c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
... Up telephone poles, Which rear, half out of leavageAs though they would shriekLike things smothered by their ownGreen, mindless, unkillable ghosts.In Georgia, the legend saysThat you must close your windowsAt night to keep it out of the houseThe glass is tinged with green, even so,As the tendrils crawl over the fields.The night the Kudzu hasYour pasture, you sleep like the dead.Silence has grown orientalAnd you cannot step upon the ground...ALL: Kudzu by James Dickey
— James Dickey
Lovers meander in prose and rhyme,trying to say-for the thousandth time-what's easier done than said.
— Piet Hein
The artistic reward for refuting the received national tradition is liberation. The price is homelessness. Interior exile.
— C.D. Wright, Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil
The books [poetry collections] may not sell, but neither are they given away or thrown away. They tend, more than other books, to fall apart in their owners’ hands. Not I suppose good news in a culture and economy built on obsolescence. But for a book to be loved this way and turned to this way for consolation and intense renewable excitement seems to me a marvel.
— Louise Glück
It was her laughter that made me love her. Her shy inappropriate madness is what made her beautiful.
— Jay     Long
I never have time to write anymore. And when I do I only write about how I never have time. It's work and it's money and I've written more lists than songs lately. I stay up all night to do all these things I need to do, be all these things I want to be, playing with shadows in the darkness that shouldn't be able to exist. Empty bottles and cigarettes while watching the sunrise, why do I complain? I have it all, everything I ever asked for.
— Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles; in search for The Great Perhaps
You bear a sword and shield, remind meof her labor, her stoning gaze. What beastwill your blade free next? What call will you loosefrom another woman's throat?
— Donika Kelly, Bestiary: Poems
A versifier passes through the sound
—  sounds go through a poet.
The Throes of Poetry - Hymns formed from groans of acquaintance, its rhythm weaving between tranquility, compassions, and peril - like bare feet stomping on broken glass - bleeds, recoils, then steps again.
— Traci Lea LaRussa
The question ‘Why poetry?’ isn’t asking what makes poetry unique among art forms; poetry may indeed share its origins with other forms of privileged utterance. A somewhat more interesting question would be: “What is the nature of experience, and especially the experience of using language, that calls poetic utterance into existence? What is there about experience that’s unutterable?” You can’t generalize very usefully about poetry; you can’t reduce its nature down to a kernel that underlies all its various incarnations. I guess my internal conversation suggests that if you can’t successfully answer the question of “Why poetry?,” can’t reduce it in the way I think you can’t, then maybe that’s the strongest evidence that poetry’s doing its job; it’s creating an essential need and then satisfying it.
— Richard Ford
Humans have the ability to rewrite history. Within a few decades it is not even questioned. Stories of the past become as real as the world you walk through today. Wars are waged over false history. Sins are denied. All for mankind to move forward and feel comfortable about its past. Your true history is written in the stars. Look up, breathe in, and be humbled by the ones who came before you. The ones who have suffered, who have endured, who have overcome. Their blood is alive in you. Their spirits roam freely in the heavens above.
— Jason E. Hodges, When The Cedars Shade Your Grave
Love doesn’t make you a poet
—  it makes you poetry.
I don’t need the facts. I’m a Pisces.
— Phil Volatile, Crushed Black Velvet
You become a house where the wind blows straight through, because no one bothers the crack in the window or lock on the door, and you’re the house where people come and go as they please, because you’re simply too unimpressed to care. You let people in who you really shouldn’t let in, and you let them walk around for a while, use your bed and use your books, and await the day when they simply get bored and leave. You’re still not bothered, though you knew they shouldn’t have been let in in the first place, but still you just sit there, apathetic like a beggar in the desert.
— Charlotte Eriksson, You're Doing Just Fine
I want to read every book that’s writtenhear every song that was sungI want to gaze at every cloudand hold the zing of each fruit on my tongue.
— Sanober  Khan, A touch, a tear, a tempest
He taught me to be a Da Vinci and I sit here, with his portraits waiting for him to returnI do not think he willIs that what it means to be humanto be all powerful, to build a temple to yourselfand leaveonly the walls to pray
— Phil Kaye, A Light Bulb Symphony
I remember yoursaying: "make itor break it."neither happened anditwon't.
— Charles Bukowski, You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense
Without the wetness of your love, the fragrance of your water, or the trickling sounds of your voice ― I shall always feel thirsty.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
poetrymelts my bones.enters my blood.and changesits composition.
— Sanober  Khan
FRUITS AND NUTSKeep jumping around them like monkeys.The clones,Commercialized zombies,And the TV junkies.Keep throwing berries,Twigs,And nuts at them.Until they wake upTo see what's up And figure out whyWe're laughing at 'em.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
Porque a volar no se aprende solo, pero a caer no se aprende nunca.
— Ernesto Pérez Vallejo, De flotar y otros vuelos
What do they think has happened, the old fools,To make them like this? Do they somehow supposeIt's more grown-up when your mouth hangs open and drools,And you keep on pissing yourself, and can't rememberWho called this morning? Or that, if they only chose,They could alter things back to when they danced all night,Or went to their wedding, or sloped arms some September?Or do they fancy there's really been no change,And they've always behaved as if they were crippled or tight,Or sat through days of thin continuous dreamingWatching the light move? If they don't (and they can't), it's strange;			Why aren't they screaming?
