c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
My mother has always loved piano music and hungered to play. When she was in her early sixties, she retired from her job as a computer programmer so that she could devote herself more fully to the piano. As she had done with her dog obsession, she took her piano education to an extreme. She bought not one, not two, but three pianos. One was the beautiful Steinway B, a small grand piano she purchased with a modest inheritance left by a friend of her parents’. She photocopied all of her music in a larger size so she could see it better and mounted it on manila folders. She practiced for several hours every day. When she wasn’t practicing the piano she was talking about the piano. I love pianos, too, and wrote an entire book about the life of one piano, a Steinway owned by the renowned pianist Glenn Gould. And I shared my mother’s love for her piano. During phone conversations, I listened raptly as she told me about the instrument’s cross-country adventures. Before bringing the Steinway north, my mother had mentioned that she was considering selling it. I was surprised, but instead of reminding her that, last I knew, she was setting it aside for me, I said nothing, unable to utter the simple words, “But, Mom, don’t you remember your promise?” If I did, it would be a way of asking for something, and asking my mother for something was always dangerous because of the risk of disappointment.
— Katie  Hafner, Mother Daughter Me
When I was five and Sarah seven, my mother went on a trip. She was gone from our home in Rochester, New York, for several days. But she was often gone — not always from the house but missing from our lives nonetheless. Then one day Sarah and I returned from school to find her standing at the door, a piñata in her hand, smiling her spellbinding, I-am-overjoyed-at-the-sight-of-you smile. Now when I imagine that scene, my mind’s eye puts a sombrero on her head, but I doubt she was wearing one. She had just come home from a trip to Juarez, Mexico, where she had obtained a quickie divorce. She told us she was taking us to live in Florida. We had no idea where – or what – Florida was. “There will be oranges there,” she said. “They’re everywhere. You can reach up and pull them off the trees.
— Katie  Hafner, Mother Daughter Me
Suddenly life was good, even glamorous. We were poor but didn’t know it, or maybe we did know, but we didn’t care, because my mother had stopped disappearing into her bedroom. Our apartment building was surrounded by empty lots, which were all that separated us from the ocean. Within a couple of decades, those stretches of undeveloped land – prime coastline real estate –would be built upon, with upscale apartment complexes and million-dollar houses with ocean views. But in 1967, those barren lots were our magnificent private playground. I had a tomboy streak and recruited neighborhood boys onto an ad hoc softball team. Dieter and my mother installed a tetherball pole, which acted as a magnet for kids in the neighborhood. For the first time in years, we were enjoying what felt like a normal, quasi-suburban existence, with us at the center of everything–the popular kids with the endless playground.
— Katie  Hafner, Mother Daughter Me
Live life carefully but save time for fun.
— Cindy Lou Moldovan, Growing Up Third World
Stately and commanding, the house I found on Sacramento Street, in Lower Pacific Heights, was an architectural jewel; tour buses drove down the street several times a day and the guides pointed out our Victorian “painted lady” not just for its curb appeal but also for its lucky survival of the earthquake. Meticulously renovated, the house had a layout that I was sure would work perfectly: a three-room suite on the lower level with a bathroom and laundry room for my mother, living space on the next level, and, on the top floor, bedrooms for Zoë and me. The master bedroom was large enough to double as my office. Moreover, it seemed symbolic that we should find a three-story nineteenth-century Victorian, whose original intention was to house multiple generations. My mother couldn’t have been more pleased. She started calling our experiment “our year in Provence.” In the face of naysayers, I chose to embrace the reaction of a friend who was living in Beijing: “How Chinese of you!” she said upon hearing the news. When I told my mother, she was delighted. “What have the Chinese got on us?” she declared. And I agreed. The Chinese revere their elderly. If they could live happily with multiple generations under one roof, so could we.
— Katie  Hafner, Mother Daughter Me
The Lush hadn’t driven in almost a decade - ever since she got in an accident that shook her so badly she refused to get behind the wheel. As you can imagine, someone nicknamed The Lush wouldn’t make a good DD anyway. I’d known her about a year before ever seeing her sober.
— Kate  Madison, Spilled Perfume: A Memoir
To me, the words “food” and “guilt” didn’t belong in the same sentence unless, say, you were referring to how you felt about the starving children in Africa.
— Kate  Madison, Spilled Perfume: A Memoir
I couldn't tear my eyes away from the blood. As odd as it sounds, I felt irritated. I'd just cleaned that glass when I first came in on my shift today. Knowing Jim, he'd make me clean them again before I could go home. After he chewed me out, of course.
— Rose Wynters, Phase One: Identify
The next day I received a phone call from Mr. Pride which began, “So, I heard you won Ho of the Year.” Well when you put it like that it didn’t sound like such an accomplishment.
— Kate  Madison, Spilled Perfume: A Memoir
I used to think a drug addict was someone who lived on the far edges of society. Wild-eyed, shaven-headed and living in a filthy squat.That was until I became one...
— Cathryn Kemp, Painkiller Addict: From wreckage to redemption - my true story
The dizzy rapture of starving. The power of needing nothing. By force of will I make myself the impossible sprite who lives on air, on water, on purity.
— Kathryn Harrison, The Kiss
What if, instead of being afraid of even talking about death, we saw our lives in some ways as preparation for it.What if we were taught to ponder it and reflect on it and talk about it and enter it and rehearse it and try it on?What if, rather than being cast out and defined by some terminal category, you were identified as someone in the middle of a transformation that could deepen your soul, open your heart, and all the while-even if and particularly when you were dying-you would be supported by and be part of a community?
