Poetry Quotes
Plato
Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.
4776 Santosh Kalwar
I don't care what you say to me. I care what you share with me.
4948 Aberjhani
The words ‘I Love You’ kill, and resurrect millions, in less than a second.
3830 Leonard Cohen
Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.
1019 Aberjhani
Each star is a mirror reflecting the truth inside you.
1549 Robert M. Drake
Look deeper through the telescope
and do not be afraid when the stars
collide towards the darkness,
because sometimes the most beautiful
things begin in chaos.
2141 Delano Johnson
I’m a man of integrity. My heart is locked and I have given you the only key.
2475 Miroslav Antić
These are your poems. Don’t ask how I discovered your thoughts. Maybe sometimes I was: you. Maybe sometimes you were also me a bit. Maybe together we were the world.
1869 Miroslav Antić
Ovo su tvoje pesme. Ne pitaj kako sam saznao šta misliš. Možda sam ponekad bio: ti. Možda si i ti pomalo bio ja. Možda smo zajedno bili ceo svet.
4318 Miroslav Antić
Moj dom je moja zemlja, a ona je na nebu. Moj dom je, dakle, nebo. A ono je u svemiru.
Moj dom je, dakle, vasiona. A ona je u mojoj glavi. Znači da ja nemam drugog zavičaja – sem sebe!
3325 N. Scott Momaday
As far as I am concerned, poetry is a statement concerning the human condition, composed in verse.
3039 Pablo Neruda
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close.
2797 Pablo Neruda
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.
3384 Robert Frost
We love the things we love for what they are.
1152 Charlotte Brontë
All my heart is yours, sir: it belongs to you; and with you it would remain, were fate to exile the rest of me from your presence forever.
4292 Sara Teasdale
Stephen kissed me in the spring,
Robin in the fall,
But Colin only looked at me
And never kissed at all.
Stephen’s kiss was lost in jest,
Robin’s lost in play,
But the kiss in Colin’s eyes
Haunts me night and day.
1722 Rumi
I know you're tired but come, this is the way.
3009 Pablo Neruda
I am no longer in love with her, that's certain, but maybe I love her. Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
3401 William Shakespeare
Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no, it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken."
(Sonnet 116)
2359 Charles Bukowski
some moments are nice, some are
nicer, some are even worth
writing
about.
1904 Margaret Atwood
A truth should exist,
it should not be used
like this. If I love you
is that a fact or a weapon?
2491 Andrea Gibson
That night when you kissed me, I left a poem in your mouth, and you can hear some of the lines every time you breathe out.
2334 Roman Payne
She is free in her wildness, she is a wanderess, a drop of free water. She knows nothing of borders and cares nothing for rules or customs. 'Time' for her isn’t something to fight against. Her life flows clean, with passion, like fresh water.
4779 E.A. Bucchianeri
Falling in love is very real, but I used to shake my head when people talked about soul mates, poor deluded individuals grasping at some supernatural ideal not intended for mortals but sounded pretty in a poetry book. Then, we met, and everything changed, the cynic has become the converted, the sceptic, an ardent zealot.
4892 Jess C. Scott
Maybe you could be mine / or maybe we’ll be entwined / aimless in this sexless foreplay.
4590 Roman Payne
You must give everything to make your life as beautiful as the dreams that dance in your imagination.
1319 Lang Leav
Love is a game
of tic-tac-toe,
constantly waiting
for the next x or o.
2199 Ovid
I am the poet of the poor, because I was poor when I loved; since I could not give gifts, I gave words.
1240 Lao Tzu
We join spokes together in a wheel,
but it is the center hole
that makes the wagon move.
We shape clay into a pot,
but it is the emptiness inside
that holds whatever we want.
We hammer wood for a house,
but it is the inner space
that makes it livable.
We work with being,
but non-being is what we use.
3071 Christopher Brennan
Were knowledge all, what were our need
To thrill and faint and sweetly bleed?
