c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.
— William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads
We have calcium in our bones, iron in our veins, carbon in our souls, and nitrogen in our brains. 93 percent stardust, with souls made of flames, we are all just stars that have people names.
— Nikita Gill
Humanity i love you because youare perpetually putting the secret oflife in your pants and forgettingit's there and sitting downon itand because you areforever making poems in the lapof death Humanityi hate you
— E.E. Cummings
The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.
— Blaise Pascal, Pensées
I don't think all writers are sad, she said.I think it's the other way around—all sad people write.
— Lang Leav, Love & Misadventure
Your reason and your passion are the rudder and the sails of your seafaring soul.If either your sails or your rudder be broken, you can but toss and drift, or else be held at a standstill in mid-seas.For reason, ruling alone, is a force confining; and passion, unattended, is a flame that burns to its own destruction.Therefore let your soul exalt your reason to the height of passion, that it may sing;And let it direct your passion with reason, that your passion may live through its own daily resurrection, and like the phoenix rise above its own ashes.
— Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
So here is my story, may it bringSome smiles and a tear or so,It happened once upon a time,Far away, and long ago,Outside the night wind keens and wails,Come listen to me, the Teller of Tales!
— Brian Jacques, Lord Brocktree
Books, books, books!I had found the secret of a garret roomPiled high with cases in my father’s name;Piled high, packed large,--where, creeping in and outAmong the giant fossils of my past,Like some small nimble mouse between the ribsOf a mastodon, I nibbled here and thereAt this or that box, pulling through the gap,In heats of terror, haste, victorious joy,The first book first. And how I felt it beatUnder my pillow, in the morning’s dark,An hour before the sun would let me read!My books!
— Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh
He ate and drank the precious words,His spirit grew robust;He knew no more that he was poor,Nor that his frame was dust.He danced along the dingy days,And this bequest of wingsWas but a book. What libertyA loosened spirit brings!
— Emily Dickinson
There are two ways to dislike poetry: One is to dislike it
—  the other is to read Pope.
The blood jet is poetryThere is no stopping it.
— Sylvia Plath, Ariel
Such was a poet and shall be and is-who'll solve the depths of horror to defend a sunbeam's architecture with his life: and carve immortal jungles of despair to hold a mountain's heartbeat in his hand.
— E.E. Cummings
Fee-fi-fo-fum -Now I'm borrowed.Now I'm numb.
— Anne Sexton
My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.	 'Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak.	 'What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?	 'I never know what you are thinking. Think.
— T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
My head is full of fireand grief and my tongueruns wild, piercedwith shards of glass.
— Federico García Lorca, Three Tragedies: Blood Wedding, Yerma, Bernarda Alba
Where the bright seraphim in burning rowTheir loud uplifted angel trumpets blow.
— John Milton, The Complete Poetry
i do not know what it is about you that closesand opens
— only something in me understandsthe voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses
Ozymandias"I met a traveller from an antique landWho said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stoneStand in the desert. Near them on the sand,Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frownAnd wrinkled lip and sneer of cold commandTell that its sculptor well those passions readWhich yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.And on the pedestal these words appear:'My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'Nothing beside remains. Round the decayOf that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,The lone and level sands stretch far away.
— Percy Bysshe Shelley, Rosalind and Helen - A Modern Eclogue with Other Poems
I could do with a bit more excess. From now on I'm going to be immoderate--and volatile--I shall enjoy loud music and lurid poetry. I shall be rampant.
— Joanne Harris, Chocolat
So I find words I never thought to speakIn streets I never thought I should revisitWhen I left my body on a distant shore.
— T.S. Eliot
This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless, Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best. Night, sleep, and the stars.
— Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
Real poetry, is to lead a beautiful life. To live poetry is better than to write it.
— Bashō Matsuo
I touch you knowing we weren't born tomorrow,and somehow, each of us will help the other live,and somewhere, each of us must help the other die.
— Adrienne Rich, Twenty One Love Poems
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,Hath had elsewhere its setting,And cometh from afar:Not in entire forgetfulness,And not in utter nakedness,But trailing clouds of glory do we come
— William Wordsworth
eat, baby.eat.chew.please.I know it hurts. I know it doesn’t feel good.please.I know your hunger is different than mine.I know it doesn’t taste the same as mine.imagine you could grow up all over againand pinpoint the millisecond that you startedcounting calories like casualties of war,mourning each one like it had a family.would you?sometimes I wonder that.sometimes I wonder if you would go backand watch yourself reappear and disappear right in front of your own eyes.and I love you so much.I am going to hold your little hand through the night.just please eat. just a little.you wrote a poem once,about a city of walking skeletons.the teacher called home because youtold her you wished it could be like thathere.let me tell you something about bones, baby.they are not warm or soft.the wind whistles through them like they areholes in a tree.and they break, too. they break right in half.they bruise and splinter like wood.are you hungry?I know. I know how much you hate that question.I will find another way to ask it, someday.please.the voices.I know they are all yelling at you to stretch yourself thinner.l hear them counting, always counting.I wish I had been there when the world made yousnap yourself in half.I would have told you that your body is not a war-zone,that, sometimes,it is okay to leave your plate empty.
