c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
I love women whose hidden desires make horses put an end to their lives at the threshold
— Mahmoud Darwish, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems
For our generation walks as in Hades, without the divine.
— Friedrich Hölderlin
Il pleure dans mon coeur Comme il pleut sur la ville.
— Paul Verlaine
I am not collarbones or drunken letters never sent. I am not the way I leave or left or didn’t know how to handle anything,at any time,and I am not your fault.
— Charlotte Eriksson
You are only as free as you think you are and freedom will always be as real as you believe it to be.
— Robert M. Drake, Beautiful Chaos
Whatever you get out of poetry - take it. take it. take it. Words are better off felt than understood.
— Sanober  Khan
Say to them,say to the down-keepers,the sun-slappers,the self-soilers,the harmony-hushers,"Even if you are not ready for dayit cannot always be night."You will be right.For that is the hard home-run.Live not for battles won.Live not for the-end-of-the-song.Live in the along.
— Gwendolyn Brooks, Selected Poems
See it was like this when we waltz into this place.A couple of papish cats is doing an Aztec two-stepAnd I says Dad let's cutbut then this dame comes up behind me see and says you and me could really existWow I says Only the next day she has bad teeth and really hates poetry.
— Lawrence Ferlinghetti
We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.
— E.M. Forster
and if iif i ever let love gobecause the hatred and the whisperingsbecome a phantom dictate i o-bey in lieu of impulse and realities(the blossoming flamingos of mywild mimosa trees)then let love freeze meout.(from i must become a menace to my enemies)
— June Jordan, Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems
Ah! well a-day! what evil looks Had I from old and young! Instead of the cross, the Albatross About my neck was hung.
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
A JEWELRY STORE NAMED INDIAIf you hold this Dazzling emeraldUp to the sky,It will shine a billion Beautiful miraclesPainted from the tearsOf the Most High.Plucked from the lush gardensOf a yellowish-green paradise,Look inside this hypnotic gemAnd a kaleidoscope of Titillating, Soul-raising Sights and colorsWill tease and seduceYour eyes and mind.Tell me, sir.Have you ever heardA peacock sing?Hold your earTo this mystical stoneAnd you will hearSacred hymns flowingTo the vibrationsOf the perfumedWind.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
from what we cannot hold the stars are made
— W.S. Merwin
Know that we have met before and that we will meet again. I will find my way to you in the next life, and every life after that.
— Mia Hollow
The horses suddenly began to neigh, protestingAgainst those who were drowning them in the ocean.The horses sank to the bottom, neighing, neighing.Until they had all gone down.That is all. Nevertheless, I pity them,Those bay horses, that never saw land again.
— Boris Slutsky, Things That Happened
I spit into the face of Time That has transfigured me.
— W.B. Yeats, The Rose
How surely gravity's law,strong as an ocean current,takes hold of the smallest thingand pulls it toward the heart of the world.Each thing---each stone, blossom, child---is held in place.Only we, in our arrogance,push out beyond what we each belong tofor some empty freedom.If we surrenderedto earth's intelligencewe could rise up rooted, like trees.Instead we entangle ourselvesin knots of our own makingand struggle, lonely and confused.So like children, we begin againto learn from the things,because they are in God's heart;they have never left him.This is what the things can teach us:to fall,patiently to trust our heaviness.Even a bird has to do thatbefore he can fly.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God
The following year the house was substantially remodeled, and the conservatory removed. As the walls of the now crumbling wall were being torn down, one of the workmen chanced upon a small leatherbound book that had apparently been concealed behind a loose brick or in a crevice in the wall. By this time Emily Dickinson was a household name in Amherst. It happened that this carpenter was a lover of poetry- and hers in particular- and when he opened the little book and realized that that he had found her diary, he was “seized with a violent trembling,” as he later told his grandson. Both electrified and terrified by the discovery, he hid the book in his lunch bucket until the workday ended and then took it home. He told himself that after he had read and savored every page, he would turn the diary over to someone who would know how to best share it with the public. But as he read, he fell more and more deeply under the poet’s spell and began to imagine that he was her confidant. He convinced himself that in his new role he was no longer obliged to give up the diary. Finally, having brushed away the light taps of conscience, he hid the book at the back of an oak chest in his bedroom, from which he would draw it out periodically over the course of the next sixty-four years until he had virtually memorized its contents. Even his family never knew of its existence.  Shortly before his death in 1980 at the age of eighty-nine, the old man finally showed his most prized possession to his grandson (his only son having preceded him in death), confessing that his delight in it had always been tempered by a nagging guilt and asking that the young man now attempt to atone for his grandfather’s sin. The grandson, however, having inherited both the old man’s passion for poetry and his tendency towards paralysis of conscience, and he readily succumbed to the temptation to hold onto the diary indefinitely while trying to decide what ought to be done with it.
