Poems Quotes

1. "PhilosophyI studied philosophy for four years. But I'd trade everything I learned for this passage... quoted in the Britannica:'But we were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments? Or our treaties whatever they may be worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted into battlefields; our dreams however rarely they may be accomplished. The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses.'Amen."
Author: A.J. Jacobs

2. "We may feel bitterly how little our poems can do in the face of seemingly out of control technological power and seemingly limitless corporate greed, yet it has always been true that poetry can break isolation, show us to ourselves when we are outlawed or made invisible, remind us of beauty where no beauty seems possible, remind us kinship where all is represented as separation."(Defy the Space That Separates, The Nation, October 7, 1996)"
Author: Adrienne Rich

3. "Writing poems is my way of celebrating with the world that I have not committed suicide the evening before."
Author: Alice Walker

4. "I'd cut my soul into a million different pieces just to form a constellation to light your way home. I'd write love poems to the parts of yourself you can't stand. I'd stand in the shadows of your heart and tell you I'm not afraid of your dark."
Author: Andrea Gibson

5. "The best public poems aren't necessarily those that go at the subject like a bull at a gate."
Author: Andrew Motion

6. "Keats writes better about poems than anybody I've ever read. The things that he says about what he wants his own poems to be are the ideals that I share."
Author: Andrew Motion

7. "Poems open doors;that don't even exist."
Author: Basith

8. "I tried hard to imagine my poems or any poems as machines that could make things happen, changing the government, or the economy or even their language, the body or its sensorium, but I could not imagine this, could not even imagine imagining it. And yet when I imagined the total victory of those other things over poetry, when I imagined, with a sinking feeling, a world without even the terrible excuses for poems that kept faith with the virtual possibilities of the medium, without the sort of absurd ritual I'd participated in that evening then I intuited an inestimable loss, a loss not of artworks but of art, and therefore infinite, the total triumph of the actual, and I realized that, in such a world, I would swallow a bottle of white pills."
Author: Ben Lerner

9. "The poet Robert Browning caused considerable consternation by including the word twat in one of his poems, thinking it an innocent term. The work was Pippa Passes, written in 1841 and now remembered for the line "God's in His heaven, all's right with the world." But it also contains this disconcerting passage: Then owls and batsCowls and twatsMonks and nuns in a cloister's moods,Adjourn to the oak-stump pantry!Browning had apparently somewhere come across the word twat--which meant precisely the same then as it does now--but pronounced it with a flat a and somehow took it to mean a piece of headgear for nuns. The verse became a source of twittering amusement for generations of schoolboys and a perennial embarrassment to their elders, but the word was never altered and Browning was allowed to live out his life in wholesome ignorance because no one could think of a suitably delicate way of explaining his mistake to him."
Author: Bill Bryson

10. "When you draw, you copy the world don't you? You remake it on paper, but it isn't the same. It's yours. No one else could have created it just like that. When I make poems, I use the words we all use, but the order and the sound create a new power. This wood is someone's creation. We stumble through it's tendrils, as if we're crawling through the synapses of his mind."
Author: Catherine Fisher

11. "I love you," he writes again and again. "I can't bear to live without you. I'm counting the minutes until I see you." The words he uses are the idioms of popular songs and poems in the newspaper. And mine to him are no less cliched. I puzzle over the onionskin, trying to spill my heart onto the page. But I can only come up with the same words, in the same order, and hope the depth of feeling beneath them gives them weight and substance. I love you. I miss you. Be careful. Be safe."
Author: Christina Baker Kline

12. "I know you and Iare not about poems orother sentimental bullshitbut I have to tell youeven the way you drink your coffeeknocks me the fuck out."
Author: Clementine Von Radics

13. "Blue eyes. No, not just blue, blue like glacial waters, like romantic poems, like heavens and moonstones. Cornflower blue. And-Blue like romantic poems? What the everliving fuck? (Austin)"
Author: Dani Alexander

14. "Poems are lenses, mirrors, and X-ray machines."
Author: David Mitchell

15. "The great poems are not about experience, but are the experience itself, felt in the body."
Author: David Whyte