— Caitlyn Siehl
All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.
— Oscar Wilde
My heart leaps up when I beholdA rainbow in the sky:So was it when my life began
— So is it now I am a man
We are unraveling our navels so that we may ingest the sun. We are not afraid of the darkness. We trust that the moon shall guide us. We are determining the future at this very moment. We know that the heart is the philosopher's stone. Our music is our alchemy.
— Saul Williams
The wind is the moon's imagination wandering.
— Saul Williams
Poetry, plays, novels, music, they are the cry of the human spirit trying to understand itself and make sense of our world.
— L.M. Elliott, Annie, Between the States
O love, how did you get here?--Nick and the Candlestick
— Sylvia Plath, Plath: Poems
Follow, poet, follow rightTo the bottom of the night,With your unconstraining voiceStill persuade us to rejoice;With the farming of a verseMake a vineyard of the curse,Sing of human unsuccessIn a rapture of distress;In the deserts of the heartLet the healing fountain start,In the prison of his daysTeach the free man how to praise.
— W.H. Auden, Another Time
A man walks into a bar and says: Take my wife–please. So you do. You take her out into the rain and you fall in love with her and she leaves you and you’re desolate.You’re on your back in your undershirt, a broken man on an ugly bedspread, staring at the water stains on the ceiling. And you can hear the man in the apartment above you taking off his shoes.You hear the first boot hit the floor and you’re looking up, you’re waiting because you thought it would follow, you thought there would be some logic, perhaps, something to pull it all together but here we are in the weeds again, here we arein the bowels of the thing: your world doesn’t make sense. And then the second boot falls. And then a third, a fourth, a fifth. A man walks into a bar and says: Take my wife–please. But you take him instead.You take him home, and you make him a cheese sandwich, and you try to get his shoes off, but he kicks you and he keeps kicking you. You swallow a bottle of sleeping pills but they don’t work. Boots continue to fall to the floor in the apartment above you.You go to work the next day pretending nothing happened. Your co-workers ask if everything’s okay and you tell them you’re just tired. And you’re trying to smile. And they’re trying to smile.A man walks into a bar, you this time, and says: Make it a double. A man walks into a bar, you this time, and says: Walk a mile in my shoes.A man walks into a convenience store, still you, saying: I only wanted something simple, something generic… But the clerk tells you to buy something or get out.A man takes his sadness down to the river and throws it in the river but then he’s still leftwith the river. A man takes his sadness and throws it away but then he’s still left with his hands.
— Richard Siken
I keep telling myselfThat you’rejust a girl.Another leaf blown across my pathDestined to pass onAnd shrivel into yourselfLike all the others.Yet despite my venomYou refuse to witherOr fade.You remain golden throughout,And in your gaze I am left to wonder if it is me aloneWho feels the fall.
— Kelly Creagh, Enshadowed
A lot we have in our head,But things of heart are not yet dead,They have done none, but just fled,Out of us, Forgotten, just been bled..
— Numey
You do not know how much they mean to me, my friends,And how, how rare and strange it is, to findIn a life composed so much, so much of odds and ends,(For indeed I do not love it ... you knew? you are not blind! How keen you are!)To find a friend who has these qualities,Who has, and givesThose qualities upon which friendship lives.How much it means that I say this to you-Without these friendships-life, what cauchemar!
— T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems, 1909-1962
Hey you, dragging the halo-how about a holiday in the islands of grief? Tongue is the word I wish to have with you.Your eyes are so blue they leak.Your legs are longer than a prisoner'slast night on death row.I'm filthier than the coal miner's bathtuband nastier than the breath of Charles Bukowski.You're a dirty little windshield.I'm standing behind you on the subway, hard as calculus. My breathbe sticking to your neck like graffiti.I'm sitting opposite you in the bar, waiting for you to uncross your boundaries.I want to rip off your logicand make passionate sense to you.I want to ride in the swing of your hips.My fingers will dig in you like quotation marks, blazing your limbs into parts of speech.But with me for a lover, you won't needcatastrophes. What attracted me in the first placewill ultimately make me resent you.I'll start telling you lies, and my lies will sparkle, become the bad stars you chart your life by.I'll stare at other women so blatantlyyou'll hear my eyes peeling, because sex with you is like Great Britain: cold, groggy, and a little uptight.Your bed is a big, soft calculatorwhere my problems multiply.Your brain is a garageI park my bullshit in, for free.You're not really my new girlfriend, just another flop sequel of the first one, who was based on the true story of my mother.You're so ugly I forgot how to spell.I'll cheat on you like a ninth grade math test, break your heart just for the sound it makes.You're the 'this' we need to put an end to.The more you apologize, the less I forgive you.So how about it?
— Jeffrey McDaniel
Another lover hits the universe. The circle is broken. But with death comes rebirth. And like all lovers and sad people, I am a poet.
— Allen Ginsberg
No’ might make them angry but it will make you free.
— Nayyirah Waheed
A little learning is a dangerous thing.Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring;There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,and drinking largely sobers us again.
— Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism
Time held me green and dyingThough I sang in my chains like the sea.
— Dylan Thomas, Fern Hill
I know that I shall meet my fate somewhere among the clouds above; those that I fight I do not hate, those that I guard I do not love.
— W.B. Yeats
When the immense drugged universe explodesIn a cascade of unendurable colourAnd leaves us gasping naked,This is no more than the ectasy of chaos:Hold fast, with both hands, to that royal loveWhich alone, as we know certainly, restoresFragmentation into true being.Ecstasy of Chaos
— Robert Graves, Poems 1965-1968
Some girls are full of heartache and poetry and those are the kind of girls who try to save wolves instead of running away from them.
— Nikita Gill, Your Body is an Ocean: Love and Other Experiments
I love all things, not only the grand but the infinitely small: thimble, spurs, plates, flower vases.....
— Pablo Neruda
But one kiss levitates above all the others. Theintersection of function and desire. The I do kiss.The I’ll love you through a brick wall kiss.Even when I’m dead, I’ll swim through the Earth,like a mermaid of the soil, just to be next to your bones.
— Jeffrey McDaniel
and sometimes I sitdown at my typewriterand I thinknot of someonecause there isn't anyoneto thinkabout and i wonderis it worth it
— Nikki Giovanni
The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.
— Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems
There is nothing at all that can be talked about adequately, and the whole art of poetry is to say what can't be said.
— Alan W. Watts
Blood was its Avatar and its seal.
— Edgar Allan Poe
Stranger, pause and look;From the dust of agesLift this little book,Turn the tattered pages,Read me, do not let me die!Search the fading letters findingSteadfast in the broken bindingAll that once was I!
— Edna St. Vincent Millay, Collected Poems
Nothingwould beeasier withoutyou,because youare everything,all of it-sprinkles, quarks, giantdonuts, eggs sunny-side up-youare the ever-expandinguniverseto me.
— Kate DiCamillo, Flora and Ulysses: The Illuminated Adventures
Live or die, but don't poison everything...Well, death's been herefor a long time --it has a hell of a lotto do with helland suspicion of the eyeand the religious objectsand how I mourned themwhen they were made obsceneby my dwarf-heart's doodle.The chief ingredientis mutilation.And mud, day after day,mud like a ritual,and the baby on the platter,cooked but still human,cooked also with little maggots,sewn onto it maybe by somebody's mother,the damn bitch!Even so,I kept right on going on,a sort of human statement,lugging myself as ifI were a sawed-off bodyin the trunk, the steamer trunk.This became perjury of the soul.It became an outright lieand even though I dressed the bodyit was still naked, still killed.It was caughtin the first place at birth,like a fish.But I play it, dressed it up,dressed it up like somebody's doll.Is life something you play?And all the time wanting to get rid of it?And further, everyone yelling at youto shut up. And no wonder!People don't like to be toldthat you're sickand then be forcedto watchyoucomedown with the hammer.Today life opened inside me like an eggand there insideafter considerable diggingI found the answer.What a bargain!There was the sun,her yolk moving feverishly,tumbling her prize --and you realize she does this daily!I'd known she was a purifierbut I hadn't thoughtshe was solid,hadn't known she was an answer.God! It's a dream,lovers sprouting in the yardlike celery stalksand better,a husband straight as a redwood,two daughters, two sea urchings,picking roses off my hackles.If I'm on fire they dance around itand cook marshmallows.And if I'm icethey simply skate on mein little ballet costumes.Here,all along,thinking I was a killer,anointing myself dailywith my little poisons.But no.I'm an empress.I wear an apron.My typewriter writes.It didn't break the way it warned.Even crazy, I'm as niceas a chocolate bar.Even with the witches' gymnasticsthey trust my incalculable city,my corruptible bed.O dearest three,I make a soft reply.The witch comes onand you paint her pink.I come with kisses in my hoodand the sun, the smart one,rolling in my arms.So I say Liveand turn my shadow three times roundto feed our puppies as they come,the eight Dalmatians we didn't drown,despite the warnings: The abort! The destroy!Despite the pails of water that waited,to drown them, to pull them down like stones,they came, each one headfirst, blowing bubbles the color of cataract-blueand fumbling for the tiny tits.Just last week, eight Dalmatians,3/4 of a lb., lined up like cord woodeachlike abirch tree.I promise to love more if they come,because in spite of crueltyand the stuffed railroad cars for the ovens,I am not what I expected. Not an Eichmann.The poison just didn't take.So I won't hang around in my hospital shift,repeating The Black Mass and all of it.I say Live, Live because of the sun,the dream, the excitable gift.
— Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems
Quiero hacer contigo lo que la primavera hace con los cerezos
— Pablo Neruda
However, he wrote some verses on her, and very pretty they were.” “And so ended his affection,” said Elizabeth impatiently. “There has been many a one, I fancy, overcome in the same way. I wonder who first discovered the efficacy of poetry in driving away love!” “I have been used to consider poetry as the food of love,” said Darcy.  “Of a fine, stout, healthy love it may. Everything nourishes what is strong already. But if it be only a slight, thin sort of inclination, I am convinced that one good sonnet will starve it entirely away.
— Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
We live in an old chaos of the sun.
— Wallace Stevens
Poetry makes life what lights and music do the stage.
— Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers
To SorrowI bade good morrow,And thought to leave her far away behind;But cheerly, cheerly,She loves me dearly;She is so constant to me, and so kind.
— John Keats, The Complete Poems
I walked a mile with Pleasure;She chatted all the way;But left me none the wiserFor all she had to say.I walked a mile with Sorrow;And ne’er a word said she;But, oh! The things I learned from her,When Sorrow walked with me.
— Robert Browning Hamilton
... so this is for us.This is for us who sing, write, dance, act, study, run and loveand this is for doing it even if no one will ever knowbecause the beauty is in the act of doing it.Not what it can lead to.This is for the times I lose myself while writing, singing, playingand no one is around and they will never knowbut I will forever rememberand that shines brighter than any praise or fame or glory I will ever have,and this is for you who write or play or read or singby yourself with the light off and door closedwhen the world is asleep and the stars are alignedand maybe no one will ever hear itor read your wordsor know your thoughtsbut it doesn’t make it less glorious.It makes it ethereal. Mysterious.Infinite.For it belongs to you and whatever God or spirit you believe inand only you can decide how much it meantand meansand will forever meanand other people will experience it toothrough you.Through your spirit. Through the way you talk.Through the way you walk and love and laugh and careand I never meant to write this longbut what I want to say is:Don’t try to present your art by making other people read or hear or see or touch it; make them feel it. Wear your art like your heart on your sleeve and keep it alive by making people feel a little better. Feel a little lighter. Create art in order for yourself to become yourselfand let your very existence be your song, your poem, your story.Let your very identity be your book.Let the way people say your name sound like the sweetest melody.So go create. Take photographs in the wood, run alone in the rain and sing your heart out high up on a mountainwhere no one will ever hearand your very existence will be the most hypnotising scar.Make your life be your artand you will never be forgotten.
— Charlotte Eriksson
To hear never-heard sounds, To see never-seen colors and shapes, To try to understand the imperceptible Power pervading the world; To fly and find pure ethereal substances That are not of matter But of that invisible soul pervading reality. To hear another soul and to whisper to another soul; To be a lantern in the darkness Or an umbrella in a stormy day; To feel much more than know. To be the eyes of an eagle, slope of a mountain; To be a wave understanding the influence of the moon; To be a tree and read the memory of the leaves; To be an insignificant pedestrian on the streets Of crazy cities watching, watching, and watching. To be a smile on the face of a woman And shine in her memory As a moment saved without planning.
— Dejan Stojanovic
It is difficultto get the news from poems
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan,The proper study of mankind is Man.Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,A being darkly wise and rudely great:With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side,With too much weakness for the Stoic's pride,He hangs between, in doubt to act or rest;In doubt to deem himself a God or Beast;In doubt his mind or body to prefer;Born but to die, and reas'ning but to err;Alike in ignorance, his reason such,Whether he thinks too little or too much;Chaos of thought and passion, all confused;Still by himself abused or disabused;Created half to rise, and half to fall;Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl'd;The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!Go, wondrous creature! mount where science guides,Go, measure earth, weigh air, and state the tides;Instruct the planets in what orbs to run,Correct old time, and regulate the sun;Go, soar with Plato to th’ empyreal sphere,To the first good, first perfect, and first fair;Or tread the mazy round his followers trod,And quitting sense call imitating God;As Eastern priests in giddy circles run,And turn their heads to imitate the sun.Go, teach Eternal Wisdom how to rule—Then drop into thyself, and be a fool!
— Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man
Poetry is not the most important thing in life... I'd much rather lie in a hot bath reading Agatha Christie and sucking sweets.
— Dylan Thomas
I thought leaving you would be easy, just walking out the door but I keep getting pinned against it with my legs around your waist and it’s like my lips want you like my lungs want air, it’s just what they where born to do so I am sitting at work thinking of you cutting vegetables in my kitchen your hair in my shower drain your fingers on my spine in the morningwhile we listen to Muddy Waters, I knowyou will never be the one I call home but the way you talk about poems like marxists talk of revolution it makes me want to keep trying. I’m still looking for reasons to love you.I’m still looking for proof you love me.
— Clementine von Radics
she stuck a bookmark in my heart and walked away
— Saul Williams, She
Everyone I have lost in the closing of a doorthe click of the lockis not forgotten, theydo not die but remainwithin the soft edgesof the earth, the ashof house fires and cancerin sin and forgivenesshuddled under old blanketsdreaming their way intomy hands, my heartclosing tight like fists.- "Indian Boy Love Song #1
— Sherman Alexie, The Business of Fancydancing
Calligraphy of geeseagainst the sky-the moon seals it.