— Jamie Fuller, The Diary of Emily Dickinson
Dancing is like poetry written by our bodies: our outstretched arms our words of longing.
— Lene Fogelberg, Beautiful Affliction
Poetry seems especially like nothing else so much as itself. Poetry is not like, it is the very lining of the inner life.
— C.D. Wright, Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil
Thus weary of the world, away she hies,And yokes her silver doves; by whose swift aidTheir mistress mounted through the empty skiesIn her light chariot quickly is convey'd;Holding their course to Paphos, where their queenMeans to immure herself and not be seen.
— William Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis
Words are what sticks to the real. We use them to push the real, to drag the real into the poem. They are what we hold on with, nothing else. They are as valuable in themselves as rope with nothing to be tied to.
— Jack Spicer
I am not I
—  pity the tale of me.
Poem (the spirit likes to dress up) The spirit likes to dress up like this: ten fingers, ten toes,shoulders, and all the rest at night in the black branches, in the morningin the blue branches of the world. It could float, of course, but would ratherplumb rough matter. Airy and shapeless thing, it needs the metaphor of the body,lime and appetite, the oceanic fluids; it needs the body’s world, instinctand imagination and the dark hug of time, sweetness and tangibility,to be understood, to be more than pure light that burns where no one is –so it enters us – in the morning shines from brute comfort like a stitch of lightning;and at night lights up the deep and wondrous drownings of the body like a star.
— Mary Oliver, Dream Work
My tongue remembers your wounded flavor.The vein in my neckadores you. A swordstands up between my hips,my hidden fleece sends forth its scent of human oil.
— Li-Young Lee, The City in Which I Love You
A wealth you cannot imagineflows through you.Do not consider what strangers say.Be secluded in your secret heart-house,that bowl of silence.
— Jalaluddin Rumi
Let me keep my distance, always, from those who think they have the answers.Let me keep company always with those who say "Look!" and laugh in astonishment, and bow their heads.
— Mary Oliver, Evidence: Poems
Without poets, without artists... everything would fall apart into chaos. There would be no more seasons, no more civilizations, no more thought, no more humanity, no more life even; and impotent darkness would reign forever. Poets and artists together determine the features of their age, and the future meekly conforms to their edit.
— Guillaume Apollinaire, Selected Writings
In the great green room, there was a telephoneAnd a red balloonAnd a picture of a cat jumping over the moon...
— Margaret Wise Brown, Goodnight Moon
Men had always been the reciters of poetry in the desert.
— Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
These wrinkles are nothingThese gray hairs are nothing,This stomach which sagswith old food, these bruisedand swollen ankles, my darkening brain,they are nothing.I am the same boymy mother used to kiss.
— Mark Strand
THOUGH you are in your shining days,Voices among the crowdAnd new friends busy with your praise,Be not unkind or proud,But think about old friends the most:Time's bitter flood will rise,Your beauty perish and be lostFor all eyes but these eyes.
— W.B. Yeats
For now, poetry has the capacity - in its own ways and by its own means - to remind us of something we are forbidden to see.
— Adrienne Rich
If poets often commit suicide, it is not because their poems are bad but because they are good. Whoever heard of a bad poet committing suicide? The reader is only a little better off. The exhilaration of a good poem lasts twenty minutes, an hour at most.Unlike the scientist, the artist has reentry problems that are frequent and catastrophic.
— Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book
Keats mourned that the rainbow, which as a boy had been for him a magic thing, had lost its glory because the physicists had found it resulted merely from the refraction of the sunlight by the raindrops. Yet knowledge of its causation could not spoil the rainbow for me. I am sure that it is not given to man to be omniscient. There will always be something left to know, something to excite the imagination of the poet and those attuned to the great world in which they live (p. 64)
— Robert Frost, Interviews With Robert Frost
The Wit of Cheats, the Courage of a Whore,Are what ten thousand envy and adore:All, all look up, with reverential Awe,At crimes that 'scape, or triumph o'er the Law:While Truth, Worth, Wisdom, daily they decry-`'Nothing is sacred now but Villainy'- Epilogue to the Satires, Dialogue I
— Alexander Pope
De pronto no puedo decirtelo que yo te debo decir,hombre,perdóname; sabrásque aunque no escuches mis palabrasno me eché a llorar ni a dormiry que contigo estoy sin vertedesde hace tiempo y hasta el fin.I can't just suddenly tell youwhat I should be telling you,friend, forgive me; you knowthat although you don't hear my words,I wasn't asleep or in tears,that I am with you without seeing youfor a good long time and until the end.