16. "The poet lives and writes at the frontier between deep internal experience and the revelations of the outer world. There is no going back for the poet once this frontier has been reached; a new territory is visible and what has been said cannot be unsaid. The discipline of poetry is in overhearing yourself say difficult truths from which it is impossible to retreat. Poetry is a break for freedom. In a sense all poems are good; all poems are an emblem of courage and the attempt to say the unsayable; but only a few are able to speak to something universal yet personal and distinct at the same time; to create a door through which others can walk into what previously seemed unobtainable realms, in the passage of a few short lines."
Author: David Whyte

17. "I think I'm a very good reader of poetry, but obviously, like everybody, I have a set of criteria for reading poems, and I'm not shy about presenting them, so if people ask for my critical response to a poem, I tell them what works and why, and what doesn't work and why."
Author: Diane Wakoski

18. "Poems have ideas. The ideas of poems come out of their emotions and their emotions are carried on images."
Author: E.L. Doctorow

19. "The poems turned up everywhere. Soon the lady of the house went into fits of hysteria when she kept discovering this attack of poetry in the most unlikely places—under doors, in the mother-of-pearl latticework of windowpanes, under jars, stones, flowerpots, loaves of bread, and even delivered by homing pigeons, around whose rose-coloured claws the young matador lovingly wound poems in which he declaimed his love in the quaint language whose provenance was unknown to the world and still evoked images of the uninterrupted empires of Visigiths, the unbridled lust of the Huns and the intransigence of the Berbers. The young maiden recognized only a few words, but to her they were fragments of a secret music: zirimiri, fine rain; senaremaztac, husband and wife; nik behar diren guzian eginen ditut, I shall do everything necessary...."
Author: Eric Gamalinda

20. "I was writing notes, but not composing poems. The Hunter began to develop out of this fragmented process."
Author: George Murray

21. "Ye are better than all the balladsThat ever were sung or said;For ye are living poems,And all the rest are dead."
Author: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

22. "If you read Keats's poems, they're often full of doubts and anxieties. They can be quite tough."
Author: Jane Campion

23. "I want to learn the language of the sun, and burn Agatha's eyes out with my love poems."
Author: Jarod Kintz

24. "These ears aren't to be trusted.The keening in the night, didn't you hear?Once I believed all the stories didn't have endings,but I realized the endings were invented, like zero,had yet to be imagined.The months come around again, and we are in the same place;full moons, cherries in bloom,the same deer, the same frogs, the same helpless scratching at the dirt. You leave poems I can't read behind on the sheets, I try to teach you songs made of twigs and frost.you may be imprisoned in an underwater palace;I'll come riding to the rescue in disguise. Leave the magic tricks to me and to the teakettle.I've inhaled the spells of willow trees,spat them out as blankets of white crane feathers.Sleep easy, from behind the closet doorI'll invent our fortunes, spin them from my own skin.(from, The Fox-Wife's Invitation)"
Author: Jeannine Hall Gailey

25. "We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words."
Author: John Fowles

26. "The ancients waited for cherry blossoms, grieved when they were gone, and lamented their passing in countless poems. How very ordinary the poems had seemed to Sachiko when she read them as a girl, but now she knew, as well as one could know, that grieving over fallen cherry blossoms was more than a fad or convention."
Author: Jun'ichirō Tanizaki

27. "My face responds without authorization from my brain, so the resulting smile feels like the biggest, most unguarded, goofiest smile I've ever unleashed in my entire life. I didn't even know my face could do this. It's like there were hidden zippers in my cheeks. Jesus. This must be what feelings are. This is why people write poems! I get it now. I get it, and I want more."
Author: Laini Taylor

28. "The more I read my poems, the more I find out about them. I still read them with the same passion I felt when I wrote them as a young man."
Author: Linton Kwesi Johnson

29. "In my godless household, poems were the closest we came to sacred speech -- the only prayers said."
Author: Mary Karr

30. "For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry."
Author: Mary Oliver

31. "Teaching English is (as professorial jobs go) unusually labor-intensive and draining. To do it well, you have to spend a lot of time coaching students individually on their writing and thinking. Strangely enough, I still had a lot of energy for this student-oriented part of the job. Rather, it was _books_ that no longer interested me, drama and fiction in particular. It was as though a priest, in midcareer, had come to doubt the reality of transubstantiation. I could still engage with poems and expository prose, but most fiction seemed the product of extremities I no longer wished to visit. So many years of Zen training had reiterated, 'Don't get lost in the drama of life,' and here I had to stand around in a classroom defending Oedipus."
Author: Mary Rose O'Reilley