— Eve Ensler, In the Body of the World
You will touch this joy and you will suddenly know it is what you were looking for your whole life, but you were afraid to even acknowledge the absence because the hunger for it was so encompassing.
— Eve Ensler, In the Body of the World
The entire partying lifestyle was superficial in my experience, and most of my friendships were as deep as a shot glass and as short-lived as a pack of cigarettes.
— Kate  Madison, Spilled Perfume: A Memoir
Lesson learned: If you’re already resorting to writing shitty poetry (not the lovey-dovey kind) to get your guys attention within one month of meeting him, he is not the one.
— Kate  Madison, Spilled Perfume: A Memoir
That's the thing about parents, I'm beginning to realize. You don't have to see them all that much to imitate them.
— Leigh Newman
I have never experienced writers block and I've written every day since June 1972. But I have experienced the need to get up and walk around, eat ice cream, let ideas percolate, forget the story for a time, and then return to the page. Even the muse needs a vacation to rest up before she gives more of herself.
— Jan Marquart, The Mindful Writer, Still the Mind, Free the Pen
I thought of my sweet little girl and her chubby cheeks, big brown eyes and long brown hair with bangs that constantly needed trimming. She was all that really mattered in this world, and I could not keep moping over some guy who came in and out of my life faster than a season of American Idol.
— Kate  Madison, Spilled Perfume: A Memoir
She [Mary Maclane] is almost always referred to as “confessional.” She has been referred to, several times, as the first blogger. Whereas her writing does not confess much - it is much more spiritual memoir than anything, or perhaps something akin to a mystic’s courtly love, directed at the self. I am wondering what distinguishes writing as confessional…I keep on feeling I prefer the latter-day MacLane, the diary she wrote while convalescing from scarlet fever back home in Butte, Montana, I, Mary MacLane, that Melville House is only publishing as an ebook. Mary MacLane melancholy, totally isolated. Feeling intense disquiet. Now in her early thirties, meditating on her whirlwind celebrity, in cities, feeling distanced from all that, but longing for it too. Obsessed with the Mary MacLane who stopped writing, or stopped publishing books, who was involved with the anarchist/bohemian crowd in Chicago, with the Dill Pickle, who died in poverty and obscurity on the South Side at the age of 48. I want to write about her, but I don’t know how or why yet.
— Kate Zambreno
My story begins with a question.
— Alexandra Bogdanovic, Truth Be Told: Adam Becomes Audrey
Free love, man, Free Love! Which, by the way, was the single greatest concept a young man has ever heard. About three years late, women got wise an my frustration returned to normal levels.
— Steve Martin
Royal Young has accomplished a rare feat in his fresh and riveting debut: he manages to recount his fascinating youth and unconventional family with a mixture of humor, scathing honesty and tenderness. Much more than simply a book about a kid who dreams of stardom, Fame Shark is a thoughtful, hilarious and moving love letter to his family and the Lower East Side of New York City.
— Kristen Johnston, Guts: The Endless Follies and Tiny Triumphs of a Giant Disaster
Most memoirs about alcoholism, promiscuity, and addiction are deep, sobering tales full of scars that will never heal and include alarming statistics and reflection about recovery.This is not one of those memoirs.
— Kate  Madison, Spilled Perfume: A Memoir
People always laugh at me when I tell them I’m scared of pencils, because they can’t fathom why anyone would fear a puncture wound or lead poisoning from a pencil, especially now that it’s impossible to get lead poisoning since they don’t actually contain lead. But those fuckers are sharp, and I have nightmares about getting cornered in a room and repeatedly stabbed with one. Somehow knives don’t frighten me, even though they are the more obvious tool for both a real and imagined stabbing.
— Kate  Madison, Spilled Perfume: A Memoir
I had a friend who got pregnant at age 14 and wasn’t quite sure who the father was. Her paternity test went a little something like this: “If it comes out black, its Darwin’s and if it comes out white its Ray’s.” This is how things were done in the trailer park.
— Kate  Madison, Spilled Perfume: A Memoir
I learned that being a mother takes a lot of energy.
— Julia Sweeney, If It's Not One Thing, It's Your Mother
Each person in the group said something except for me. My silence became noticed. About halfway through the meeting I started to think, I've got to talk. Today, I've got to talk. Fear racked me so bad that sweat ran down my sides. I thought, After the curly-haired woman stops talking I'll raise my hand. A man with a cocky smile told the curly woman that her story was nothing compared to his, he'd been passed out cold from heroin and God knows what, and I wanted to tell him to quit glorifying hinself. I was just about to say the words, a few faces turned toward me as if they could sense my imminent speech, when a man across the circle interrupted.The opportunity passed; what I wanted to say wouldn't fit now. I tilted on the back two legs of the chair and waited for my desire to speak and be noticed and be part of the group to travel back through my nervous system. Up the synapses condemnation rushed: Why couldn't I spit something out like a normal person?
— Daphne Scholinski, The Last Time I Wore a Dress
Because when you’re a 23-year old party girl who has to pee you don’t really think about the possibility that your nerdy bouncer friend might suddenly start acting like a trench-coated pedophile who flashes kids at the park.