— Philip Larkin, The Complete Poems
I wait on my fix:I am a poetry junkie.
— Charles Bukowski, Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit
Then there's the twoof us. This wordis far too short for us, it has onlyfour letters, too sparseto fill those deep barevacuums between the starsthat press on us with their deafness.It's not love we don't wishto fall into, but that fear.This word is not enough but it willhave to do. It's a singlevowel in this metallicsilence, a mouth that saysO again and again in wonderand pain, a breath, a fingergrip on a cliffside. You canhold on or let go.
— Margaret Atwood, Selected Poems: 1966-1984
It got so bad that Al thoughtmaybe it washimso he went to a shrinkand askedand the shrink said,"you're one of the sanest menI've ever met."poor Al.that made him feelworse than ever.
— Charles Bukowski, You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense
Our CrossOur little circle hides in the mind,It's difficult to miss but hard to find,It goes unspoken but yet it speaks,From backward years to forward weeks,We can't forget but why even try,Two of a kind doesn't know goodbye,It's a silent question that God won't share,A breeze we feel but seems unfair,Distant, rare but only madness can see,It's something deeper than any infinity,Because we walk this parallel path up and down,There is no circle to hold us circus clowns,So let's give it a symbol and label it a loss,We will remember it always as we carry our cross.
— Shannon L. Alder
[…] but she cannot make him eat, like you.
— Warsan Shire, Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth
You ask my love completest,As strong next year as now,The devil take you, sweetest,Ere I make aught such vow.Life is a masque that changes,A fig for constancy!No love at all were better,Than love which is not free.
— Ernest Dowson, The Poems and Prose of Ernest Dowson
No jewels, save my eyes, do I own, but I have a rose which is even softer than my rosy lips. And a quiet youth said: 'There is nothing softer than your heart.' And I lowered my gaze...
— Vladimir Nabokov
Be a poet in action as well as in words.
— Marty Rubin
Sometimes in composition class, when I have been confronted by someone who simply cannot get the first word written on paper, I give the following advice: Say your essay into a tape recorder and then write it down.
— Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Writing Poetry to Save Your Life: How to Find the Courage to Tell Your Stories
If you ask a twenty-one-year-old poet whose poetry he likes, he might say, unblushing, "Nobody's," In his youth, he has not yet understood that poets like poetry, and novelists like novels; he himself likes only the role, the thought of himself in a hat.
— Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
Let my toes teach the shore how to feel a tranquil lifethrough the wetness of sands Let my heart latch the doorof blackness, as all my pain now blue sky understands
— Munia Khan
Poetry led me by the hand out of madness.
— Anne Sexton
I want to unfold.I don’t want to be folded anywhere,because where I am folded,there I am a lie.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God
Never fear the thing you feel-- Only by love is life made real
— Sara Teasdale, Love Songs
Poverty of young men alone behind thestairways, who practicealchemy inside bottle caps, who knowthe altruism of a last syringe.
— Jim Carroll, Fear of Dreaming: The Selected Poems
Let me begin again as a speckof dust caught in the night windssweeping out to sea. Let me beginthis time knowing the world issalt water and dark clouds, the worldis grinding and sighing all night, and dawncomes slowly, and changes nothing.
— Philip Levine, 7 Years from Somewhere: Poems
I wind up stretched across the couchstill nodding with Sherlock Holmesexamining our crushed veins
— Jim Carroll
It is true that there is not enough beauty in the world. It is also true that I am not competent to restore it. Neither is there candor, and here I may be of some use.
— Louise Glück, Averno
But yester-night I prayed aloud In anguish and in agony, Up-starting from the fiendish crowd Of shapes and thoughts that tortured me: A lurid light, a trampling throng, Sense of intolerable wrong, And whom I scorned, those only strong! Thirst of revenge, the powerless will Still baffled, and yet burning still! Desire with loathing strangely mixed On wild or hateful objects fixed. Fantastic passions! maddening brawl! And shame and terror over all! Deeds to be hid which were not hid, Which all confused I could not know Whether I suffered, or I did: For all seemed guilt, remorse or woe, My own or others still the same Life-stifling fear, soul-stifling shame.
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Complete Poems
To wander solitary there:Two paradises ‘twere in oneTo live in paradise alone.
— Andrew Marvell
I believed even then that if I could transform my experience into poetry I would give it the value and dignity it did not begin to possess on its own. I thought too that if I could write about it I could come to understand it; I believed that if I could understand my life—or at least the part my work played in it—I could embrace it with some degree of joy, an element conspicuously missing from my life.
— Philip Levine
I hear they make greeting cards now to thank your therapist... for NOTHING
— Casey Renee Kiser, Swan Wreck
There are strange things done in the midnight sun By the men who moil for gold; The Arctic trails have their secret tales That would make your blood run cold;The Northern Lights have seen queer sights, But the queerest they ever did see Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge I cremated Sam McGee.