— Yosa Buson
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.Write, for example,'The night is shatteredand the blue stars shiver in the distance.'The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.Tonight I can write the saddest lines.I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.Through nights like this one I held her in my armsI kissed her again and again under the endless sky.She loved me sometimes, and I loved her too.How could one not have loved her great still eyes.Tonight I can write the saddest lines.To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.What does it matter that my love could not keep her.The night is shattered and she is not with me.This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.My sight searches for her as though to go to her.My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.The same night whitening the same trees.We, of that time, are no longer the same.I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.Another's. She will be another's. Like my kisses before.Her voide. Her bright body. Her inifinite eyes.I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her. Love is so short, forgetting is so long.Because through nights like this one I held her in my armsmy sould is not satisfied that it has lost her.Though this be the last pain that she makes me sufferand these the last verses that I write for her.
— Pablo Neruda
He could build a city. Has a certain capacity. There’s a niche in his chestwhere a heart would fit perfectlyand he thinks if he could just maneuver one into place –well then, game over.
— Richard Siken
Stars open among the lilies.Are you not blinded by such expressionless sirens?This is the silence of astounded souls.
— Sylvia Plath, Crossing the Water
There's a certain slant of light,On winter afternoons,That oppresses, like the weightOf cathedral tunes.
— Emily Dickinson
. . . 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.
— Kim Addonizio
A poet who reads his verse in public may have other nasty habits.
— Robert A. Heinlein
If you are a monster, stand up.If you are a monster, a trickster, a fiend,If you’ve built a steam-powered wishing machineIf you have a secret, a dark past, a scheme,If you kidnap maidens or dabble in dreamsCome stand by me.If you have been broken, stand up.If you have been broken, abandoned, aloneIf you have been starving, a creature of boneIf you live in a tower, a dungeon, a throneIf you weep for wanting, to be held, to be known,Come stand by me.If you are a savage, stand up.If you are a witch, a dark queen, a black knight,If you are a mummer, a pixie, a sprite,If you are a pirate, a tomcat, a wright,If you swear by the moon and you fight the hard fight,Come stand by me. If you are a devil, stand up.If you are a villain, a madman, a beast,If you are a strowler, a prowler, a priest,If you are a dragon come sit at our feast,For we all have stripes, and we all have horns, We all have scales, tails, manes, claws and thornsAnd here in the dark is where new worlds are born.Come stand by me.
— Catherynne M. Valente
A poet's mission is to make words do more work than they normally do, to make them work on more than one level.
— Jay-Z, Decoded
I will love you with too many commas, but never any asterisks.
— Sarah Kay, No Matter the Wreckage
I arise from dreams of thee,And a spirit in my feetHas led me- who knows how?To thy chamber-window, Sweet!
— Percy Bysshe Shelley
As wave is driven by wave And each, pursued, pursues the wave ahead, So time flies on and follows, flies, and follows, Always, for ever and new. What was before Is left behind; what never was is now; And every passing moment is renewed.
— Ovid, Metamorphoses
I see all of us reading ourselves away from ourselves,  straining in circles of light to find more light until the line of words becomes a trail of crumbs that we follow across a page of fresh snow
— Billy Collins, Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems
I was not prepared: sunset, end of summer. Demonstrations of time as a continuum, as something coming to an end, not a suspension: the senses wouldn’t protect me. I caution you as I was never cautioned: you will never let go, you will never be satiated.You will be damaged and scarred, you will continue to hunger. Your body will age, you will continue to need. You will want the earth, then more of the earth–Sublime, indifferent, it is present, it will not respond. It is encompassing, it will not minister. Meaning, it will feed you, it will ravish you, it will not keep you alive.
— Louise Glück, The Seven Ages
I'm at that place I grew up to leave.
— Adrian C. Louis, Fire Water World: Poems
We are all instruments pulling the bows across our own lungs. Windmills, still startling in every storm. Have you ever seen a newborn blinking at the light? I wanna do that every day. I wanna know what the kite called itself when it got away, when it escaped into the night...
— Andrea Gibson
When I heard the learn’d astronomer; When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me; When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them; When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the	lecture-room, How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself, In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
— Walt Whitman
The world was fair, the mountains tallIn Elder Days before the fall...
— J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
As the future ripens in the past,so the past rots in the future --a terrible festival of dead leaves.
— Anna Akhmatova, Poems of Akhmatova
I’m not aspiring to be someone else – If I’m me for the rest of my life then so be it
— Terry Lander, Life Through the Eyes of an Insider: 101 Poems to Help You Understand Life Better
Some hae meat and canna eat,And some wad eat that want it,But we hae meat and we can eat,And sae the Lord be thankit.
— Robert Burns
You are always new. THe last of your kisses was ever the sweetest; the last smile the brightest; the last movement the gracefullest. When you pass'd my window home yesterday, I was fill'd with as much admiration as if I had then seen you for the first time...Even if you did not love me I could not help an entire devotion to you.
— John Keats, Bright Star: Love Letters and Poems of John Keats to Fanny Brawne
Does something which exists on the edge have no true relevance to the stable center, or does it, by being on the edge, become a part of the edge and thus a part of the boundary, the definition which gives the whole its shape?
— Lucy Grealy
Come live with me and be my Love, And we will all the pleasures prove
— Christopher Marlowe, The Complete Plays and Poems
For I have learned to look on nature, not as in the hour of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes the still, sad music of humanity.