— Kate  Madison, Spilled Perfume: A Memoir
Become your own soulmate. Then you'll always have someone watching your back, and you'll always have someone who loves you.
— Rebecca O'Donnell, Freak: The True Story of an Insecurity Addict
We mask our needs as the needs of others.
— Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice
Dogs possess a quality that's rare among humans--the ability to make you feel valued just by being you--and it was something of a miracle to me to be on the receiving end of all that acceptance. The dog didn't care what I looked like, or what I did for a living, or what a train wreck of a life I'd led before I got her, or what we did from day to day. She just wanted to be with me, and that awareness gave me a singular sensation of delight. I kept her in a crate at night until she was housebroken, and in the mornings I'd let her up onto the bed with me. She'd writhe with joy at that. She'd wag her tail and squirm all over me, lick my neck and face and eyes and ears, get her paws all tangled in my braid, and I'd just lie there, and I'd feel those oceans of loss from my past ebbing back, ebbing away, and I'd hear myself laugh out loud.
— Caroline Knapp, Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs
I am in the unthinkable situation that people cannot bear to contemplate.
— Sonali Deraniyagala, Wave
Their promise, my children's possibilities, still linger in our home.
— Sonali Deraniyagala, Wave
There occurs the beautiful feeling that only humanity together is the true human being, and that the individual can be cheerful and happy only if he has the courage to feel himself in the Whole.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Truth and Fiction: Relating to My Life
Your past doesn't dictate what your future will be.
— Jillian Bullock, Here I Stand
That night I slept like a baby. When I woke the next morning I knew I was going to smoke heroin again. Everything that day was enjoyable: sitting on the bus, working all day – it all felt good. It was the best day of my life.
— Christine Lewry, Thin Wire: A Mother's Journey Through Her Daughter's Heroin Addiction
I used to teach at an abused children's home. I told the kids, "You all have a manure pile of memories. Nothing you can do about that. Now you can drown in the stink or turn it into compost and grow a garden. I wouldn't't be as good a teacher to you if I didn't know what you're going through. That way, I make my memories do good instead of letting them eat me. I'm like Herbie from Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer. I pulled my Bumble's teeth. He's still big and scary but he can't bite me anymore.
— Rebecca O'Donnell, Freak: The True Story of an Insecurity Addict
The rock I'd seen in my life looked dull because in all ignorance I'd never thought to knock it open. People have cracked ordinary New England pegmatite - big, coarse granite - and laid bare clusters of red garnets, or topaz crystals, chrysoberyl, spodumene, emerald. They held in their hands crystals that had hung in a hole in the dark for a billion years unseen. I was all for it. I would lay about me right and left with a hammer, and bash the landscape to bits. I would crack the earth's crust like a piñata and spread to the light the vivid prizes in chunks within. Rock collecting was opening the mountains. It was like diving through my own interior blank blackness to remember the startling pieces of a dream: there was a blue lake, a witch, a lighthouse, a yellow path. It was like poking about in a grimy alley and finding an old, old coin. Nothing was at it seemed. The earth was like a shut eye. Mother's not dead, dear - she's only sleeping. Pry open the thin lid and find a crystalline intelligence inside, a rayed and sidereal beauty. Crystals grew inside rock like arithmetical flowers. They lengthened and spread, adding plane to plane in awed and perfect obedience to an absolute geometry that even the stones - maybe only the stones - understood.
— Annie Dillard, An American Childhood
Why should I be frightened of dying? I did not know what death truly was; no one did. Who had made dying a bad word? Yes, it was universally considered awful—unwanted, painful, feared—because when it happened it stopped us from moving and being, and we interpreted that as if something had ended. But what if it were actually a beautiful experience? What if, with death, something actually began instead?
— Charles Novacek, Border Crossings: Coming of Age in the Czech Resistance
After college I got a job and started working. This new career had absolutely nothing to do with my degree.
— Jason Najum, Delusions of Grandeur
She hops expectantly into the sink. I turn on the tap for her; she laps without a glance in my direction, like a duchess so used to being ministered to that she no longer notices the servants and sees only a world where objects dumbly bend to her wishes, doors opening, faucets discharging cool water, delicious things appearing in her dish.
— Peter Trachtenberg, Another Insane Devotion: On The Love of Cats and Persons
I carried with me into the West End Bar, the White Horse Tavern, a long list of things I would never do: I would never have my hair set in a beauty parlor. I would never move to a suburb and bake cakes or make casseroles. I would never go to a country club dance, although I did like the paper lanterns casting rainbow colors on the terrace. I would never invest in the stock market. I would never play canasta. I would never wear pearls. I would love like a nursling but I would never go near a man who had a portfolio or a set of golf clubs or a business or even a business suit. I would only love a wild thing. I didn't care if wild things tended to break hearts. I didn't care if they substituted scotch for breakfast cereal. I understood that wild things wrote suicide notes to the gods and were apt to show up three hours later than promised. I understood that art was long and life was short.
— Anne Roiphe, Art and Madness: A Memoir of Lust Without Reason
Everything around me affirmed there was nothing else I could do – yet everything inside me cried that I was not doing enough.
— Jason Najum, Delusions of Grandeur
Work hard. "Suit yourself, then you'll know at least one person is pleased.
