escapes the day in its most beautiful way. She starves for that beauty, she longs to quench her limitless thirst, but those moments are so fleeting and their limit is her unrest. Her bones are hollow and heavy as she takes a single step, and in that instant she is gone, blinded by the flash of a stray ray of light, her eyes close in that moment and stars flood her night. She falls forward slow, counting the half seconds of her descent. Her eyes stay closed, her thoughts are spent.

1. kembali pada onggokan kota tua, perempuan pada sebuah pertemuan apa itu definisi? tanya mereka lalu kemana perginya pertemuan? kata cinta kapal-kapal finisi membawa berita dari negeri seberang tentang sisifus yang belum juga kelelahan bukan naik ke atap gunung yang ia tuju, tetapi ketabahan menjalani kesia-siaan.

500 years /n another nail in the cross what's the difference anymore if it rains

3 A.M. isn't a time for sleep when the silhouette of you is breathing next to me.

7. But what kind of love is it, really? Don’t fool yourself and call it sublimity. Admit that you have stood in front of a little pile of powdered ultramarine pigment in a glass cup at a museum and felt a stinging desire. But to do what? Liberate it? Purchase it? Ingest it? . . . You might want to reach out and disturb the pile of pigment, for example, first staining your fingers with it, then staining the world. You might want to dilute it and swim in it, you might want to rouge your nipples with it, you might want to paint a virgin’s robe with it. But still you wouldn’t be accessing the blue of it. Not exactly.

A beautiful poem is nothing but a mirror of philosophy through which we can see life’s pure beauty.

A Blessing on the Poets Patient earth-digger, impatient fire-maker, Hungry word-taker and roving sound-lover, Sharer and saver, muser and acher, You who are open to hide or uncover, Time-keeper and –hater, wake-sleeper, sleep-waker; May language’s language, the silence that lies Under each word, move you over and over, Turning you, wondering, back to surprise.

A book about books is like a poem about poetry: Books are knowledge, paid for, all. Readers - horses in a stall. Stallions should always run. Lest they stale become, in turn. Running waters are most clear. In some books, you disappear – lose yourself, and track of time. How I wish that one was mine... Mine, to have, to write, to read... Mine, just like a flying steed. Mine, forever, - to improve. Would I then, of me, approve? I would not, I can't... myself. I'm but dust, swept off a shelf. Fly, can I, just 'til I'm settled, down, beside my flower, petalled.

A black boy brought Wilson's gin and he sipped it very slowly because he had nothing else to do except to return to his hot and squalid room and read a novel - or a poem. Wilson liked poetry, but he absorbed it secretly, like a drug. The Golden Treasury accompanied him wherever he went, but it was taken at night in small doses - a finger of Longfellow, Macaulay, Mangan: 'Go on to tell how, with genius wasted, Betrayed in friendship, befooled in love...' His taste was romantic. For public exhibition he has his Wallace. He wanted passionately to be indistinguishable on the surface from other men: he wore his moustache like a club tie - it was his highest common factor, but his eyes betrayed him - brown dog's eyes, a setter's eyes, pointing mournfully towards Bond Street.

Above the dark town After the sun's gone down Two vapour trails cross the sky Catching the day's last slow goodbye Black skyline looks rich as velvet Something is shining Like gold but better Rumours of glory...

[About describing atomic models in the language of classical physics:] We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections.

A bush-warbler, Coming to the verandah-edge, Left its droppings On the rice-cakes.

a broken mirror tries hard to fix itself everytime she smiles at it

absence looks like a lake bed flooded with sky sounds like cotton howling tastes like tear-stained pillows smells like churning bile and burnt hair feels like screaming agony, my heart dying and dying

A butterfly in a caterpillar prison Illustrates a solitary ideal, that ideas are the insects of achievement set aloft by chromatic, galactic wings.

A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; How could I answer the child?. . . .I do not know what it is any more than he. I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven. Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord, A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropped, Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose? Or I guess the grass is itself a child. . . .the produced babe of the vegetation. Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic, And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones, Growing among black folks as among white, Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same. And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves. Tenderly will I use you curling grass, It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men, It may be if I had known them I would have loved them; It may be you are from old people and from women, and from offspring taken soon out of their mother’s laps, And here you are the mother’s laps. This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers, Darker than the colorless beards of old men, Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths. O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues! And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing. I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women, And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps. What do you think has become of the young and old men? What do you think has become of the women and children? They are alive and well somewhere; The smallest sprouts show there is really no death, And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it, And ceased the moment life appeared. All goes onward and outward. . . .and nothing collapses, And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.