— William Wordsworth, Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey
Uncontradicting solitudeSupports me on its giant palm;And like a sea-anemoneOr simple snail, there cautiouslyUnfolds, emerges, what I am.
— Philip Larkin, Collected Poems
My face in thine eye, thine in mine appeares, And true plaine hearts doe in the faces rest, Where can we finde two better hemispheares Without sharpe North, without declining West? What ever dyes, was not mixt equally; If our two loves be one, or, thou and I Love so alike, that none doe slacken, none can die.
— John Donne, The Complete English Poems
McGough: I'm sorry. I'm afraid I've caught poetry. Mr Bones: Oh really? Well, don't worry, sir - I used to suffer from short stories.McGough: Really? When?Mr Bones: Oh, once upon a time ...
— Graham Chapman
Every beginning has an end and every end has a new beginning, don't worry, broken soul, life will one day come to an end. 
— Santosh Kalwar
Nobody the dead man & Nobody the livingNobody is giving in & Nobody is givingNobody hears me but just Nobody caresNobody fears me but Nobody just staresNobody belongs to me & Nobody remainsNo Nobody knows nothingAll that remains are remains
— Kami Garcia, Beautiful Creatures
Il pleure dans mon coeurComme il pleut sur la ville.Tears are shed in my heart like the rain on the town.
— Paul Verlaine, One Hundred and One Poems by Paul Verlaine: A Bilingual Edition
It is time to float on the waters of the night. Time to wrap my arms around this book and press it to my chest, life preserver in a sea of unremarkable men and women, anonymous faces on the street, a hundred thousand unalphabetized things, a million forgotten hours.
— Billy Collins, Picnic, Lightning
Had we but world enough and time, This coyness, lady, were no crime. We would sit down, and think which way To walk, and pass our long love’s day.
— Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress
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.
— Katerina Stoykova Klemer
They are not long, the days of wine and roses:Out of a misty dreamOur path emerges for awhile, then closesWithin a dream.
— Ernest Dowson, The Poems and Prose of Ernest Dowson
This is perhaps the most noble aim of poetry, to attach ourselves to the world around us, to turn desire into love, to embrace, finally what always evades us, what is beyond, but what is always there – the unspoken, the spirit, the soul.
— Octavio Paz, The Other Voice: Essays on Modern Poetry
In a rich moonlit garden, flowers open beneath the eyes of entire nations terrified to acknowledge the simplicity of the beauty of peace.
— Aberjhani, Elemental: The Power of Illuminated Love
You read and write and sing and experience, thinking that one day these things will build the character you admire to live as. You love and lose and bleed best you can, to the extreme, hoping that one day the world will read you like the poem you want to be.
— Charlotte Eriksson
You're trying not to tell him you love him, and you're trying to choke down the feeling, and you're trembling, but he reaches over and he touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist, and you feel your heart taking root in your body, like you've discovered something you don't even have a name for.
— Richard Siken, Crush
Poetry is an echo asking a shadow to dance.
— Carl Sandburg
My heart born nakedwas swaddled in lullabies.Later alone it worepoems for clothes.Like a shirtI carried on my backthe poetry I had read.So I lived for half a centuryuntil wordlessly we met.From my shirt on the back of the chairI learn tonighthow many yearsof learning by heartI waited for you.
— John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos
The History TeacherTrying to protect his students' innocencehe told them the Ice Age was really justthe Chilly Age, a period of a million yearswhen everyone had to wear sweaters.And the Stone Age became the Gravel Age,named after the long driveways of the time.The Spanish Inquisition was nothing morethan an outbreak of questions such as"How far is it from here to Madrid?""What do you call the matador's hat?"The War of the Roses took place in a garden,and the Enola Gay dropped one tiny atom on Japan.The children would leave his classroomfor the playground to torment the weakand the smart,mussing up their hair and breaking their glasses,while he gathered up his notes and walked homepast flower beds and white picket fences,wondering if they would believe that soldiersin the Boer War told long, rambling storiesdesigned to make the enemy nod off.
— Billy Collins, Questions About Angels
Since then, at an uncertain hour, That agony returns: And till my ghastly tale is told, This heart within me burns.
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
But often, in the world’s most crowded streets,But often, in the din of strife,There rises an unspeakable desireAfter the knowledge of our buried life;A thirst to spend our fire and restless forceIn tracking out our true, original course;A longing to inquireInto the mystery of this heart which beatsSo wild, so deep in us—to knowWhence our lives come and where they go.
— Matthew Arnold, The Complete Poems
tell meof something fiercer than the love with which i gaze upon youof something softer than the tendernesswith which i hold you.
— Sanober  Khan
I shall have peace, as leafy trees are peaceful When rain bends down the bough; And I shall be more silent and cold-hearted Than you are now.
— Sara Teasdale, Rivers to the Sea
I felt a Cleaving in my Mind—As if my Brain had split—I tried to match it—Seam by Seam—But could not make it fit.
— Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
I often repeat repeat myself,I often repeat repeat.I don't don't know why know why,I simply know that I I Iam am inclined to say to saya lot a lot this way this way-I often repeat repeat myself,I often repeat repeat.I often repeat repeat myself,I often repeat repeat.My mom my mom gets mad gets mad,it irritates my dad my dad,it drives them up a tree a tree,that's what they tell they tell me me-I often repeat repeat myself,I often repeat repeat.I often repeat repeat myself,I often repeat repeat.It gets me in a jam a jam,but that's the way I am I am,in fact I think it's neat it's neatto to to to repeat repeat-I often repeat repeat myself,I often repeat repeat.
— Jack Prelutsky, A Pizza the Size of the Sun
Love me like a wrong turn on a bad roadlate at night.
— Kim Addonizio
Lord, may the pain be ours, And the weakness that it brings, But at least give us the strength, Of not showing it to anyone!
— Fernando Pessoa, Poems of Fernando Pessoa
I could feel the day offering itself to me,and I wanted nothing morethan to be in the moment-but which moment?Not that one, or that one, or that one,
— Billy Collins, The Trouble With Poetry - And Other Poems
The young student sits with his head bent over his books, and his mind straying in youth's dreamland; where prose is prowling on the desk and poetry hiding in the heart.
— Rabindranath Tagore, Lover's Gift
Haiku is not a shriek, a howl, a sigh, or a yawn; rather, it is the deep breath of life.
— Santōka Taneda, Mountain Tasting: Haiku and Journals of Santoka Taneda
When you were sleeping on the sofaI put my ear to your ear and listenedto the echo of your dreams.That is the ocean I want to dive in, merge with the bright fish, plankton and pirate ships.I walk up to people on the street that kind of look like youand ask them the questions I would ask you.Can we sit on a rooftop and watch stars dissolve into smokerising from a chimney? Can I swing like Tarzan in the jungle of your breathing? I don’t wish I was in your arms, I just wish I was peddling a bicycle toward your arms.
— Jeffrey McDaniel
HEARTWORKEach day is born with a sunriseand ends in a sunset, the same way weopen our eyes to see the light, and close them to hear the dark.You have no control overhow your story begins or ends.But by now, you should know thatall things have an ending.Every spark returns to darkness.Every sound returns to silence.And every flower returns to sleepwith the earth.The journey of the sunand moon is predictable.But yours, is your ultimateART.
— Suzy Kassem
September has come, it is hersWhose vitality leaps in the autumn,Whose nature prefersTrees without leaves and a fire in the fireplace.So I give her this month and the nextThough the whole of my year should be hers who has rendered alreadySo many of its days intolerable or perplexedBut so many more so happy.Who has left a scent on my life, and left my wallsDancing over and over with her shadowWhose hair is twined in all my waterfallsAnd all of London littered with remembered kisses.
— Louis MacNeice, Autumn Journal
Cada vez que te enamores no expliques a nadie nada, deja que el amor te invada sin entrar en pormenores
— Mario Benedetti
Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road.Healthy, free, the world before me.The long brown path before me leading me wherever I choose.Henceforth, I ask not good fortune, I myself am good fortune.Henceforth, I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing.
— Walt Whitman, Songs for the Open Road: Poems of Travel and Adventure
A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back when it begins to rain.
— Robert Frost
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.
— John Berryman
I don’t think that I’ve been in love as suchAlthough I liked a few folk pretty wellLove must be vaster than my smiles or touchfor brave men died and empires rose and fellFor love, girls follow boys to foreign landsand men have followed women into hellIn plays and poems someone understandsthere’s something makes us more than blood and boneand more than biological demands For me love’s like the wind, unseen, unknownI see the trees are bending where it’s beenI know that it leaves wreckage where it’s blownI really don’t know what "I love you" meansI think it means "don’t leave me here alone
— Neil Gaiman, Adventures in the Dream Trade
Sing your life
—  any fool can think of words that rhyme.
I love you as the plant that never blooms but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers; thanks to your love a certain solid fragrence risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body. and: No one can stop the river of your hands, your eyes and their sleepiness, my dearest. You are the trembling of time, which passes between the vertical light and the darkening sky. and: From the stormy archipelagoes I brought my windy accordian, waves of crazy rain, the habitual slowness of natural things: they made up my wild heart.
— Pablo Neruda
Listen! If stars are litIt means there is someone who needs it,It means someone wants them to be,That someone deems those specks of spitMagnificent!
— Vladimir Mayakovsky, Listen!
I would not come in.I meant not even if asked,And I hadn't been.
— Robert Frost, The Poetry of Robert Frost
To see a World in a grain of sand,And a Heaven in a wild flower,Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,And Eternity in an hour.
— William Blake, Auguries of Innocence
I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests.
— Pablo Neruda
I will come back to you, I swear I will;And you will know me still.I shall be only a little tallerThan when I went.
— Edna St. Vincent Millay, The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems
Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been; I am also call'd No-more, Too-late, Farewell
— Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The House of Life
I am tired, Beloved, of chafing my heart againstThe want of you;Of squeezing it into little inkdrops,And posting it.
