Best 8159 quotes in «poetry quotes» category

When did we revert back to sticks and shields, Uniform uniforms, stylized agenda reveals, Hiding behind glass with nods to our reflection, Blocking out the light that sparked the deception? Who do we see staring across the isle, A path once for feet now stretched into miles, Removed from our view to a place unseen, Forcing poisonous venom through a flickering screen? Where should we gather outside of the homes, But a place for the masses to manifest from their phones, The hatred and evil broadcasting the waves, Telling you daily, “Elvis lives and Jesus saves”? What could restart a flawed mental state, Built on cause and guilt for an unfulfilled faith In policy, redemption, a nation self aware, Our values compressed and trapped in despair? How can we rise with the odds in their favor, Sedated once more, still waiting for a Savior Willing to spare from thoughts profound? Stand tall, my friends, when the fool comes around.

Whenever a time arises where clarity is desired, it is always wise to reflect on the sage within.

Whenever I lose my mind in God's word, I find my heart.

When dreams meet memories it's a promise.

Whenever I write a dramatic poem I can't understand why the characters should ever want to be anything but poets themselves.

Whenever life is getting tough hold on. Don't let it get the best of you stay strong.

Whenever you are in transition it is always important to choose the words that you use. You call it crises in your life and I call it transition.

Whenever you keep score in love, you lose.

Whenever Richard Cory went down town, We people on the pavement looked at him: He was a gentleman from sole to crown, Clean favored, imperially slim. And he was always quietly arrayed, And he was always human when he talked; But still he fluttered pulses when he said, 'Good-morning,' and he glittered when he walked. And he was rich--yes, richer than a king-- And admirably schooled in every grace: In fine, we thought that he was everything To make us wish that we were in his place. So on we worked, and waited for the light, And went without the meat, and cursed the bread; And Richard Cory, one calm summer night, Went home and put a bullet through his head.

Whenever someone is a threat to the enemy there will be an attack dispatched against that person to try to minimise their effectiveness.

When everything is drawn and done. —vision.

When everything hurries everywhere, nothing goes anywhere.

When he asks you why you chose alone all these years. Tell him that it’s because you love with all claws and bared teeth. Apologize for the scratches that you will leave on his skin; ask forgiveness for the bite marks. Tell him you never ever mean to love so hard, but you do.

When Great Trees Fall When great trees fall, rocks on distant hills shudder, lions hunker down in tall grasses, and even elephants lumber after safety. When great trees fall in forests, small things recoil into silence, their senses eroded beyond fear. When great souls die, the air around us becomes light, rare, sterile. We breathe, briefly. Our eyes, briefly, see with a hurtful clarity. Our memory, suddenly sharpened, examines, gnaws on kind words unsaid, promised walks never taken. Great souls die and our reality, bound to them, takes leave of us. Our souls, dependent upon their nurture, now shrink, wizened. Our minds, formed and informed by their radiance, fall away. We are not so much maddened as reduced to the unutterable ignorance of dark, cold caves. And when great souls die, after a period peace blooms, slowly and always irregularly. Spaces fill with a kind of soothing electric vibration. Our senses, restored, never to be the same, whisper to us. They existed. They existed. We can be. Be and be better. For they existed.

When he is most powerful, nothing does he become.

When God put “self” in man, all hell broke loose; from “self” came all sorts of dirt and refuse. If God could just remove the “self” from man, the world be freed from all things inhuman. But then without “self” how will the world be? None might even care dressing their body. Yes, we may have licked crimes and poverty, but we’ve threatened man’s perpetuity.