2800 Jeffrey McDaniel
There's two kinds of women-those you write poems about and those you don't.
4874 Robert Frost
Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee
And I'll forgive Thy great big one on me.
3794 Jasper Fforde
Whereas story is processed in the mind in a straightforward manner, poetry bypasses rational thought and goes straight to the limbic system and lights it up like a brushfire. It's the crack cocaine of the literary world.
3576 Chad Sugg
If you're reading this...
Congratulations, you're alive.
If that's not something to smile about,
then I don't know what is.
2256 Mary Oliver
To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.
3910 Roman Payne
I was an adventurer, but she was not an adventuress. She was a 'wanderess.' Thus, she didn’t care about money, only experiences - whether they came from wealth or from poverty, it was all the same to her.
1954 Rainer Maria Rilke
She who reconciles the ill-matched threads
Of her life, and weaves them gratefully
Into a single cloth –
It’s she who drives the loudmouths from the hall
And clears it for a different celebration.
2716 Roman Payne
When she was a child, my love carried a road-map in her hand the way other girls carried handkerchiefs. She always knew the way. Her feet were little wings. And her beautiful head was a compass.
1592 Dejan Stojanovic
To risk life to save a smile on a face of a woman or a child is the secret of chivalry.
1215 Dylan Thomas
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
2776 John Boyle O'Reilly
Be silent and safe - silence never betrays you;
Be true to your word and your work and your friend;
Put least trust in him who is foremost to praise you,
Nor judge of a road till it draw to the end.
1261 Robert M. Drake
She was a beautiful dreamer. The kind of girl, who kept her head in the clouds, loved above the stars and left regret beneath the earth she walked on.
2700 Fernando Pessoa
To be great, be whole;
Exclude nothing, exaggerate nothing that is not you.
Be whole in everything. Put all you are
Into the smallest thing you do.
So, in each lake, the moon shines with splendor
Because it blooms up above.
4677 Neil Gaiman
If you only write when inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you'll never be a novelist.
4178 Charles Slagle
The statement ‘There is nothing more American than an Indian’ happens to be a multidimensional paradox. Try and not say too many of those. That might open your mind to ideas that could cause sanity point loss.
1887 Aberjhani
Poetry and art nourish the soul of the world with the flavor-filled substances of beauty, wisdom and truth.
3481 Dejan Stojanovic
Nature is an outcry, unpolished truth; the art - a euphemism - tamed wilderness.
2656 Sheeba Shamsudeen
I wish to get you out of my veins, but you are my third skin; I can't rub you off.
2067 Dejan Stojanovic
The same word we love and hate, leaves in different directions, taking different paths.
4597 Marlen Komar
Speak to the breeze cautiously during those lonely summer nights.
2266 Marlen Komar
And me, standing under the splintered night,
catching fractured glimpses into the black behind the black,
hearing the prayers of stars, the angry whispers of the dark summer night.
Its voice cracks,
on your name.
My eyes close,
on your name.
3859 Marlen Komar
The stars, like the hollow eyes of a god forgotten, marry the sadness of the exhausted hour and inspire a little chaos, a little gentleness, to those below.
I look up at the sky and see everything I’ve ever lost,
waiting for me.
4379 Sylvia Plath
How can I tell Bob that my happiness streams from having wrenched a piece out of my life, a piece of hurt and beauty, and transformed it to typewritten words on paper? How can he know I am justifying my life, my keen emotions, my feeling, by turning it into print?
3420 Edgar Allan Poe
The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.
1788 Charles Bukowski
girls
please give your
bodies and your
lives
to
the young men
who
deserve them
besides
there is
no way
I would welcome
the
intolerable
dull
senseless hell
you would bring
me
and
I wish you
luck
in bed
and
out
but not
in
mine
than
3978 Omar Khayyam
This world
that was our home
for a brief spell
never brought us anything
but pain and grief;
its a shame that not one of our problems
was ever solved.