— Pablo Neruda
Well in case you failed to notice,In case you failed to see,This is my heart bleeding before you,This is me down on my kneesThese foolish games are tearing me apartYour thoughtless words are breaking my heartYou're breaking my heart
— Jewel, Pieces of You
With you a part of me hath passed away; For in the peopled forest of my mind A tree made leafless by this wintry wind Shall never don again its green array. Chapel and fireside, country road and bay, Have something of their friendliness resigned; Another, if I would, I could not find, And I am grown much older in a day. But yet I treasure in my memory Your gift of charity, and young hearts ease, And the dear honour of your amity; For these once mine, my life is rich with these. And I scarce know which part may greater be,-- What I keep of you, or you rob from me.
— George Santayana
Modern poetry, for me, began not in English at all but in Spanish, in the poems of Lorca.
— W.S. Merwin
But now, you are twain, you are cloven apartFlesh of his flesh, but heart of my heart.
— Algernon Charles Swinburne
A voice that had traversed the centuries, so heavy it broke what it touched, so heavy I feared it would ring in me with eternal resonance, a voice rusty with the sound of curses and the hoarse cries that issue from the delta in the last paroxysm of orgasm.
— Anaïs Nin, House of Incest
the flames are silent,Peace is violent,Tears are frozen’cause massacre was chosen.~~ 26/11– Mumbai terror attack memories
— Ankita Singhal
In scientific thinking are always present elements of poetry. Science and music requires a thought homogeneous.
— Albert Einstein
We walked through night until there was a poem.
— Brenda Hillman
Honest criticism and sensible appreciation are directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry.
— T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems, 1909-1962
On Waterloo Bridge where we said our goodbyes,the weather conditions bring tears to my eyes.I wipe them away with a black woolly gloveAnd try not to notice I've fallen in loveOn Waterloo Bridge I am trying to think:This is nothing. you're high on the charm and the drink.But the juke-box inside me is playing a songThat says something different. And when was it wrong?On Waterloo Bridge with the wind in my hairI am tempted to skip. You're a fool. I don't care.the head does its best but the heart is the boss-I admit it before I am halfway across
— Wendy Cope, Serious Concerns
In pale moonlight / the wisteria's scent / comes from far away.
— Yosa Buson
Maybe you're one of those people who writes poems, but rarely reads them. Let me put this as delicately as I can: If you don't read, your writing is going to suck.
— Kim Addonizio, Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within
Two girls discover the secret of lifein a sudden line of poetry.
— Denise Levertov, Poems, 1960-1967
One writes because one has been touched by the yearning for and the despair of ever touching the Other.
— Charles Simic, The Unemployed Fortune-Teller: Essays and Memoirs
I played God todayAnd it was fun!I made animals that men had never seenSo they would stop and scratch their headsInstead of scowling.I made words that men had never heardSo they would stop and stare at meInstead of running.And I made love that laughedSo men would giggle like childrenInstead of sighing.Tomorrow, perhaps, I won't be GodAnd you will know itBecause you won't see any three-headed catsOr bushes with bells on...I wish I could always play GodSo that lonely men could laugh!
— James Kavanaugh, There Are Men Too Gentle to Live Among Wolves
Little world, full of scars and gashes, ripened with another's pain,Your flowers feed on carrion--so do your birds;Men feed on each other because you taught them life was cheap,Flowing from your endless womb without pain or understanding.No midwife caresses your flesh or bathes clean your progeny,Life spurts from you, little world,and you regard it with disdain.Only bruised men sense your cruelty, men whose life has lost its meaning.
— James Kavanaugh, There Are Men Too Gentle to Live Among Wolves
Shall I compare thee to a barrel of apples?Though art more hairy, but sweeter inside.Rough winds couldn't keep me from taking you to chapel,Where finally a horse could take a bride...
— Cynthia Hand, My Lady Jane
You can learn more by going to the opera than you ever can by reading Emerson. Like that there are two sexes.
— David Markson
In the boundaryless forests, there’re dancers of nude.Yet in the confines of pasture, there’s promise of food.On which is your side?Ô, but tarry and bide,ere you decide,in both do confide.
— Roman Payne
For all the ghosts and corpses that shall never know the breath of our childrenso longfor the sacrifice and endurance of our mothers and the sustained breath of our fatherswe live
— Saul Williams, She
Pleasured equallyIn seeking as in finding,Each detail minding,Old Walt went seekingAnd finding.