When he was in college, a famous poet made a useful distinction for him. He had drunk enough in the poet's company to be compelled to describe to him a poem he was thinking of. It would be a monologue of sorts, the self-contemplation of a student on a summer afternoon who is reading Euphues. The poem itself would be a subtle series of euphuisms, translating the heat, the day, the student's concerns, into symmetrical posies; translating even his contempt and boredom with that famously foolish book into a euphuism. The poet nodded his big head in a sympathetic, rhythmic way as this was explained to him, then told him that there are two kinds of poems. There is the kind you write; there is the kind you talk about in bars. Both kinds have value and both are poems; but it's fatal to confuse them. In the Seventh Saint, many years later, it had struck him that the difference between himself and Shakespeare wasn't talent - not especially - but nerve. The capacity not to be frightened by his largest and most potent conceptions, to simply (simply!) sit down and execute them. The dreadful lassitude he felt when something really large and multifarious came suddenly clear to him, something Lear-sized yet sonnet-precise. If only they didn't rush on him whole, all at once, massive and perfect, leaving him frightened and nerveless at the prospect of articulating them word by scene by page. He would try to believe they were of the kind told in bars, not the kind to be written, though there was no way to be sure of this except to attempt the writing; he would raise a finger (the novelist in the bar mirror raising the obverse finger) and push forward his change. Wailing like a neglected ghost, the vast notion would beat its wings into the void. Sometimes it would pursue him for days and years as he fled desperately. Sometimes he would turn to face it, and do battle. Once, twice, he had been victorious, objectively at least. Out of an immense concatenation of feeling, thought, word, transcendent meaning had come his first novel, a slim, pageant of a book, tombstone for his slain conception. A publisher had taken it, gingerly; had slipped it quietly into the deep pool of spring releases, where it sank without a ripple, and where he supposes it lies still, its calm Bodoni gone long since green. A second, just as slim but more lurid, nightmarish even, about imaginary murders in an imaginary exotic locale, had been sold for a movie, though the movie had never been made. He felt guilt for the producer's failure (which perhaps the producer didn't feel), having known the book could not be filmed; he had made a large sum, enough to finance years of this kind of thing, on a book whose first printing was largely returned.

When I call on God, I am not trying to get his attention and I am not trying to get Him to notice me. In all this my journey with Him two questions usually comes to my mind, they are; am I paying attention to him or am I trying to get his attention?

When hope turns dark, I will bring the sun to light it, I shall guide, protect thee, For I am the human spirit. Poem: God’s Dream, in ‘Chameleon Lights

When I came to you A butterfly came too And feelings started anew... ...Do you remember it? But most of all: Do you believe in signs?

When Hughes writes, in the first two lines of his poem, “Let America be America again/ Let it be the dream it used to be,” he acknowledges that America is primarily a dream, a hope, an aspiration, that may never be fully attainable, but that spurs us to be better, to be larger. He follows this with the repeated counterpoint, “America never was America to me,” and through the rest of this remarkable poem he alternates between the oppressed and the wronged of America, and the great dreams that they have for their country, that can never be extinguished.

When humankind cannot produce a philosopher to speak its mind, it longs for a poet to sing its heart

When I built my luminous prison around you, you simply lay down at the center of it and died.

when I finally begin to drift into sleep your memory is the...first and the moonlight the last, to kiss my face.

When I give, It doesn’t come with expectations. It doesn’t happen, With terms and conditions. When I give, I don’t expect you To give back more. When I give, I just give and keep giving more For, I value you For, I want us to be happy For, I care about the little things For, I want you to feel ‘special’ I give, for, I actually Have this habit of giving But, the moment I decide to leave I make sure that I do it And then, Though you come back and promise To bring the moon, the sun and All the stars in the sky above I don’t return . . . I don’t return . . . I don’t return . . .

When I look into your eyes I find an entire universe within them.

when I drive the freeways I see the soul of humanity of my city and it's ugly, ugly, ugly: the living have choked the heart away.

When I feel too much and the universe aches inside of me.

When I lean my ear up against your seashell heart, I can hear an ocean of love roaring inside.