We depart
with a thousand regrets
in our hearts.
1449 Robert M. Drake
Death is the easy part, the hard part is living and knowing you could be so much more then you’re willing to be.
3241 Roman Payne
With the need for the self in the time of another / I left my seaport grim and dear / knowing good work could be made / in the state governed by both Hope and Despair.
2329 Virginia Woolf
A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her understanding, or will refuse, though the rapier is denied him, to run through the body with his pen.
4751 Dylan Thomas
A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him.
2927 Randall Jarrell
A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.
4562 Pablo Neruda
I want to see thirst
In the syllables,
Tough fire
In the sound;
Feel through the dark
For the scream.
2831 Truman Capote
To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the music the words make.
1521 Virginia Woolf
Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?
1913 Robert Frost
A poem begins with a lump in the throat; a homesickness or a love sickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.
2472 Saul Williams
They say that I am a poet
I wonder what they would say if they saw me from the inside I bottle
emotions and place them into the sea for others to unbottle on
distant shores I am unsure as to whether they ever reach and for
that matter as to whether I ever get my point across
or my love
4215 Nikki Giovanni
and sometimes I sit
down at my typewriter
and I think
not of someone
cause there isn't anyone
to think
about and i wonder
is it worth it
4838 Nâzım Hikmet
… and the most beautiful words ever spoken, I have not yet said to you.
3098 Kim Addonizio
. . . All artists’ work is autobiographical. Any writer’s work is a map of their psyche. You can really see what their concerns are, what their obsessions are, and what interests them.
2741 John Berryman
You should always be trying to write a poem you are unable to write, a poem you lack the technique, the language, the courage to achieve. Otherwise you're merely imitating yourself, going nowhere, because that's always easiest.
2582 Muriel Rukeyser
No one wants to read poetry. You have to make it impossible for them to put the poem down-impossible for them to stop reading it, word after word. You have to keep them from closing the book.
2058 Seamus Heaney
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
2763 Virginia Woolf
Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces.
1675 Pat Conroy
Writing poetry and reading books causes brain damage.
2642 A. Saleh
When you write about what you dream, you become a writer.
When you dream about what you write, you become haunted by a curse.
3057 Marina Tsvetaeva
Don't you know no one can escape
the power of creatures reaching out
with breath alone?
2422 Umberto Eco
Rem tene, verba sequentur: grasp the subject, and the words will follow. This, I believe, is the opposite of what happens with poetry, which is more a case of verba tene, res sequenter: grasp the words, and the subject will follow.
4511 George Orwell
He drove his mind into the abyss where poetry is written.
3287 Dorianne Laux
Who you are contributes to your poetry in a number of important ways, but you shouldn't identify with your poems so closely that when they are cut, you're the one that bleeds.
2515 Julio Cortázar
Wordplay hides a key to reality that the dictionary tries in vain to lock inside every free word.
4070 Dorianne Laux
We aren't suggesting that mental instability or unhappiness makes one a better poet, or a poet at all; and contrary to the romantic notion of the artist suffering for his or her work, we think these writers achieved brilliance in spite of their suffering, not because of it.
4021 Julian Barnes
Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.
2638 David Almond
I sit in my tree
I sing like the birds
My beak is my pen
My songs are my poems.
3577 Katerina Stoykova Klemer
Writing is not a matter of time, but a matter or of space. If you don't keep space in your head for writing, you won't write even if you have the time.
1029 Robert Frost
A poem is never a put-up job, so to speak. It begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is never a thought to begin with.
2561 Kim Addonizio
Maybe you're one of those people who writes poems, but rarely reads them. Let me put this as delicately as I can: If you don't read, your writing is going to suck.
3514 Lang Leav
I don't think all writers are sad, she said.
I think it's the other way around -
all sad people write.
3555 Seamus Heaney
I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
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