— Langston Hughes
The Poem That Took The Place Of A MountainThere it was, word for word, The poem that took the place of a mountain. He breathed its oxygen, Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table. It reminded him how he had needed A place to go to in his own direction How he had recomposed the pines, Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds For the outlook that would be right, Where he would be complete in an unexplained completion: The exact rock where his inexactness Would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged Where he could lie and gazing down at the sea, Recognize his unique and solitary home.
— Wallace Stevens
Oh, friend, forget not, when you fain would noteIn me a beauty that was never mine,How first you knew me in a book I wrote,How first you loved me for a written line....
— Edna St. Vincent Millay
My Muse sits forlornShe wishes she had not been bornShe sits in the coldNo word she says is ever told.
— Stevie Smith
Come to the beach with meAnd watch the pelicans die,Hear their feeble screamsCalling to an empty skyWhere once they playedAnd scouted for food,Not scavenging like the gullsBut plummeting unafraidInto friendly waters.Come to the beach with meAnd watch the pelicans die,Listen to their feeble screamsCalling to an empty sky.Maybe Christ will walk byAnd save them in their final toilOr work a miracle from the shore,A courtesy of Union Oil.Come to the beach with meAnd watch the pelicans die.My God! They'll never fly again.It's worse than Normandy somehow,For there we only murdered men.
— James Kavanaugh, There Are Men Too Gentle to Live Among Wolves
It was language I loved, not meaning. I liked poetry better when I wasn't sure what it meant. Eliot has said that the meaning of the poem is provided to keep the mind busy while the poem gets on with its work -- like the bone thrown to the dog by the robber so he can get on with his work. . . . Is beauty a reminder of something we once knew, with poetry one of its vehicles? Does it give us a brief vision of that 'rarely glimpsed bright face behind/ the apparency of things'? Here, I suppose, we ought to try the impossible task of defining poetry. No one definition will do. But I must admit to a liking for the words of Thomas Fuller, who said: 'Poetry is a dangerous honey. I advise thee only to taste it with the Tip of thy finger and not to live upon it. If thou do'st, it will disorder thy Head and give thee dangerous Vertigos.
— P.K. Page, The Filled Pen: Selected Non-Fiction
But drunkenly, or secretly, we swore,Disciples of that astigmatic saint,That we would never leave the islandUntil we had put down, in paint, in words,As palmists learn the network of a hand,All of its sunken, leaf-choked ravines,Every neglected, self-pitying inletMuttering in brackish dialect, the ropes of mangrovesFrom which old soldier crabs slippedSurrendering to slush,Each ochre track seeking some hilltop andLosing itself in an unfinished phrase,Under sand shipyards where the burnt-out palmsInverted the design of unrigged schooners,Entering forests, boiling with life,Goyave, corrosol, bois-canot, sapotille.Days!The sun drumming, drumming,Past the defeated pennons of the palms,Roads limp from sunstroke,Past green flutes of the grassThe ocean cannonading, come!Wonder that opened like the fanOf the dividing frondsOn some noon-struck sahara,Where my heart from its rib cage yelped like a pupAfter clouds of sanderlings rustily wheelingThe world on its ancient,Invisible axis,The breakers slow-dolphining over more breakers,To swivel our easels down, as firmAs conquerors who had discovered home.
— Derek Walcott, Another Life: Fully Annotated
I can’t help but notice that you keep writing love poetry to my wife. Well, you see, I married her, which makes her my wife. You know what you might want to try? Writing some poems about the sunset. The sunset isn’t fucking married.
— A.J. Jacobs, The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World
From the union of power and money,from the union of power and secrecy,from the union of government and science,from the union of government and art,from the union of science and money,from the union of ambition and ignorance,from the union of genius and war,from the union of outer space and inner vacuity,the Mad Farmer walks quietly away.
— Wendell Berry
This dewdrop world Is but a dewdrop worldAnd yet —
— Kobayashi Issa
This is newness: every little tawdryObstacle glass-wrapped and peculiar,Glinting and clinking in a saint's falsetto. Only youDon't know what to make of the sudden slippiness,The blind, white, awful, inaccessible slant.There's no getting up it by the words you know.No getting up by elephant or wheel or shoe.We have only come to look. You are too newTo want the world in a glass hat.
— Sylvia Plath
literature will lose, sunlight will win, don't worry.
— Franz Wright, God's Silence
No truer word, save God's, was ever spoken,Than that the largest heart is soonest broken.
— Walter Savage Landor
When a woman's face is wrinkledAnd her hairs are sprinkled, With gray, Lackaday!Aside she's cast, No one respect will pay;Remember, Lasses, remember.And while the sun shines make hay:You must not expect in December, The flowers you gathered in May.