— Robert W. Service, The Cremation of Sam McGee
Where are we going? It’s not an issue of here or there. And if you ever feel you can’t take another step, imagine how you might feel to arrive, if not wiser, a little more aware how to inhabit the middle ground between misery and joy. Trudge on. In the higher regions, where the footing is unsure, to trudge is to survive.
— Stephen Dunn, Lines of Defense: Poems
We real cool. WeLeft school. WeLurk late. WeStrike straight. WeSing sin. WeThin gin. WeJazz June. WeDie soon.
— Gwendolyn Brooks, The Bean Eaters
Aristocracy naturally leads the human mind to the contemplation of the past, and fixes it there. Democracy, on the contrary, gives men a sort of instinctive distaste for what is ancient. In this respect aristocracy is far more favorable to poetry; for things commonly grow larger and more obscure as they are more remote; and, for this two-fold reason, they are better suited to the delineation of the ideal.
— Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
Me too thy nobleness has taughtTo master my despair
— The fountains of my hidden lifeAre through thy friendship fair.
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea.
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan
He [the poet] brings out the inner part of things and presents them to men in such a way that they cannot refuse but must accept it. But how the mere choice and rhythm of words should produce so magical an effect no one has yet been able to comprehend, and least of all the poets themselves.
— Hilaire Belloc
O I never thought that joys would run away from boys,Or that boys would change their minds and forsake such summer joys;But alack I never dreamed that the world had other toys
— John Clare, Poems Chiefly from Manuscript
Down dropt the breeze, the sails dropt down, 'Twas sad as sad could be; And we did speak only to break The silence of the sea! All in a hot and copper sky, The bloody Sun, at noon, Right up above the mast did stand, No bigger than the Moon. Day after day, day after day, We stuck, nor breath nor motion; As idle as a painted ship Upon a painted ocean.
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Other Poems
Promise me no promises, So will I not promise you: Keep we both our liberties, Never false and never true: Let us hold the die uncast, Free to come as free to go: For I cannot know your past, And of mine what can you know?
— Christina Rossetti
Put your mouthful of words away  and come with me to watch  the lilies open in such a field,  growing there like yachts,  slowly steering their petals  without nurses or clocks.
— Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems
I like for you to be still: it is as though you are absentdistant and full of sorrow as though you had diedOne word then, one smile is enoughAnd I'm happy; happy that it's not true
— Pablo Neruda, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
Stasis in darkness.Then the substanceless blue
— Sylvia Plath, Ariel
Love’s language starts, stops, starts; the right words flowing or clotting in the heart.
— Carol Ann Duffy, Rapture
I have no life but this, To lead it here; Nor any death, but lest Dispelled from there; Nor tie to earths to come, Nor action new, Except through this extent, The realm of you.
— Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
Green trees against the sky in the spring rain while the sky set off the spring trees in the obscuration. Red flowers dot the land in the breeze's chase while the land colored up in red after the kiss.
— Gayle Forman, Just One Day
Where had I heard this wind beforeChange like this to a deeper roar?What would it take my standing there for,Holding open a restive door,Looking down hill to a frothy shore?Summer was past and day was past.Somber clouds in the west were massed.Out in the porch's sagging floor,leaves got up in a coil and hissed,Blindly struck at my knee and missed.Something sinister in the toneTold me my secret must be known:Word I was in the house aloneSomehow must have gotten abroad,Word I was in my life alone,Word I had no one left but God.
— Robert Frost
And tell me everything, tell chain by chain, and link by link, and step by step; sharpen the knives you kept hidden away, thrust them into my breast, into my hands, like a torrent of sunbursts, an Amazon of buried jaguars, and leave me cry: hours, days and years, blind ages, stellar centuries.
— Pablo Neruda, The Heights of Macchu Picchu
Is there a better method of departure by night than this quiet bon voyage with an open book, the sole companion who has come to see you off, to wave you into the dark waters beyond language?
— Billy Collins, Questions About Angels
Old age doth in sharp pains abound;We are belabored by the gout,Our blindness is a dark profound,Our deafness each one laughs about.Then reason's light with falling rayDoth but a trembling flicker cast.Honor to age, ye children pay!Alas! my fifty years are past!
— Pierre-Jean de Béranger
In pride, in reasoning pride, our error lies;All quit their sphere and rush into the skies.Pride still is aiming at the blest abodes, Men would be angels, angels would be gods. Aspiring to be gods, if angels fell, Aspiring to be angels, men rebel.
— Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man & Satires
I'm everyone everywhere with you without you unbound set free in limbo lost at sea.
— Bryan Lee O'Malley
My sincere thanks to friends and family, especially my mother, father, brother, and Mandy, who continue to love and support me despite my obsessions.
— Jonathan Ball, Ex Machina
How are you supposed to know what to read next? This is the question that keeps us up at night, so at Day One our mission is to feed an audience of literature-hungry, time-constrained readers like you with a weekly lineup of talented authors, poets, and artists that we believe you will love. And if we can identify some of the next generation of literary stars, and cultivate an appreciation for transformative poetry and fiction, then frankly we will sleep better at night.