When I reached the vestibule of my apartment building, the campus police closed in on me. I heard Professor Edelstein shout, it's okay, he's a poet. Matter of fact, the best black ... the best poet writing today." The cops instantly backed off. I was protected by poetic immunity. I had permission to act crazy.

When i remember your name i know you are my hope. for what ? not for love... 'cause i know you can't love me. but i know you are my hope for... Life. Just remembering your smile... i know you are my world you shaping my world that became like this... you are my story Not to be told, But to remember... i love you and... I miss you now i miss my world i miss your face, your smile and your voice I miss you more than anyone that I've ever met -For Enno Indi WP-

When I pour out my hurt and sadness into the typewriter do I then begin to realize that I have created poetry!

When I’m with you, The gravity of our moments, The weight of our smiles Makes time nearly stop.

When I no longer have your heart I will not request your body your presence or even your polite conversation. I will go away to a far country separated from you by the sea — on which I cannot walk — and refrain even from sending letters describing my pain.

When I say that I love animals, I mean to say that I am IN love with them. Because they don't know evil and have never been tempted by it. Because they are the purest image of any higher being I have ever known. Because their souls are made of a much larger magic than my own, and if you let them, they will show it to you. Because this world is theirs, they were here first. And we should all love them a little more for graciously allowing us to have so much of it.

when i speak to you i speak as though i am offering a rose in your hand.

When I stand strong in you I can look beyond the clouds With your words The sun will rise again

When it came down to it, she decided, she believed in a few important things. In humanity before Dogma. In religion of human kindness. In Poetry. In Sex. In being clear enough to ask for what she wanted, and detaching from ego enough to hear the answer. In the power of yoga. In being embodied. In owning her reality without apology. In embracing it all, the fuck-ups and the bliss. In the absolute necessity of dark chocolate to her continued existence. In the power of a hard swallow of whiskey to make everything clear. That most of the time we all do the very best we can. But most of all, she believed that nothing is fixed and unchanging, Not even the things she believed the most. That belief, it turns out, is the one that felt the most like freedom.

When it comes to nothingness, there is no cup.

When it comes to love we are primates breaking sticks while pointing to our hearts.

When I shut my eyes on this world I'll finally have peace.

When I smack my gum it's to signal that I do perceive space and time, it's just I'm kind of over it.

When it came to her, I became an indomitable warrior. My muscles became her shield and my lungs aided her breath. She would not fall with me by her side, for I was the wings that sprouted from her back. No one would cross her without first having to survive my wrath.

When I throw back my head and howl People (women mostly) say But you've always done what you want, You always get your way - A perfectly vile and foul Inversion of all that's been. What the old ratbags mean Is I've never done what I don't. So the shit in the shuttered chateau Who does his five hundred words Then parts out the rest of the day Between bathing and booze and birds Is far off as ever, but so Is that spectacled schoolteaching sod (Six kids, and the wife in pod, And her parents coming to stay)... Life is an immobile, locked, Three-handed struggle between Your wants, the world's for you, and (worse) The unbeatable slow machine That brings what you'll get. Blocked, They strain round a hollow stasis Of havings-to, fear, faces. Days sift down it constantly. Years. --The Life with the Hole in It

When it rains, the world softens around the edges; streets and sidewalks become a liquid mirror onto which lights and colors bleed. When it rains, everything becomes beautiful . . . for a while.

When I try to achieve greatness, it spits on me the night before.

When it over, I want to say:all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was a bridegroom, taking the world into my arms. When it's over, I don't want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular,and real. I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened, or full of argument. I don't want to end up simply having visited this world. from "When the death comes

When I wake from my nightmares I’m more afraid of the breath in my lungs than whatever might be chasing me.

When I think of Robert Frost's poems, like "The Road Not Taken", I feel the support of someone who is on my side, who understands what life's choices are like, someone who says, "I've been there, and it's okay to go on".

When I was sad I smiled So everyone thought I was happy And smiled back Even if they were sad They were happy that I was happy Even if we were sad.