— Carole Estrup, Barefoot Girl Out of Ohio: A Memoir of Survival and Overcoming
My father has the proper degrees and framed pictures on the walls, though they're mostly taped over with photos of children, family and friends. Images from the past and present and trips and experiences combined with files on the floor – it's a happening or collage in progress.
— Alex McKeithen, The Seventh Angel
During these three months I have gone through much; I mean, I have gone through much in myself; and now there are the things I am going to see and go through. There will be much to be written.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Dostoevsky: Letters And Reminiscences
The stars were withdrawn, small, giving no light, unlike other nights when they seemed to hang large from the sky ready to be reached for and taken into our hands.
— Sanora Babb, An Owl on Every Post
I avoided one-on-one situations, eye contact, and healthy relationships. Instead I took refuge in drinking too much, cheap sex, and sarcasm.
— Jason Najum, Delusions of Grandeur
We're human. We all occasionally wet ourselves. No one is really better than anyone else. We're just all trying to make it through the year as best we can. We screw up sometimes. We succeed sometimes. We laugh. We cry. We go on. Those are the things we should really share with each other this holiday season, right, if we dare send a letter? We should share the truth. We should share the insanity.
— Wade Rouse, It's All Relative: Two Families, Three Dogs, 34 Holidays, and 50 Boxes of Wine
How to preside over your own internal disorder? Finding the "I" that can represent the pack of you is the first challenge of the memoirist.
— Tracy Kidder, Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction
Chris didn’t need to learn how to conquer fear. He had to embrace it, walk with it and listen to it.
— Michelle Tackabery, Within Your Reach: A Journey Through Diabetes
A lifelong movie I already knew the ending to
— Jason Najum, Delusions of Grandeur
Any action a woman engages in from a spirit of joy, and within a similarly safe and joyous environment, falls within the city-walls of feminism. A girl has a right to dance how she wants, when her favourite record comes on.
— Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman
You had a certain way of saying my name. It was the inflection maybe, something you put into those three syllables. And now you are gone and my name is just my name again, not the story of my life.
— Abigail Thomas, Safekeeping: Some True Stories from a Life
If a writer starts worring about what he or she has left out or forgotten, they might not be able to write even a single line.
— Baby Halder, A Life Less Ordinary: A Memoir
You have to study and learn so that you can make up your own mind. Stock your mind, stock your mind. It is your house of treasure and no one in the world can interfere with it. If you won the Irish Sweepstakes and bought a house that needed furniture would you fill it with bits and pieces of rubbish? Your mind is your house and if you fill it with rubbish from the cinemas, it will rot in your head. You might be poor, your shoes might be broken, but your mind is a palace.
— Frank McCourt, Angela's Ashes
I had to get a close-hand view of the misery and unhappiness of a man made world, before I reached the point where I could successfully revolt against it.
— Emmeline Pankhurst, My Own Story
it's been a long time since i've thought about that night, that wonderful raucous night. I can still see the president s surprise and amusement while opening gifts. I can still hear the music, the guests singing along and the president having such a wonderful time surrounded by his closest family and friends. What a privilege it was to have been there, to witness the joy and laughter. But Always, when I remember that special birthday celebration on the Sequoia, I can't help but think it should not have been his last. At forty six it shouldn't have been his last
— Clint Hill, Mrs. Kennedy and Me: An Intimate Memoir
One of the things I learned about writing a memoir is you can’t drag the reader through everything. Every human life is worth 20 memoirs.
— Andre Dubus III
The onset of adulthood is an organic, creeping process. No one wakes up one day and decides, "Lo, on this day I shall forever put away childish things and begin clipping coupons to go to Wal-Mart.
— David Carr, The Night of the Gun
I felt so happy I could barely stay in my skin
— Frank McCourt, 'Tis
This memoir is one of the most brutally honest books I’ve ever read. You will grow to believe, and cheer on, this flawed hero as he gains a liberating knowledge of himself.
— Joe Loya, The Man Who Outgrew His Prison Cell: Confessions of a Bank Robber
She would (if she could) put her arm around the girl she'd been and try to tell her Take it easy, but the girl would not have listened. The girl had no receptors for Take it easy. And besides, "Hey Jude" was on the radio, it was her prayer, her manifesto, almost her dwelling place. She sang it everywhere. The music made her cry then; it makes her cry now. Listening to it now brings back memories so sharp they taste like blood in her mouth.
— Abigail Thomas, Safekeeping: Some True Stories from a Life
But you have to remember...that you can't run from unhappiness. You just take it with you.
— Karen Wheeler, Tout Sweet: Hanging Up My High Heels For A New Life In Rural France
We must define a story which encourages us to make use of the place where we live without killing it, and we must understand that the living world cannot be replicated.
— William Kittredge, Hole in the Sky: A Memoir
One thing I've noticed since I quit drinking is that a person usually has two or three sets of impulses scratching away at some internal door at any given time. If you're sober--if you're alert, and paying attention to those impulses, and not yielding to the instinct to anesthetize them--you can receive a lot of guidance about where to go, what to do next in life.
— Caroline Knapp, Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs
We had our family patterns and were quite comfortable in them, which made it even more shocking when, just after his eightieth birthday, Papa began bringing up his time as a prisoner of war in Germany.Of course, I had always known that he had served in World War II and been captured, just like I had always know the stories about my grandmother and the build of their house. It's that peculiar type of family memory, where someone has obviously told you but you were too young to remember actually hearing it, so it seems like knowledge that was instilled at birth. Papa never brought it up, and my parents said they hadn't heard him mention it once in the previous fifty years. But suddenly, he was talking.
