Best 429 quotes in «poets quotes» category

We need knew knights, but without swords.

We only live in moments, passing us by. As big as the sky. They’re here and gone in the blink of an eye. Don’t waste time thinking about What you’re going to sprout out Or what route you need to scout. There is a reason for everything that happens. Don’t worry too much and let in sadness. Don’t let the thoughts throw off your balance. We only live in moments, here and gone Quick as a sunrise and slow as the dawn. Please hold on before your moment’s drawn.

We write to go on living, after we have died.

What a poet I am. Like T S Eliot but with better boobs.

Whatever you get out of poetry - take it. take it. take it. Words are better off felt than understood.

What’s the use of writing poetry for your peers? I don’t think I should sell my poetry to other poets. If that’s who my audience is, I’m dead, I’m not going to make any money.

What we call life is only talk of nature.

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 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 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 write of you, my dear i am holding you in the most exquisite ways.

When one does something, one must do it wholly and well. Those bastard existences where you sell suet all day and write poetry at night are made for mediocre minds – like those horses that are equally good for saddle and carriage, the worst kind, that can neither jump a ditch nor pull a plow.

When there's a moon the shadows in the house grow larger; invisible hands draw back the curtains, a pallid finger writes forgotten words on dust of the piano...

When there is fear,I will have my pen hold high,when the wonders of night give its light, I lie behind the familiar world with a strange crown, not of Lilly,nor of violets,not of hawthorn,not of maple,but burthen words my fallen tears build an avenger’s crown.

When the others were picked up and walked home by friends or fathers or best friend’s sisters, I was the kid in a grey hoodie, walking with the poets, the singers, the thinkers, and I was not alone.

When the sullen evening arrived,the sun drowned down the distant horizon with a yellow banded light,diffused with the unsettled,dismal clouds,flown above the blue-deep Ocean that queerly stretched.

When you catch it in the right light, you'll see how each shattered piece of my heart never truly fit back in place again.

What was it Like?" "What was what like?" he said, although he knew. "Quick, I imagine. But you must have perceived something. A split second of vanishing awareness. A grasping at a shrinking light." "It was like being fucked in the brain.

What you are trying to let go of ...is already gone.

...when a good poet is confronted with difficult facts that he knows to be true but also are inimical to poetry, he has no choice but to flee to the margins; it was...this very retreat that allowed him to hear the hidden music that is the source of all art.

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

Wherever there is somebody else, a war is not far away.

Without intending to, without even knowing it, he demonstrated with his life that his father had been right when he repeated until his dying day that there was no one with more common sense, no stonecutter more obstinate, no manager so lucid or dangerous, than a poet.

With a little more time, patience, and hard work, and above all with a more sensitive taste for the formal aspects of arts, he would have managed to write mediocre poetry, good enough for a lady’s album – and this is always a gallant thing to do, whatever you may say.

Words are fossilized butterfly wings, pretty to look at sometimes, but only good for Museums. I want to miserably burn down the Museums.

words like mysterious mermaids come and live permanently in the soft sweeps and scars of my skin.

Writing poetry is supernatural. Or, it should be.

You are alone, So alone, You speak back to silence. People call it loneliness, You call it solitude, Different words, Meaning the same pain.

You are the ache in my heart!

You are the ocean to my eyes.

You ask me to write you a poem, I pen you an empty ocean, You run away. You ask me who I am, I paint you a breaking sky, You weep in the rain.

You don't sound like a scientist; you sound like a poet." Rey smiled. "Can I be both?" "But you'd rather be a poet." "Who wouldn't?" he said.

you make autumn mist taste like champagne and turn winter rain into the elixir of life itself.

Young poets are too apt to consider themselves “children of the mist” – they must dwell apart from men and contemn their kind, or they fear they shall be only taken for common-place characters. They forget that poetry is the language which speaks to all hearts—and that instead of cherishing the sacred fire as a lonely light, as one that burns in a charnel house, they should bring it forth in its beauty and brightness as a guide to the pleasant places and sparkling waters of earth’s happiness and the radiant messenger of heaven’s exalted hopes. And they should rejoice and be glad that to them the kindling of such high imagination is given. ~ Sarah Josepha Hale Ladies Magazine, November 1830 From the Introduction to Cherishing the Sacred Fire

your smile. is the ultimate golden dream. all the poems in the world are waking up from.

Your words... I hold them deep like ancient skins hold wrinkles.

You touched my heart...ever so softly and I realized tears had never been...merely salt and the rain Oh the Rain! had never been merely water.

When you read a poem, you may not get out of it all that the poet put into it, but you are different from the poet. You’re different from everybody else who is going to read the poem, so you should take from it what you need. Use it personally.

Without space, there is no time.

Words have never belonged to those who wrote them. Always to those who needed then.

#Writers, #artists , and #poets don't get the respect they deserve until they are either dead, or they cut off an ear Mozaiah T.

You ask if I will write a poem I could, I suppose write the most splendiferous one of all but not right now not when your hands are brewing warm cinnamon tea across my skin not when I’m trying to imagine what might happen if you began flowering kisses upon me My dear, how can I write a poem when I’m already inside one?

You either a poet or a homosexual." "Oh, shit, that's fucked up. Why can't I be both?

Your head is a lit chamber.

You tell me you are a poet. If so, our destination is the same. I find myself now the boatman, driving a taxi at the end of the world. I will see that you arrive safely, my friend, I will get you there.

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.

99% of natural poets discovered their talents through love letters.

A change of style is a change of meaning.

Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets, but humbler folk may circumvent this restriction if they know how.

A chronic poet should always be an inveterate nature-lover.