— Carmen Johnson
A mí me ha tocado no estar contigo
—  no tengo miradas para encontrarteni hay cosa en que pueda reconocerte.
Adrijene, nemoj da se duriš!Vrati se!U redu grešila samduge godine nisam se vracala kuci,ali sam ti uvek krilada je to zato što sam bila u zatvoru!Grešila sam priznajemcesto sam tukla psa,ali sam te volela!Adrijene, nemoj da se duriš!Vrati se!
— Jacques Prévert
Les rêves sont seuls les réalités de la vie.
— Xavier Forneret
Mind's acres are forever green: Oh, IShall keep perpetual summer here; I shallRefuse to let one startled swallow die,Or, from the copper beeches, one leaf fall.
— Stanley Kunitz
It is our fate to give ourselves most lavishlyto those who'd rather not be burdened with the gift
— Rodney Hall, The Owner of My Face: New & Selected Poems
Ik weet nietof er woorden bestaandie de geur van je huidkunnen vangen, het beweeglijkelicht in je ogen, de warmtedie in me opspringt zodraje me aanraakt, het rullegevoel van je haaraan mijn vingertoppen,de bloemblaadjestere huidvan je oogleden tegenmijn lippen.Als daar woorden voor waren,kon ik alles snelvastleggen op papiervoor als je er niet bent(en dat is dikwijls).
— Hanny Michaelis, Verzamelde gedichten
1.I told you that I was a roadway of potholes, not safe to cross. You said nothing, showed up in my driveway wearing roller-skates.2.The first time I asked you on a date, after you hung up, I held the air between our phones against my ear and whispered, “You will fall in love with me. Then, just months later, you will fall out. I will pretend the entire time that I don’t know it’s coming.”3.Once, I got naked and danced around your bedroom, awkward and safe. You did the same. We held each other without hesitation and flailed lovely. This was vulnerability foreplay.4.The last eight times I told you I loved you, they sounded like apologies.5.You recorded me a CD of you repeating, “You are beautiful.” I listened to it until I no longer thought in my own voice.6.Into the half-empty phone line, I whispered, “We will wake up believing the worst in each other. We will spit shrapnel at each other’s hearts. The bruises will lodge somewhere we don’t know how to look for and I will still pretend I don’t know its coming.”7.You photographed my eyebrow shapes and turned them into flashcards: mood on one side, correct response on the other. You studied them until you knew when to stay silent.8.I bought you an entire bakery so that we could eat nothing but breakfast for a week. Breakfast, untainted by the day ahead, was when we still smiled at each other as if we meant it.9.I whispered, “I will latch on like a deadbolt to a door and tell you it is only because I want to protect you. Really, I’m afraid that without you I mean nothing.”10.I gave you a bouquet of plane tickets so I could practice the feeling of watching you leave.11.I picked you up from the airport limping. In your absence, I’d forgotten how to walk. When I collapsed at your feet, you refused to look at me until I learned to stand up without your help.12.Too scared to move, I stared while you set fire to your apartment – its walls decaying beyond repair, roaches invading the corpse of your bedroom. You tossed all the faulty appliances through the smoke out your window, screaming that you couldn’t handle choking on one more thing that wouldn’t just fix himself.13.I whispered, “We will each weed through the last year and try to spot the moment we began breaking. We will repel sprint away from each other. Your voice will take months to drain out from my ears. You will throw away your notebook of tally marks from each time you wondered if I was worth the work. The invisible bruises will finally surface and I will still pretend that I didn’t know it was coming.”14.The entire time, I was only pretending that I knew it was coming.
— Miles Walser
Ah! The anguish, the vile rage, the despairOf not being able to expressWith a shout, an extreme and bitter shout,The bleeding of my heart.
— Fernando Pessoa, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems
What is this life so full of care,We don't have time to stand and stare.
— W.H. Davies, The Collected Poems of William H. Davies; With a Portrait
This man has talent, that man geniusAnd here's the strange and cruel difference:Talent gives pence and his reward is gold,Genius gives gold and gets no more than pence.
— W.H. Davies
Only--but this is rare--When a beloved hand is laid in ours,When, jaded with the rush and glareOf the interminable hours, Our eyes can in another's eyes read clear,When our world-deafen'd earIs by the tones of a loved voice caress'd--A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast,And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again.The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain,And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know.A man becomes aware of his life's flow,And hears its winding murmur; and he seesThe meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze.
— Matthew Arnold, The Poems of Matthew Arnold 1849 - 1867
Yes, I am proud; I must be proud to seeMen not afraid of God afraid of me.
— Alexander Pope
Memory revises me.
— Li-Young Lee, The City in Which I Love You
brave love, dreamnot of staunching such strict flame, but come,lean to my wound; burn on, burn on.