— Ann Rinaldi, Or Give Me Death: A Novel of Patrick Henry's Family
And the Hippos were boiled in their tanks!
— Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums
depth and substance.the two most exquisite qualities. be it in a poemor a person.
— Sanober  Khan
For it is up to you and meto take solacein nostalgia's armsand our abilityto create the everlastingfrom fleeting moments.
— Sanober  Khan, A touch, a tear, a tempest
I rhymeTo see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
— Seamus Heaney, Death of a Naturalist
love wounds me with soft pillows with tender lips and fingers
— Sanober  Khan, A touch, a tear, a tempest
I can't even make up a rhyme about an umbrella, let alone death and life and eternal peace.
— Knut Hamsun, Mysteries
THERE is something in the autumn that is native to my blood—	 Touch of manner, hint of mood;	 And my heart is like a rhyme,	 With the yellow and the purple and the crimson keeping time.
— Bliss Carman
One breath taken completely; one poem, fully written, fully read - in such a moment, anything can happen.
— Jane Hirshfield, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry
There is also a third kind of madness, which is possession by the Muses, enters into a delicate and virgin soul, and there inspiring frenzy, awakens lyric....But he, who, not being inspired and having no touch of madness in his soul, comes to the door and thinks he will get into the temple by the help of art--he, I say, and his poetry are not admitted; the sane man is nowhere at all when he enters into rivalry with the madman.
— Plato, Phaedo
Four billion people on this earthbut my imagination is still the same.It's bad with large numbers.It's still taken by particularity.It flits in the dark like a flashlight,illuminating only random faceswhile all the rest go by,never coming to mind and never really missed.
— Wisława Szymborska, Poems New and Collected
I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. There are no such truths; there is nothing about death that Swinburne and Landor knew but Epicurus and Heidegger failed to grasp. Rather, it is because I would have lived more fully if I had been able to rattle off more old chestnuts — just as I would have if I had made more close friends.
— Richard M. Rorty
it's so easy to be a poetand so hard to be a man.
— Charles Bukowski, Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit
Had we but world enough, and time
— Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress
And all at once the heavy nightFell from my eyes and I could see, --A drenched and dripping apple-tree,A last long line of silver rain,A sky grown clear and blue again.And as I looked a quickening gustOf wind blew up to me and thrustInto my face a miracleOf orchard-breath, and with the smell, --I know not how such things can be! --I breathed my soul back into me.Ah! Up then from the ground sprang IAnd hailed the earth with such a cryAs is not heard save from a manWho has been dead, and lives again.About the trees my arms I wound;Like one gone mad I hugged the ground;I raised my quivering arms on high;I laughed and laughed into the sky
— Edna St. Vincent Millay, Collected Poems
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;Coral is far more red than her lips' red;If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,But no such roses see I in her cheeks;And in some perfumes is there more delightThan in the breath that from my mistress reeks.I love to hear her speak, yet well I knowThat music hath a far more pleasing sound;I grant I never saw a goddess go;My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground: And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare As any she belied with false compare.
— William Shakespeare, Shakespeare's Sonnets
And then she would smile, to show me how, and it was the saddest smile I ever saw.
— Charles Bukowski, The Pleasures of the Damned
I loved a woman whose beauty Like the moon moved all the humming heavens to music till the stars with their tiny teeth burst into song and I fell on the ground before her while the sky hardened and she laughed and turned me down softly, I was so young.
— Peter Meinke
A poem should not meanBut be.
— Archibald MacLeish, Collected Poems, 1917-1982
When a group of people get up from a table, the table doesn’tknow which way any of them will go.
— Galway Kinnell, Three Books: Body Rags; Mortal Acts, Mortal Words; The Past
And here, in thought, to thee-In thought that can alone, Ascend thy empire and so be A partner of thy throne, By winged Fantasy, My embassy is given, Till secrecy shall knowledge be In the environs of Heaven.
— Edgar Allan Poe, Al Aaraaf: Reproduced From the Edition Of 1829
I don't feel strong anymoreI feel like falling to my knees.Things aren't the way they were before,They're not the way they're supposed to be.
— Atarah L. Poling, Hidden Light
Did I live the spring I’d sought?It’s true in joy, I walked along,took part in dance, and sang the song.and never tried to bind an hourto my borrowed garden bower;nor did I once entreata day to slumber at my feet.Yet days aren’t lulled by lyric song,like morning birds they pass along,o’er crests of trees, to none belong;o’er crests of trees of drying dew,their larking flight, my hands, eschewThus I’ll say it once and true…From all that I saw, and everywhere I wandered,I learned that time cannot be spent,It only can be squandered.