32. "Read my poems quite slowlyOr should I say listen closely"
Author: Mr.Yoso

33. "In our period, they say there is free speech. They say there is no penalty for poets, There is no penalty for writing poems. They say this. This is the penalty."
Author: Muriel Rukeyser

34. "I reached for the notebook which was always close by. All thoughts of composing epic poems of Greek heroes had left me. The words that often burst from my onto the paper in recent days would be considered mere nothings to the world, but they were everything to me . . . They were the pourings of my heart FOR my heart . . ."
Author: Nancy Moser

35. "Ahead and to the west was our ranger station - and the mountains of Idaho, poems of geology stretching beyond any boundaries and seemingly even beyond the world."
Author: Norman Maclean

36. "Without any assistance or guidance from youi have loved you assiduously for 8 months 2 wks & a dayi have been stood up four timesi've left 7 packages on yr doorstepforty poems 2 plants & 3 handmade notecards i lefttown so i cd send to you have been no help to meon my jobyou call at 3:00 in the mornin on weekdaysso i cd drive 27 1/2 miles cross the bay before i go to workcharmin charminbut you are of no assistancei want you to knowthis waz an experimentto see how selifsh i cd beif i wd really carry on to snare a possible loverif i waz capable of debasin my self for the love of anotherif i cd stand not being wantedwhen i wanted to be wanted& i cannotsowith no further assistance & no guidance from youi am endin this affairthis note is attached to a planti've been waterin since the day i met youyou may water ityr damn self"
Author: Ntozake Shange

37. "I work on words quite separately to music. They're both ongoing, and I don't ever feel like I'm working in a cycle in that respect, because it's every day anyway, no matter what I'm doing. Then I get to a point when I've collected together enough words that seem like they want to be songs rather than poems, or sometimes not."
Author: P. J. Harvey

38. "A poem, as a manifestation of language and thus essentially dialogue, can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the –not always greatly hopeful-belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land, on heartland perhaps. Poems in this sense too are under way: they are making toward something. Toward what? Toward something standing open, occupiable, perhaps toward an addressable Thou, toward an addressable reality."
Author: Paul Celan

39. "Poems are never finished - just abandoned"
Author: Paul Valéry

40. "Every so often I find some poems that are too good for the readers of The Atlantic because they are a little too involved with the nature of poetry, as such."
Author: Peter Davison

41. "It's easy to understand why the most beautiful poems about England in the spring were written by poets living in Italy at the time."
Author: Philip Dunne

42. "There must of course be a relationship between translating and making poems of your own, but what it is I just don't know."
Author: Robert Fitzgerald

43. "But give thanks, at least, that you still have Frost's poems; and when you feel the need of solitude, retreat to the companionship of moon, water, hills and trees. Retreat, he reminds us, should not be confused with escape. And take these poems along for good luck!"
Author: Robert Graves

44. "Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you fore defeated Challengers of oblivion Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down, The square-limbed Roman letters Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well Builds his monument mockingly; For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun Die blind and blacken to the heart: Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained thoughts found The honey of peace in old poems."
Author: Robinson Jeffers

45. "People can put their best poems straight onto the web."
Author: Roger McGough

46. "In your light I learn how to love. In your beauty, how to make poems. You dance inside my chest where no-one sees you, but sometimes I do, and that sight becomes this art."
Author: Rumi

47. "In all the poems I've written I've not really engaged in politics, and when I've found myself moving in that direction I've always stopped myself."
Author: Simon Armitage

48. "Do you know what a poem is, Esther?'No, what?' I would say.A piece of dust.'Then, just as he was smiling and starting to look proud, I would say, 'So are the cadavers you cut up. So are the people you think you're curing. They're dust as dust as dust. I reckon a good poem lasts a whole lot longer than a hundred of those people put together.'And of course Buddy wouldn't have any answer to that, because what I said was true. People were made of nothing so much as dust, and I couldn't see that doctoring all that dust was a bit better than writing poems people would remember and repeat to themselves when they were unhappy or sick or couldn't sleep."
Author: Sylvia Plath

49. "He's probably their battle poet, too." "You mean he makes up heroic songs about famous battles?" "No, no. He recites poems that frighten the enemy....When a well-trained gonnagle starts to recite, the enemy's ears explode."
Author: Terry Pratchett

50. "I prefer the absurdity of writing poemsto the absurdity of not writing poems."
Author: Wisława Szymborska

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