— Sylvia Plath
SPRING POEMIt is spring, my decision, the earthferments like rising breador refuse, we are burninglast year's weeds, the smokeflares from the road, the clumped stalksglow like sluggish phoenixes / it wasn'tonly my fault / birdsongs burst fromthe feathered pods of their bodies, dandelionswhirl their blades upwards, from beneaththis decaying board a snakesidewinds, chained hidesmelling of reptile sex / the hensroll in the dust, squinting with bliss, frogbodiesbloat like bladders, contract, stringthe pond with living jellyeyes, can I be thisruthless? I plungemy hands and arms into the dirt,swim among stones and cutworms,come up rank as a fox,restless. Nights, while seedlingsdig near my headI dream of reconciliationswith those I have hurtunbearably, we move stilltouching over the greening fields, the futurewounds folded like seedsin our tender fingers, daysI go for vicious walks past the charredroadbed over the bashed stubbleadmiring the view, avoidingthose I have not hurtyet, apocalypse coiled in my tongue,it is spring, I am searchingfor the word:finishedfinishedso I can begin overagain, some yearI will take this word too far.
— Margaret Atwood, You are Happy
Nobody can tell you about that sword all that there is to be told of it; for those that know of those paths of Space on which its metals once floated, till Earth caught them one by one as she sailed past on her orbit, have little time to waste on such things as magic and so cannot tell you how the sword was made, and those who know whence poetry is, and the need that man has for song, or know any one of the fifty branches of magic, have little time to waste on such things as science, and so cannot tell you whence its ingredients came. Enough that it was once beyond our Earth and was now here amongst our mundane stones; that it was once but as those stones, and now had something in it such as soft music has; let those that can define it.
— Lord Dunsany, The King of Elfland's Daughter
Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.
— Guillaume Apollinaire
How do I learn to speakwhen silence is all I know?
— Susie Clevenger, Dirt Road Dreams
I fain would follow love, if that could be; I needs must follow death, who calls for me; Call and I follow, I follow! let me die.
— Alfred Tennyson, Idylls of the King
The still watersWrap my lips,Eyes, nose and ears,A clearCellophane I cannot crack.
— Sylvia Plath, Ariel
He said he'd hurt himself against a wall or had fallen down.But there was probably some other reason for the wounded, the bandaged shoulder.With a rather abrupt gesture, reaching for a shelf to bring down some photographs he wanted to look at, the bandage came came undone and a little blood ran.I did it up again, taking my time over the binding; he wasn't in pain and I liked looking at the blood. It was a thing of my love, that blood.When he left, I found, in front of his chair, a bloody rag, part of the dressing, a rag to be thrown straight into the garbage; and I put it to my lips and kept it there a long while- the blood of love against my lips.
— Constantinos P. Cavafis
Next o'er his books his eyes began to roll,In pleasing memory of all he stole.
— Alexander Pope, The Dunciad
He sits, strong and blunt as a Celtic cross, Clearly used to silence and an armchair: Tonight the wife and children will be quiet At slammed door and smoker's cough in the hall.
— Seamus Heaney
In the prison of his daysTeach the free man how to praise
— W.H. Auden
Hesitate once, hesitate twice, hesitate a hundred times before employing political standards as a device for the analysis and appreciation of poetry.
— Christopher Hitchens, Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere
In those days I used to talk to myself as if reciting poetry.
— Haruki Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
You alone in Europe are not ancient oh ChristianityThe most modern European is you Pope Pius XAnd you whom the windows observe shame keeps youFrom entering a church and confessing this morningYou read the prospectuses the catalogues the billboards that sing aloudThat's the poetry this morning and for the prose there are the newspapersThere are the 25 centime serials full of murder mysteriesPortraits of great men and a thousand different headlines("Zone")
— Guillaume Apollinaire, Zone
I dragged myself to my feet, and with my hellhound in tow started off once more through the fastness of the wood, feeling, as the poet did before me, that my companion would be with me through the nights and through the days and down the arches of the years, and I should never be rid of him.
— Daphne du Maurier, The Scapegoat
...fine love poetry tends to be written when the object of one's affection is at a safe distance; also, it often reflects a love of words more than a love of women...
— Kate Fox, Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour
Please lift your snowy skies off my soul -Your diamond dreams slice through my veins
— Else Lasker-Schüler
The glamorous splender of a mystical moon.. Natures sleepless wonders.
— Shamima Mulla
Shadow is ever besieged, for that is its nature. Whilst darkness devours, and light steals. And so one sees shadow ever retreat to hidden places, only to return in the wake of the war between dark and light.
— Steven Erikson, House of Chains
This is life...by all means necessary
— Natasha Head
As often as we made love I remembered what my poet told me, that this man was born of a goddess, the force that moves the stars and the waves of the sea and couples the animals in the fields in spring, the power of passion, the light of the evening star.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia
Nature is bent on new beginningand death has not a chance of winning...
— Rosy Cole, The Twain: Poems of Earth and Ether
Here the phenomenologist has nothing in common with the literary critic who, as has frequently been noted, judges a work that he could not create and, if we are to believe certain facile condemnations, would not want to create. A literary critic is a reader who is necessarily severe. By turning inside out like a glove an overworked complex that has become debased to the point of being part of the vocabulary of statesmen, we might say that the literary critic and the professor of rhetoric, who know-all and judge-all, readily go in for a simplex of superiority. As for me, being an addict of felicitous reading, I only read and re-read what I like, with a bit of reader's pride mixed in with much enthusiasm.
— Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
Aeneas' mother is a star?""No; a goddess."I said cautiously, "Venus is the power that we invoke in spring, in the garden, when things begin growing. And we call the evening star Venus."He thought it over. Perhaps having grown up in the country, among pagans like me, helped him understand my bewilderment. "So do we, he said. "But Venus also became more...With the help of the Greeks. They call her Aphrodite...There was a great poet who praised her in Latin. Delight of men and gods, he called her, dear nurturer. Under the sliding star signs she fills the ship-laden sea and the fruitful earth with her being; through her the generations are conceived and rise up to see the sun; from her the storm clouds flee; to her the earth, the skillful maker, offers flowers. The wide levels of the sea smile at her, and all the quiet sky shines and streams with light..."It was the Venus I had prayed to, it was my prayer, though I had no such words. They filled my eyes with tears and my heart with inexpressible joy.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia
A life without books is a thirsty life, and one without poetry is...like a life without pictures.
— Stephen King
I,” I’ll type. And that will be enough.Then there are the other days, when nothing is enough. The poem grins. It grins because it knows it is a terrible poem. It grins in embarrassment. It grins in pity. It grins in superiority. I may be a terrible poem, it grins, but at least I have one comfort. At least I’m not a terrible poet. At least I’m not the guy who sat in front of a typewriter for two hours coming up with the likes of me.
— Lynn Coady, Mean Boy
[Poetry] was a form of incantation, a means of welding the world inside his head to the one that surrounded him, words the fiery chain that bound it all together.
— Elizabeth Hand, Radiant Days
I want a marriage of companions—one of shared lives and shared poems,' he murmured. 'If we were husband and wife, we would collect books, read, and drink tea together. As I told you before, I'd want you for what's in here.'Again he pointed to my heart, but I felt it in a place far lower in my body.
— Lisa See, Peony in Love
...prose unfolds in time; and time contains both obstacles and revelations. Prose develops, the way characters and situations do. It requires a flow. A poem is an instant, lightning across the sky. Prose is before the storm, the storm, after the storm.
— Molly Peacock
Listen. Outside this frame I can see light,heavy as pardon, reliable as granite.Help me. Help me drag it into the picture.
— Jeanne Murray Walker
maybe silent hurting is the new Mid-Western love
— Daniel Bailey, Hallelujah, Giant Space Wolf
The world is as it used to be:“All nations striving strong to makeRed war yet redder. Mad as hattersThey do no more for Christés sakeThan you who are helpless in such matters.“That this is not the judgment-hourFor some of them’s a blessed thing,For if it were they’d have to scourHell’s floor for so much threatening....“Ha, ha. It will be warmer whenI blow the trumpet (if indeedI ever do; for you are men,And rest eternal sorely need).
— Thomas Hardy
I believe that open-heart surgery is a mustfor all human beings
— Daniel Bailey, Hallelujah, Giant Space Wolf
Poets find their voices when they articulate the wishes of the dead, especially those slain as sacrificial talismans to a larger frame of existence.
— Michael S. Harper
And the testicles of the fathers hang down like old lace
— Robert Penn Warren, New and Selected Poems, 1923-1985
once I trained for the Olympics but panic is not a sport
— Daniel Bailey, Hallelujah, Giant Space Wolf
if what is true brings us sorrow, / if what sorrow brings is truth
— Robert Peake, New Poets, Short Books, Volume V
My whole being is a dark chantthat will carry you perpetuating youto the dawn of eternal growths and blossomingsin this chant I sighed you, ohin this chant,I grafted you to the tree, to the water, to the fire.
— فروغ فرخزاد
Poetry will die when love and pain cease to exist.
— Kellie Elmore
We are all poets, really.
— Walter Lowenfels
something genuine like a mark in a toilet, graced with guts and gutted with grace
— E.E. Cummings, No Thanks
Spring, spring! Bytuene Mershe ant Averil, when spray biginneth to spring! When shaws be sheene and swards full fayre, and leaves both large and longe! When the hounds of spring are on winter’s traces, in the spring time, the only pretty ring time, when the birds do sing, hey-ding-a-ding ding, cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-wee, ta-witta-woo! And so on and so on and so on. See almost any poet between the Bronze Age and 1805.
— George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying
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.
— Robinson Jeffers, Selected Poems
My earliest poems appear almost skeletal to me now - it seems I've learned to add meat, muscle and a nice suit of clothes.
— Wanda Lea Brayton
I don't understand the whole thrilling verse, but I love the way poetry turns ordinary words into winged things that rise up and soar!
— Margarita Engle, The Wild Book
During our first date,I wanted to hold your hand so badI almost cut mine offand threw it at youto see if you would catch it
— Colin Gilbert
Poetry is not an art, it's a symptom.
— Michele Brenton
Every poet will forever try to write the greatest poem ever written, I have found that this kind of poem can be written with “One” word. And that word consists of a beauty beyond any measure to man and one of the most beauty creations to grace the presents of man. That one word poem is…….. “YOU
— Michael    Jones
Poetry is the guardian of love - constructed from truth it is a bridge that can be crossed from either side and it is oblivious of age or gender
— Rodney Compton
Love could never be forever only for a lifetime, only God can love eternally.