— Jesse Cozean
Is there anything courageous or brave about making the only possible choice that will save your life? When you're drowning, you grab any hand that's offered. To me, bravery is a spontaneous decision to save somebody else's life when your own is in danger.
— Claire Sylvia
She winced and covered her ears as Eric,onstage, wrestled with his microphone."Sorry about that, guys!" he yelled. "All right. I'm Eric, and this is my homeboy Matt on the drums. My first poem is called 'Untitled.'" He screwed up his face as if in pain, and wailed into the mike. "Come my faux juggernaut, my nefarious loins! Slather every protuberance with arid zeal!"Simon slid down in his seat. "Please don't tell anyone I know him."Clary giggled. "Who uses the word 'loins'?""Eric," Simon said grimly. "All his poems have loins in them."'Turgid is my torment!" Eric wailed. "Agony swells within!""You bet it does," Clary said.
— Cassandra Clare, City of Bones
Every moment of the nightForever changing placesAnd they put out the star-lightWith the breath from their pale faces
— Edgar Allan Poe
I love not man the less, but nature more
— George Gordon Byron
November comesAnd November goes,With the last red berriesAnd the first white snows.With night coming early,And dawn coming late,And ice in the bucketAnd frost by the gate.The fires burnAnd the kettles sing,And earth sinks to restUntil next spring.
— Clyde Watson
Some people like me, some don't. I don't understand, Where the difference comes from. My heart like them all. For a simple childish reason. We all are created equal, we all are humans.
— Santosh Kalwar, A Very First Book Of Poems: Heartbreak
Ourchestra:So you haven't got a drum, just beat your belly.So I haven't got a horn-I'll play my nose.So we haven't any cymbals-We'll just slap our hands together,And though there may be orchestrasThat sound a little betterWith their fancy shiny instrumentsThat cost an awful lot-Hey, we're making music twice as goodBy playing what we've got!
— Shel Silverstein
EnnuiTea leaves thwart those who court catastrophe,designing futures where nothing will occur:cross the gypsy’s palm and yawning shewill still predict no perils left to conquer.Jeopardy is jejune now: naïve knightfinds ogres out-of-date and dragons unheardof, while blasé princesses indicttilts at terror as downright absurd.The beast in Jamesian grove will never jump,compelling hero’s dull career to crisis;and when insouciant angels play God’s trump,while bored arena crowds for once look eager,hoping toward havoc, neither pleas nor prizesshall coax from doom’s blank door lady or tiger.
— Sylvia Plath
nothing's news.it's the same old thing indisguise.only one thing comes without adisguise and you only see itonce, ormaybe never.like getting hit by a freighttrain.makes us realize that all ourmoaning about long lost girlsin gingham dressesis not so importantafterall.
— Charles Bukowski, Bone Palace Ballet
I hate and love. And why, perhaps you’ll ask.I don’t know: but I feel, and I’m tormented.
— Catullus
We may know who we are or we may not. We may be Muslims, Jews or Christians but until our hearts become the mould for every heart we will see only our differences.
— Jalaluddin Rumi
A thousand years or more ago,When I was newly sewn,There lived four wizards of renown,Whose name are still well-known:Bold Gryffindor from wild moor,Fair Ravlenclaw from glen,Sweet Hufflepuff from valley broad,Shrewd Slytherin from fen.They share a wish, a hope, a dream,They hatched a daring plan,To educate young sorcerers,Thus Hogwarts school began.Now each of these four foundersFormed their own house, for eachDid value different virtues,In the ones they had to teach.By Gryffindor, the bravest werePrized far beyond the rest;For Ravenclaw, the cleverestWould always be the best;For Hufflepuff, hardworkers wereMost worthy of admission;And power-hungry SlytherinLoved those of great ambition.While still alive they did divideTheir favourates from the throng,Yet how to pick the worthy onesWhen they were dead and gone? 'Twas Gryffindor who found the way,He whipped me off his headThe founders put some brains in meSo I could choose instead!Now slip me snug around your ears,I've never yet been wrong,I'll have alook inside your mind And tell where you belong!
— J.K. Rowling
I have you fast in my fortress,And will not let you depart,But put you down into the dungeon,In the round-tower of my heart,And there will I keep you forever,Yes, forever and a day,Till the walls shall crumble to ruin,And moulder in the dust away!
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Said the Sun to the Moon-'When you are but a lonely white crone,And I, a dead King in my golden armour somewhere in a dark wood,Remember only this of our hopeless loveThat never till Time is doneWill the fire of the heart and the fire of the mind be one
— Edith Sitwell
All the drawing lacksis the final touch: To addeyes to the dragon
— Diane Duane, The Wizard's Dilemma
If I knew where poems came from, I'd go there.
— Michael Langley
But who are we, where do we come fromWhen all those yearsNothing but idle talk is leftAnd we are nowhere in the world?"= MEETING =
— Boris Pasternak, The Poems of Doctor Zhivago
Oh captain my captain
— Walt Whitman
I believe in your kiss... your touch and the way you make me feel. I believe in your eyes... that make me see the good in most. I believe in your mouth... and your sweet taste... and the softness of the words that flow from you. I believe your love has taken me places, I never dreamed possible. I believe in your laughter... your tears of caring and your muted look of understanding. I believe that your love has made me a better human being. I believe your compassion and patience have enriched all who have come to know you. I believe because of you, I'm the luckiest person on the face of the earth. I believe in you... in everything you say and do. I believe... that you have made this world a better place
— Joe Fazio
A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself. 