— Amy Lowell
That’s what I do: I make coffee and occasionally succumb to suicidal nihilism. But you shouldn’t worry — poetry is still first. Cigarettes and alcohol follow
— Anne Sexton
The lamb misused breeds public strifeAnd yet forgives the butcher's knife.
— William Blake
It costs me never a stab nor squirm / To tread by chance upon a worm. / Aha, my little dear, / I say, Your clan will pay me back one day.
— Dorothy Parker
Resolve, and thou art free.
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Flower-de-Luce, and the Masque of Pandora
The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.
— Christopher Morley
We have seen the best minds of our generation destroyed by boredom at poetry readings.
— Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Wild Dreams of a New Beginning
Valentine's Day is the poet's holiday.
— Ted Kooser
Anger's like a battery that leaks acid right out of meAnd it starts from the heart 'til it reaches my outer me
— Criss Jami, Venus in Arms
If it ain't a pleasure, it ain't a poem.
— William Carlos Williams
Want of imagination makes things unreal enough to be destroyed. By imagination I mean knowledge and love. I mean compassion. People of power kill children, the old send the young to die, because they have no imagination. They have power. Can you have power and imagination at the same time? Can you kill people you don’t know and have compassion for them at the same time?
— Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter
forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.and perhaps it will be pleasing to have remembered these things one day
— Virgil, Eclogues. Georgics. Aeneid: Books 1-6
You are an Universe of Universes and your soul a source of songs.
— Rubén Darío
We suffer each other to have each other a while.
— Li-Young Lee
You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;	They called me the hyacinth girl.'	 —Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,	 Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not	 Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither	 Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,	 Looking into the heart of light, the silence.	 Od' und leer das Meer.
— T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Writings
Gather the stars if you wish it soGather the songs and keep them.Gather the faces of women.Gather for keeping years and years.And then...Loosen your hands, let go and say good-bye.Let the stars and songs go.Let the faces and years go.Loosen your hands and say good-bye.
— Carl Sandburg
In Xanadu did Kubla KhanA stately pleasure-dome decree:Where Alph, the sacred river, ranThrough caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea.
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Complete Poems
I'll say I love you,Which will lead, of course,to disappointment,but those words unsaidpoison every next moment.I will try to disappoint youbetter than anyone else has.
— Stephen Dunn, Different Hours
What would the world be, once bereft Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet; Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
— Gerard Manley Hopkins, Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Complete Poems
I used to think love was two people suckingon the same straw to see whose thirst was stronger,but then I whiffed the crushed walnuts of your nape,traced jackals in the snow-covered tombstones of your teeth.I used to think love was a non-stop saxophone soloin the lungs, till I hung with you like a pair of sneakersfrom a phone line, and you promised to always smellthe rose in my kerosene. I used to think love was terminalpelvic ballet, till you let me jog beside while you pedaledall over hell on the menstrual bicycle, your tongueripping through my prairie like a tornado of paper cuts.I used to think love was an old man smashing a mirrorover his knee, till you helped me carry the barbellof my spirit back up the stairs after my car pirouettedin the desert. You are my history book. I used to not believein fairy tales till I played the dunce in sheep’s clothingand felt how perfectly your foot fit in the glass slipperof my ass. But then duty wrapped its phone cordaround my ankle and yanked me across the continent.And now there are three thousand miles between the uand s in esophagus. And being without you is like standingat a cement-filled wall with a roll of Yugoslavian nickelsand making a wish. Some days I miss you so muchI’d jump off the roof of your office buildingjust to catch a glimpse of you on the way down. I wishwe could trade left eyeballs, so we could always seewhat the other sees. But you’re here, I’m there,and we have only words, a nightly phone call - one chanceto mix feelings into syllables and pour into the receiver,hope they don’t disassemble in that calculus of wire.And lately - with this whole war thing - the language machinesupporting it - I feel betrayed by the alphabet, like they’reinjecting strychnine into my vowels, infecting my consonants,naming attack helicopters after shattered Indian tribes:Apache, Blackhawk; and West Bank colonizers are settlers,so Sharon is Davey Crockett, and Arafat: Geronimo,and it’s the Wild West all over again. And I imagine Picassolooking in a mirror, decorating his face in war paint,washing his brushes in venom. And I think of Jeninin all that rubble, and I feel like a Cyclops with two eyes,like an anorexic with three mouths, like a scuba diverin quicksand, like a shark with plastic vampire teeth,like I’m the executioner’s fingernail trying to reasonwith the hand. And I don’t know how to speak lovewhen the heart is a busted cup filling with spit and paste,and the only sexual fantasy I have is bustinginto the Pentagon with a bazooka-sized pen and blowingopen the minds of generals. And I comfort myselfwith the thought that we’ll name our first child Jenin,and her middle name will be Terezin, and we’ll teach herhow to glow in the dark, and how to swallow firecrackers,and to never neglect the first straw; because no oneever talks about the first straw, it’s always the last strawthat gets all the attention, but by then it’s way too late.
— Jeffrey McDaniel
Poetry is life distilled.
— Gwendolyn Brooks