— Jeannette Scollard, Divine Intervention
For me, the short story is not a character sketch, a mouse trap, an epiphany, a slice of suburban life. It is the flowering of a symbol center. It is a poem grafted onto sturdier stock.
— William H. Gass
Writing poetry is supernatural. Or, it should be.
— Katerina Stoykova Klemer
I notice you have the assault proof vest -So it's my fault I guess.So apparently I didn't say 'no' as loud as my clothes could say 'yes.'You see I didn't know that my ‘no’ wasn't enough -I didn't understand that my body became less precious because certain dresses make me look hot.And I guess if I'm wearing the wrong topthen my ‘yes’ is the same as ‘stop.’And you shouldn't have to, just because I begged you to.I'm begging you -Tell me the magic outfit and I'll buy it.Apparently my ‘no’ wasn't heard,even when I screamed.So I need my clothes to be quiet.
— Connell, Steve
I walk through the old yellow sunlightto get to my kitchen tablethe poem about melying there with the booksin which I am listedamong the dead and future Dylans
— Leonard Cohen, The Energy of Slaves
I keep following this sort of hidden river of my life, you know, whatever the topic or impulse which comes, I follow it along trustingly. And I don't have any sense of its coming to a kind of crescendo, or of its petering out either. It is just going steadily along.
— William Stafford
Jag föddes för att kränga rosor på de dödas avenyer
— Charles Bukowski, Love Is a Dog from Hell
Haunted by demons of the past, hounded by demons not yet met, the nevermore and evermore left her little peace.” ~A Tale of Two Women
— Kimberly Kinrade, Bits of You & Pieces of Me
The house burned in the fire. Her house. Her prison of lies and of denial. Her American dream turned nightmare.”~Unbreakable Heart
— Kimberly Kinrade, Bits of You & Pieces of Me
I am always trying to 'preserve' things by getting other people to read what I have written, and feel what I felt.
— Philip Larkin, Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica
Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination.
— Jeanette Winterson
Stars are shining, my dreams too
— لطيفة الحاج
I will never take what is never given, but I will receive to what is given.
— Michael    Jones, Drowning Silence Poetry
Fragmentary BlueWhy make so much of fragmentary blueIn here and there a bird, or butterfly,Or flower, or wearing-stone, or open eye,When heaven presents in sheets the solid hue?Since earth is earth, perhaps, not heaven (as yet)--Though some savants make earth include the sky;And blue so far above us comes so high,It only gives our wish for blue a whet.
— Robert Frost
Empty-page staring again tonight. It's maddening. I suppose people who don't write (like the Connollies) imagine anything that can be though can be expressed. Well, I don't know. I can't do it. It's this sort of thing that makes me belittle the whole business: what's the good of a 'talent' if you can't do it when you want to? What should we think of a woodcarver who couldn't woodcarver? or a pianist who couldn't play the piano? Bah, likewise grrr.
— Philip Larkin, Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica
But the detail of the poem shows power akin to genius, and reveals to us that much neglected law of literary history -- that potential genius can never become actual unless it finds or makes the Form which it requires.
— C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition
No sword Of wrath her right arm whirl'd,But one poor poet's scroll, and with his word She shook the world.
— Alfred Tennyson
The faster you go, the idler you get.
— Ferreira Gullar
Demander à la poésie du sentimentalisme ... ce n'est pas ça. Des mots rayonnants, des mots de lumière ... avec un rythme et une musique, voilà ce que c'est, la poésie.
— Théophile Gautier, Pages from the Goncourt Journals
He is a Londoner, too, in his writings. In his familiar letters he displays a rambling urban vivacity, a tendency to to veer off the point and to muddle his syntax. He had a brilliantly eclectic mind, picking up words and images while at the same time forging them in new and unexpected combinations. He conceived several ideas all at once, and sometimes forgot to separate them into their component parts. This was true of his lectures, too, in which brilliant perceptions were scattered in a wilderness of words. As he wrote on another occasion, "The lake babbled not less, and the wind murmured not, nor the little fishes leaped for joy that their tormentor was not." This strangely contorted and convoluted style also characterizes his verses, most of which were appended as commentaries upon his paintings. Like Blake, whose prophetic books bring words and images in exalted combination, Turner wished to make a complete statement. Like Blake, he seemed to consider the poet's role as being in part prophetic. His was a voice calling in the wilderness, and, perhaps secretly, he had an elevated sense of his status and his vocation. And like Blake, too, he was often considered to be mad. He lacked, however, the poetic genius of Blake - compensated perhaps by the fact that by general agreement he is the greater artist.
— Peter Ackroyd, Turner
Kretanje je duša svega što drhti.Započinje tako da se prvo dogodi trenutakonima koji žive trenutak,a onda se, onima koji žive vječnost,vječnost nametne kao bolest.
— Kemal Mujičić Artnam, Zona Zoo
A little bunny or some kind of ferret was probablythere too, and bore witness as only rodents can.