— E.M. Forster
i am like a dead begoniahanging upside down because like a dead begonia I don't give a fuck
— David Levithan, Will Grayson, Will Grayson
only kindness that raises its headfrom the crowd of the world to sayit is I you have been looking for,and then goes with you everywherelike a shadow or a friend.
— Naomi Shihab Nye, I Feel a Little Jumpy Around You: A Book of Her Poems  His Poems Collected in Pairs
Good folk, I have no coin,To take were to purloin:I have no copper in my purse,I have no silver either,And all my gold is on the furzeThat shakes in windy weatherAbove the rusy heather.
— Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market and Other Poems
Beer bottles, whiskey bottles, brown glass, green. They fell to the lawn and I'd feel serene. Adam was king to my stilted queen.
— Kate Bernheimer, The Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold
I have a rendezvous with death... I will not fail that rendezvous
— Alan Seeger
Most Like an Arch This MarriageMost like an arch—an entrance which upholds and shores the stone-crush up the air like lace. Mass made idea, and idea held in place. A lock in time. Inside half-heaven unfolds.Most like an arch—two weaknesses that lean into a strength. Two fallings become firm. Two joined abeyances become a term naming the fact that teaches fact to mean.Not quite that? Not much less. World as it is, what’s strong and separate falters. All I do at piling stone on stone apart from you is roofless around nothing. Till we kissI am no more than upright and unset. It is by falling in and in we makethe all-bearing point, for one another’s sake, in faultless failing, raised by our own weight.
— John Ciardi, The Collected Poems
Evening by eveningAmong the Brookside rushes,Laura bow'd her head to hear,Lizzie veil'd her blushes:Crouching close togetherIn the cooling weather,With clasping arms and cautioning lips,With tingling cheeks and fingertips."lie close," Laura said,Pricking up her golden head:"We must not look at Goblin men,We must not buy their fruits:who knows upon the soil they fedTheir hungry thirsty roots?""Come buy," call the GoblinsHobbling down the glen
— Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market and Other Poems
...in that rich earth a richer dust concealed.(I'm flogging a dead horse w/ this one but this is the 1st time I've even seen this quotes feature! I just wanted to post something.)
— Rupert Brooke
After the fierce midsummer all ablaze Has burned itself to ashes, and expires In the intensity of its own fires,There come the mellow, mild, St. Martin daysCrowned with the calm of peace, but sad with haze. So after Love has led us, till he tires Of his own throes, and torments, and desires,Comes large-eyed friendship: with a restful gaze,He beckons us to follow, and across Cool verdant vales we wander free from care. Is it a touch of frost lies in the air?Why are we haunted with a sense of loss?We do not wish the pain back, or the heat;And yet, and yet, these days are incomplete.
— Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Poems of Passion
Is stuffed, de world, wif feeding girls.
— John Berryman, The Dream Songs
Poems are not often simply emotions butOne has enough emotions -- they're experienceExperience themselves are not important....
— Angela Suba, From My Pen, On Life
There are anonymous poems and poets without poems.
— Dejan Stojanovic, Serbian Satire and Aphorisms
The kind of poetry to avoid in the pretty-pretty kind that pleased our grandmothers, the kind that Longfellow and Tennyson, good poets at their best, wrote at their worst.
— Clifton Fadiman, Clifton Fadiman's Fireside Reader
I rushed through the door.You had bitten a way for me.
— Hannah Weiner, Hannah Weiner's Open House
He walked out the door and with each step my heart breaks.He'd be gone for days with long silences between each breath.I know I'm his one of many and he knows he's my one of one. The only one who holds him down.Yet, he still leaves.He walks through the door and with each step my heart leaps.He crumbles to the ground in tears telling me he's sorry.He says he needs me and he's nothing without me.How can he be so attached and detached at the same time?I swear, this man loves to see me in pain.
— J.A. ANUM
It made me happy that poems are referred to in the present tense even when the poet is in the past tense.
— David Benioff, City of Thieves
Names sound nice because no one peeks behind the cover to see the sad face of a poem crying for meaning, while the name of the creator proudly smiles from the title.
— Dejan Stojanovic, Serbian Satire and Aphorisms
A poem is its own name and cover.
— Dejan Stojanovic, Serbian Satire and Aphorisms
I believe that poems die the moment they are outwardly expressed.
— Maurice Maeterlinck
You said we can't happen, but darling, we started happening the very first day we met.
— J.A. ANUM
I am a master wordsmith. I have the ability to bend words at will and invoke feelings with the stroke of my pen. But I'm yet to master the art of finding the right words to describe what happens in my heart when I see you.
— J.A. ANUM
No baby, you didn't hurt me. You wrecked me. Know the difference.
— J.A. ANUM
We left dents on each other. Mine was in her heart, and hers was on my car.
— J.A. ANUM
Let me be the drink in your cup. I know how to intoxicate you.
— J.A. ANUM
I'll gladly settle for amnesia if I had to live in a world where I couldn't remember how much you mean to me.
— J.A. ANUM
I'll stop loving you the day my shadow stops following me around. Because on that day, nothing will make sense.