— Roman Payne, Rooftop Soliloquy
Science is the poetry of reality.
— Richard Dawkins
Oh! That was poetry!" said Pippin. "Do you really mean to start before the break of day?
— J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
How can I find the words? Poets have taken them all and left me with nothing to say or do""Except to teach me for the first time what they meant.
— Dorothy L. Sayers, Busman's Honeymoon
Be there a picnic for the devil,an orgy for the satyr,and a wedding for the bride.
— Roman Payne, The Basement Trains
Las lágrimas que no se lloranesperan en pequeños lagos?O serán ríos invisiblesque corren hacia la tristeza?
— Pablo Neruda
July 4th fireworks exhale over the Hudson sadly.It is beautiful that they have to disappear.It's like the time you said I love you madly.That was an hour ago. It's been a fervent year.
— Frederick Seidel
Spilling a Secret What its size, will have varying consequences. It’s not possible to predict what will happen if you open the gunnysack, let the cat escape. A liberated feline might purr on your lap, or it might scratch your eyes out. You can’t tell until you loosen the knot. Do you chance losing a friendship, if that friend’s well-being will only be preserved by betraying sworn-to silence trust? Once the seam is ripped, can it be mended again? And if that proves impossible, will you be okay when it all falls to pieces?
— Ellen Hopkins, Triangles
We don't read and write poetry because it's cute.
— Tom Schulman
Cuando vayamos al maryo te diré mi secreto:Me envuelve, pero no es ola...Me amarga..., pero no es sal...
— Dulce María Loynaz
...they come to us, these restless dead,Shrouds woven from the words of men,With trumpets sounding overhead(The walls of hope have grown so thinAnd all our vaunted innocenceHas withered in this endless frost)That promise little recompenseFor all we risk, for all we've lost...
— Mira Grant, Feed
Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.
— Wallace Stevens
So much dependsupona blue carsplattered with mudspeeding down the road.
— Sharon Creech, Love That Dog
Love WasLove Will BeBut Most of All,Love is.Life Cannot Be Without ItIt is found in the WombIn The WoodsIn The Stars.To Be or Not to BeTo Love, or not to LoveThey Are Equal.My Soul Whispers Into the Spaces.Yes.
— Cindy Martinusen Coloma, Caleb + Kate
Life is a poem most people never read.
— Laurence Overmire
some see things as they are: others as they are” (p.82) ~CXCI
— Manav Sachdeva Maasoom, The Sufi's Garland: A Tribute to Emily Dickinson, Antonio Porchia and Rabindranath Tagore
Crystal ball and candle light, I want your dance tonight. Show me the power of love as we stand together in the middle of the night.
— Santosh Kalwar
We may kill each other someday.
— Santosh Kalwar, The Warrior
Try to be thoughtful, don't make the poor man say it;see how human he is,he has children of his own,it is your job to ask:And now he can never not nod.And now he can never say no.And now he can never not say.
— Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno, Slamming Open the Door
Now goes under, and I watch it go under, the sunThat will not rise again.Today has seen the setting, in your eyes cold and senseless as the sea,Of friendship better than bread, and of bright charityThat lifts a man a little above the beasts that run.That this could be!That I should live to seeMost vulgar Pride, that stale obstreperous clown,So fitted out with purple robe and crownTo stand among his betters! Face to faceWith outraged me in this once holy place,Where Wisdom was a favoured guest and huntedTruth was harboured out of danger,He bulks enthroned, a lewd, an insupportable stranger!I would have sworn, indeed I swore it:The hills may shift, the waters may decline,Winter may twist the stem from the twig that bore it,But never your love from me, your hand from mine.Now goes under the sun, and I watch it go under.Farewell, sweet light, great wonder!You, too, farewell,-but fare not well enough to dreamYou have done wisely to invite the night before the darkness came.
— Edna St. Vincent Millay
When there's a moon the shadows in the house grow larger;invisible hands draw back the curtains,a pallid finger writes forgotten words on dustof the piano...
— Yiannis Ritsos, The Fourth Dimension
Only in books the flat and final happens, Only in dreams we meet and interlock....
— Philip Larkin
Again I resume the longlesson: how small a thingcan be pleasing, how littlein this hard world it takesto satisfy the mindand bring it to its rest.