— John Ashbery
If you have a fight work it out, don't get out
— Angel Silva
They miss the whisper that runsany day in your mind,"Who are you really, wanderer?"--and the answer you have to giveno matter how dark and coldthe world around you is:"Maybe I'm a king.
— William Stafford
the bouquetBetween me and the worldyou are a bay, a sailthe faithful ends of a ropeyou are a fountain, a wind, a shrill childhood cry.Between me and the worldyou are a picture frame, a windowa field covered in wildflowersyou are a breath, a bed,a night that keeps the stars company.Between me and the world, you are a calendar, a compassa ray of light that slips through the gloomyou are a biographical sketch, a book marka preface that comes at the end.between me and the worldyou are a gauze curtain, a mista lamp shining in my dreamsyou are a bamboo flute, a song without wordsa closed eyelid carved in stone.Between me and the worldyou are a chasm, a poolan abyss plunging downyou are a balustrade, a walla shield’s eternal pattern.
— Bei Dao
The WeaverMy life is but a weavingbetween my Lord and me;I cannot choose the colorsHe worketh steadily.Oft times He weaveth sorrowAnd I, in foolish pride,Forget He sees the upper,And I the underside.Not til the loom is silentAnd the shuttles cease to fly,Shall God unroll the canvasAnd explain the reason why.The dark threads are as needfulIn the Weaver's skillful hand,As the threads of gold and silverIn the pattern He has planned.
— Benjamin Malachi Franklin
The image of a wood has appeared often enough in English verse. It has indeed appeared so often that it has gathered a good deal of verse into itself; so that it has become a great forest where, with long leagues of changing green between them, strange episodes of poetry have taken place. Thus in one part there are lovers of a midsummer night, or by day a duke and his followers, and in another men behind branches so that the wood seems moving, and in another a girl separated from her two lordly young brothers, and in another a poet listening to a nightingale but rather dreaming richly of the grand art than there exploring it, and there are other inhabitants, belonging even more closely to the wood, dryads, fairies, an enchanter's rout. The forest itself has different names in different tongues- Westermain, Arden, Birnam, Broceliande; and in places there are separate trees named, such as that on the outskirts against which a young Northern poet saw a spectral wanderer leaning, or, in the unexplored centre of which only rumours reach even poetry, Igdrasil of one myth, or the Trees of Knowledge and Life of another. So that indeed the whole earth seems to become this one enormous forest, and our longest and most stable civilizations are only clearings in the midst of it.
— Charles Williams, The Figure of Beatrice:  A Study in Dante
The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty. He is a sovereign, and stands on the centre. For the world is not painted, or adorned, but is from the beginning beautiful; and God has not made some beautiful things, but Beauty is the creator of the universe. Therefore the poet is not any permissive potentate, but is emperor in his own right. Criticism is infested with a cant of materialism, which assumes that manual skill and activity is the first merit of all men, and disparages such as say and do not, overlooking the fact, that some men, namely, poets, are natural sayers, sent into the world to the end of expression, and confounds them with those whose province is action, but who quit it to imitate the sayers. The poet does not wait for the hero or the sage, but, as they act and think primarily, so he writes primarily what will and must be spoken, reckoning the others, though primaries also, yet, in respect to him, secondaries and servants; as sitters or models in the studio of a painter, or as assistants who bring building materials to an architect.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays, Second Series
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thoughtAs doth eternity...
— John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn and Other Poems
How can love's spaciousnessbe conveyed in the narrowconfines of one syllable?
— Diane Ackerman
The poetic impulse is distinct from ideas about things or feelings about things, though it may use these. It's more like a desire to separate a piece of one's experience & set it up on its own, an isolated object never to trouble you again, at least not for a bit. In the absence of this impulse nothing stirs.
— Philip Larkin, Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica
When Rachel Carson accepted the National Book Award, she said, 'if there is poetry in my book about the sea it is not because I deliberately put it there but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out poetry.
— Jim Lynch, The Highest Tide
The music of revelation announces itself to the reader in somber brooding tones or in melodies light as air and one is invited to dance with the most captivating of partners: poetry.
— Aberjhani, Journey through the Power of the Rainbow: Quotations from a Life Made Out of Poetry
When we lose these woods, we lose our soul. Not simply as individuals, but as a people.
— Kevin  Walker, These Moments Pass: Poems
A tree forms itself in answerto its place and the light.Explain it how you will, the onlything explainable will beyour explanation.” Sabbaths 1999 IV
— Wendell Berry, Given
Two things consistently bring me pleasure: hot sweet tea and writing. Which is not to say that either are particularly good for me…I use entirely too much sugar and so far don’t find sucralose to be a good alternative. Also, writing is not a practice that engenders confidence. Quite the opposite. It’s about making yourself deliberately insecure so that you can write the next thing and have it be worth reading.And that’s not even taking into consideration the business end of things, which can make you bitter if you’re not careful…But I’ve spent my the bulk of my life to date figuring out the right mix of fat and sugar in my tea and also, how to get incrementally better (I hope…) at the writing, so I’m not giving it/them up!
— Ariel Gordon