— J.A. ANUM
The first time I saw your face, my lips said, "hello" and my heart said, "that's your wife.
— J.A. ANUM
He pulled me close and said, "Katie, don't leave me, you're my breath, I refuse to live without you."It was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard, but I still walked away, because my name is Anne Marie.
— J.A. ANUM
I tasted danger on his lips and became an addict.A slave to adrenaline and irrational behaviour.We lived recklessly in a dramatic whirl;Clubbing and Cutting,Drinking and Driving,Fighting and Fucking,Smoking and Snorting,Overdoing and Overdosing. I tasted danger on his lips and lost my way.
— J.A. ANUM
There's something about her.It's not her smile or grace,It's not her beauty or race,It's not her scent or warm embrace,Maybe it's her laugh or the shape of her face.No, that's not the case.It's just her.
— J.A. ANUM
A versifier’s poem is born by the sound
—  a poet’s sound is born by the poem.
Roses are red Violets are blueI don't go on this accountSo go away SHOO!
— bob C Cow
My uncle read me Omar Khayyam. In Arabic. Not Turkish or even English. I tried so hard to understand it. I would ask him what it all meant but he always said the pleasure was in the finding out... the discovery. He said you can keep some poems by you your whole life and they will only reveal parts of themselves to you when you are ready to hear them. (Ottmar)
— Miranda Emmerson, Miss Treadway and the Field of Stars
poetry is not—except in a very limited sense—a form of self-expression. Who on earth supposes that the pearl expresses the oyster?
— Cecil Day-Lewis, Selected Poetry
How do poems grow? They begin deep down in the pit of the soul as a seedling of a thought …
— Nanette L. Avery
Nails that claw by a beautiful mind.A pretty face can leave you blind - Poem 'Small Pain' from 'The B Word: The B in LBGTQ Poetry'.
— S.C. Silver, The B Word: The B in LBGTQ Poetry
O Sailor!It’s the way I want to beIt’s beyond the pale for meIt’s what being unknown is all aboutIt’s the path I choose to takeIt’s the destiny I makeIt’s my life now – the only way outOut of circulation in another dimensionI carry you right inside my heartAs we’re one, moulded togetherAlways and forever, never apartIt’s a world where I’m aloneIt’s a place where I can atoneIt’s a severing of all ties I knowI feel so free and yet I’m boundI’m invisible and yet aroundI know I’ve got to go with the flowMy life now is like a sailboat ride,Destiny is the wind – with you by my side,I’m the sailor, who sets the course,Empowered by an incredible force.
— Tapan Ghosh, Faceless The Only Way Out
When once we are buried you think we are gone. But behold me immortal!
— Jane Austen
She has a fiery soul that cannot be tamed.She has free spirit that cannot be maimed.She moves with the wind and flows with the river.She howls at the moon and smiles at the sun.Just when you think she is finished, she declares, “I’ve just begun.”Like wild flowers, she grows where she decides to push through fallow ground.Like wild fires, she spreads with speed that can’t be drowned.She has mystery in her blood, magic in her touch and regardless of her frameshe can be too much-wild woman.She is not predictable, controllable nor the people pleasing kind.That’s why she is called wild woman and can never be defined.
— Mishi McCoy
my poems are only bits of scratchingon the floor of acage.
— Charles Bukowski, The Pleasures of the Damned
No poet can stay alive solely in his/her poetry etched in papers, it is the reader audience in whom the poets breath forever.......
— SWANSH
I read somewhere that dedications are like coded love letters, but I always seem to lay us out bare.Sorry for the poems.
— Unknown
Thoughtful symmetry in a maze of tortuous confusion, Loving me is a battle, wrought with pain and illusion
— Emery LeeAnn, Chaos & Burnt Offerings
The fatal problem with poetry: poems.
— Ben Lerner, The Hatred of Poetry
A wise old owl once told me,One time when he was out of his tree,That nothing in this world is for free.I agree!
— P.D. Cain, A-Z of Animal Poems & Colouring Book
Poetry is like an unexpected noise in the night: the creak of a door, a footstep on the porch, the soft scuffle of a moth against the screen, which rouses every sense to an instant alert. So comes poetry to the drowsy mind, which startles a moment, wonders, and returns to sleep.
— Christopher Morley, Inward, Ho!
LOVE the hideous in order to find the sublime core of it.
— Mina Loy, The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems of Mina Loy
Poetry": What kind of art assumes the dislike of its audience and what kind of artist aligns herself with that dislike, even encourages it? An art hated from without and within.
— Ben Lerner, The Hatred of Poetry
A little bump in the road is just a bump. There's more ahead until you reach your destination.
— China Cancio, THE SOUL: Poems of Life
I've been writing poems since I was sixteen. Back then, poems were an obvious release for all the frustrations and anxieties associated with adolescence. Mostly, they were a way for me to impress girls, even though I never remember any girls being impressed.
— Tony Magistrale
We think we owe everyone something. We think we need to explain ourselves and we think too much about thinking too much.And it is funny how we think we know it all, but the reality is this: everything we think that brings us together is everything that sets us further apart. And over thinking of how different we all are; is failing to recognize of how connected we all could really be.
— Robert M. Drake, Black Butterfly
The attention was flattering. For the first five minutes. Now I know how poems feel.