— Wendell Berry, Sabbaths
Without thinking, I knelt in the grass, like someone meaning to pray. When I tried to stand again, I couldn't move,my legs were utterly rigid. Does grief change you like that?Through the birches, I could see the pond.The sun was cutting small white holes in the water.I got up finally; I walked down to the pond. I stood there, brushing the grass from my skirt, watching myself,like a girl after her first loverturning slowly at the bathroom mirror, naked, looking for a sign.But nakedness in women is always a pose.I was not transfigured. I would never be free. 
— Louise Glück
beauty’ is related not to ‘loveliness’ but to a state in which reality plays a part.
— William Carlos Williams
More or Less Love Poems #11:No babeWe'd neverSwing together butthe syncopationwould be something wild
— Diane di Prima, Revolutionary Letters
Places We LovePlaces we love exist only through us,Space destroyed is only illusion in the constancy of time,Places we love we can never leave,Places we love together, together, together,And is this room really a room, or an embrace,And what is beneath the window: a street or years?And the window is only the imprint left byThe first rain we understood, returning endlessly,And this wall does not define the room, but perhaps the nightYour son began to move in your sleeping blood,A son like a butterfly of flame in your hall of mirrors,The night you were frightened by your own light,And this door leads into any afternoonWhich outlives it, forever peopledWith your casual movements, as you stepped,Like fire into copper, into my only memory;When you go, space closes over like water behind you,Do not look back: there is nothing outside you,Space is only time visible in a different way,Places we love we can never leave.
— Ivan V. Lalić
Freud thought that a psychosis was a waking dream, and that poets were daydreamers too, but I wonder if the reverse is not as often true, and that madness is a fiction lived in like a rented house
— William H. Gass
Always our wars have been our confessions of weakness
— Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry
Pensive they sit, and roll their languid eyes.
— John Keats
Poetry is an intimate act. It's about bringing forth something that's inside you--whether it is a memory, a philosophical idea, a deep love for another person or for the world, or an apprehension of the spiritual. It's about making something, in language, which can be transmitted to others--not as information, or polemic, but as irreducible art.
— Dorianne Laux, The Poet's Companion: A Guide To The Pleasures Of Writing Poetry
Here the frailest leaves of me and yet my strongest lasting, Here I shade and hide my thoughts, I myself do not expose them, And yet they expose me more than all my other poems
— Walt Whitman
The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
My Papa's Waltz:The whiskey on your breathCould make a small boy dizzy;But I hung on like death:Such waltzing was not easy.We romped until the pansSlid from the kitchen shelf;My mother's countenanceCould not unfrown itself.The hand that held my wristWas battered on one knuckle;At every step you missedMy right ear scraped a buckle.You beat time on my headWith a palm caked hard by dirt,Then waltzed me off to bedStill clinging to your shirt.
— Theodore Roethke
At five in the afternoon. It was exactly five in the afternoon. A boy brought the white sheet at five in the afternoon. A frail of lime ready prepared at five in the afternoon. The rest was death, and death alone
— Federico García Lorca
After the leaves have fallen, we returnTo a plain sense of things. It is as ifWe had come to an end of the imagination,Inanimate in an inert savoir.
— Wallace Stevens, The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play
Stars in the night,' he said. 'Something something something something, some delight
— Philippa Gregory, The Other Boleyn Girl
A pear should come to the table popped with juice,Ripened in warmth and served in warmth. On termsLike these, autumn beguiles the fatalist.
— Wallace Stevens, The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play
Give a poet a pen
— A. Jarrell Hayes
I began composing the next poem, the one that was to be written next. Not the last poem of those I had read, but the poem written in the head of someone who may never have existed but who had certainly written another poem nonetheless, and just never had the chance to commit it to ink and the page.
— Steve Erickson, Rubicon Beach
The busybody (banned as sexist, demeaning to older women) who lives next door called my daughter a tomboy (banned as sexist) when she climbed the jungle (banned; replaced with "rain forest") gym. Then she had the nerve to call her an egghead and a bookworm (both banned as offensive; replaced with "intellectual") because she read fairy (banned because suggests homosexuality; replace with "elf") tales.I'm tired of the Language Police turning a deaf ear (banned as handicapism) to my complaints. I'm no Pollyanna (banned as sexist) and will not accept any lame (banned as offensive; replace with "walks with a cane") excuses at this time. (banned as ethnocentric; replace with "Doctrine" or "Belief"), why can't my daughter play stickball (banned as regional or ethnic bias) on boy's night out (banned as sexist)? Why can't she build a snowman (banned, replace with "snow person") without that fanatic (banned as ethnocentric; replace with "believer," "follower," or "adherent") next door telling her she's going to hell (banned; replaced with "heck" or "darn")?Do you really think this is what the Founding Fathers (banned as sexist; replace with "the Founders" or "the Framers") had in mind? That we can't even enjoy our Devil (banned)-ed ham sandwiches in peace? I say put a stop to this cult (banned as ethnocentric) of PC old wives' tales (banned as sexist; replace with "folk wisdom") and extremist (banned as ethnocentric; replace with "believer," "follower," or "adherent") conservative duffers (banned as demeaning to older men).As an heiress (banned as sexist; replace with "heir") to the first amendment, I feel that only a heretic (use with caution when comparing religions) would try to stop American vernacular from flourishing in all its inspirational (banned as patronizing when referring to a person with disabilities) splendor.