— Margaret Edson, Wit
I have never cared for castles or a crown that grips too tight,Let the night sky be my starry roof and the moon my only light,My heart was born a Hero,My storm-bound sword won't rest,I left this harbour long ago on a never-ending quest.I am off to the horizon,Where the wild wind blows the foam,Come get lost with me, love,And the sea shall be our home.
— Cressida Cowell, How to Break a Dragon's Heart
How would you start to write a poem? How would you put together a series of words for its first line—how would you know which words to choose? When you read a poem, every word seemed so perfect that it had to have been predestined—well, a good poem.
— Ashley Hay, The Railwayman's Wife
Her breast is fit for pearls,But I was not a "Diver" - Her brow is fit for thronesBut I have not a crest,Her heart is fit for home-I- a Sparrow- build thereSweet of twigs and twineMy perennial nest.
— Emily Dickinson, Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson
One must speak in such a way that although someone else, or many others, or an infinite number of people have said it before, it seems as though you said it first.
— Juan Ramón Jiménez, The Complete Perfectionist
It was Halloween eve, And I was yearning alone waiting for my soul mate Ethan, He was expected by now for the celebrations in our bedroom, We planned for this, many months back, and now I was getting restless, My dick was erect and making a pole in my boxer - tough to handle 9 inches long of yearning all alone.
— Delicious David, Dark Desires: II Gay Erotic Poems
I write poems. I'm often laughed at for doing so. My friends and foes, who were born in 1980's or even later aren't savvy with this concept of the reading and writing poems. They're probably not at fault because while they were being brought up in their respective environments, they weren't really taught how to appreciate poetry. Sadly, those same indifferent souls are now raising their children in the same robotic way, keeping them away from an art form as pure as poetry. Anyway, on the path my life, my poems, written and unwritten, are spread throughout like breadcrumbs. Alas! I'm savouring these breadcrumbs alone because no one has chosen to walk by me, maybe because they're skeptic about the taste of these crumbs. They've hypothetically assumed that these crumbs, these poems are bitter. Sigh! They aren't courageous enough to gather the strength to actually taste them. Perhaps this way, the real sweetness of my crumbs, of my poems stays obscured to them. But I haven't let them crush this sweetness beneath their feet and that's why, I've chosen to walk alone instead. How can I not savour these crumbs if I already know that they're leading me to the apex of my life? How can I not write poems if a voice inside me is constantly pecking my hands to give it a form? This voice is my meditation. This voice is my shadow, a shadow which is stubborn enough to remain intact even when I'll be gone. This voice is my concrete, the concrete that I'm made up of. This voice is my power, the power that will shake your senses. This voice is my poetry.
— Supriya Kaur Dhaliwal
In The Shadow Of The NightAll the clouds are gray, and the sky is dark as night. Soft words are spoken, and there's a twinkle, of a flicker of light.The presence of a Man walks by, and Mighty and Powerful is He.Kneeling down to pray, He says a prayer for me.The sky becomes brighter, and the leaves of the trees turn green.The flowers begin to bloom, and there's a warm gentle breeze.Thank you Lord for setting me free...
— Jerrel C. Thomas, Christian Rhyme Poems: Inspiring For The Soul
It became a weekend of reading, of trying to see her in the fragments of the poem she'd left for me.
— John Green, Paper Towns
And then, as I got older,I left the woods and lookedat fading stars, dying stars,eternal stars in their heavens,with lips that would kiss and wordsshaped through love songs,a life of journeys to some placefar from home, unfamiliar,(a wild weird western shore)until sunset across limestoneprompts us to make these,our plagiarised prayersto broken stone.
— Miriam Joy, Fleeting Ink
A novel is a hearty meal, but poems are the Belgian chocolates of the bookshelf. You can pick one and linger over it. Savour the aroma, the taste, the melting texture, the sweet craving it leaves behind! Or you can scoff down as many as you can eat. It’s up to you.
— Vicky Arthurs
I write poems. I'm often laughed at for doing so. My friends and foes, who were born in 1980's or even later aren't savvy with this concept of the reading and writing poems. They're probably not at fault because while they were being brought up in their respective environs, they weren't really taught how to appreciate poetry. Sadly, those same indifferent souls are now raising their children in the same robotic way, keeping them away from an art form as pure as poetry. Anyway, on the path my life, my poems, written and unwritten, are spread throughout like breadcrumbs. Alas! I'm savoring these breadcrumbs alone because no one has chosen to walk by me, maybe because they're skeptic about the taste of these crumbs. They've hypothetically assumed that these crumbs, these poems are bitter. Sigh! They aren't courageous enough to gather the strength to actually taste them. Perhaps this way, the real sweetness of my crumbs, of my poems stays obscured to them. But I haven't let them crush this sweetness beneath their feet and that's why, I've chosen to walk alone instead. How can I not savor these crumbs if I already know that they're leading me to the apex of my life? How can I not write poems if a voice inside me is constantly pecking my hands to give it a form? This voice is my meditation. This voice is my shadow, a shadow which is stubborn enough to remain intact even when I'll be gone. This voice is my concrete, the concrete that I'm made up of. This voice is my power, the power that will shake your senses. This voice is my poetry.
— Supriya Kaur Dhaliwal
Love- if not reciprocated, comes with an expiry date, no matter how strongly we beg to differ.
— Manish Pathania, Poems That Do Not Rhyme
A poem is an event, like a wedding or birth.
— Marty Rubin