— Denise Duhamel
E andando nel sole che abbagliasentire con triste meravigliacom'è tutta la vita e il suo travaglioin questo seguitare una muragliache ha in cima cocci aguzzi di bottiglia.
— Eugenio Montale
O Stunden in der Kindheit,da hinter den Figuren mehr als nurVergangnes war und vor uns nicht die Zukunft.
— Rainer Maria Rilke
Almost none of the poetries I admire stick to their labels, native or adopted ones. Rather, they are vagrant in their identifications. Tramp poets, there you go, a new label for those with unstable allegiances.
— C.D. Wright
Then others for breath of words respect,Me for my dumb thoughts, speaking in effect.
— William Shakespeare
Strategy for a MarathonI will startwhen the gun goes off.I will runfor five miles.Feeling good,I will run to the tenth mile.At the tenthI will say,Only three moreto the halfway."At the halfway mark,13.1 miles,I will knowfifteen is in reach.At fifteen milesI will say,You've run twenty before,keep going."At twenty I will say,Run home.
— Marnie Mueller
When someone offers you lines like that, he must be Mephistopheles and you must be Faust. You know you shouldn't succumb to such language, but you succumb.
— William Logan
How far away the stars seem, and how farIs our first kiss, and ah, how old my heart!
— W.B. Yeats, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats
I dreamed that you bewitched me into bedAnd sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.(I think I made you up inside my head.)
— Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems
Once in a while i am struckall over again... by just how blue the sky appears .. on wind-played autumn mornings, blue enoughto bruise a heart.
— Sanober  Khan
At the edge of madness you howl diamonds and pearls.
— Aberjhani, Journey through the Power of the Rainbow: Quotations from a Life Made Out of Poetry
I think here I will leave you. It has come to seemthere is no perfect ending.Indeed, there are infinite endings.Or perhaps, once one begins,there are only endings.
— Louise Glück, Faithful and Virtuous Night
Xs and OsLove is a gameof tic-tac-toe,constantly waiting,for the next x or o.
— Lang Leav, Love & Misadventure
I don’t need your praiseto survive. I was here first, before you were here, beforeyou ever planted a garden.And I’ll be here when only the sun and moonare left, and the sea, and the wide field.I will constitute the field.
— Louise Glück, The Wild Iris
To see the Summer SkyIs Poetry, though never in a Book it lie—True Poems flee—
— Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
What is this life if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare.No time to stand beneath the boughsAnd stare as long as sheep or cows...
— W.H. Davies, The Collected Poems of William H. Davies
So this is what I amPondering his eyes that could notConceive that I was a creature to run fromI who have always believed too much in words
— W.S. Merwin
I shivered in thosesolitudeswhen I heardthe voiceofthe saltin the desert.
— Pablo Neruda
I sleep with thee, and wake with thee,And yet thou are not there;I fill my arms with thoughts of thee,And press the common air.
— John Clare, The Later Poems, 1837-1864: Volumes I and II
Your politics are so far right,They're wrong.
— Harry Whitewolf, Rhyme and Rebellion
Surprised by joy- impatient as the WindI turned to share the transport-- Oh! with whomBut thee, deep buried in the silent tomb,That spot which no vicissitude can find?Love, faithful love, recalled thee to my mind--But how could I forget thee? Through what power,Even for the least division of an hour,Have I been so beguiled as to be blindTo my most grievous loss? -- That thought's returnWas the worst pang that sorrow ever bore,Save one, one only, when I stood forlorn,Knowing my heart's best treasure was no more;That neither present time, nor years unbornCould to my sight that heavenly face restore.
— William Wordsworth, The Works of William Wordsworth (Wordsworth Collection)
Not in the clamor of the crowded street,Not in the shouts and plaudits of the throng,But in ourselves, are triumph and defeat.
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Kéramos and Other Poems
I long for scenes where man hath never trod A place where woman never smiled or wept There to abide with my Creator, God, And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept, Untroubling and untroubled where I lie The grass below—above the vaulted sky.
— John Clare, The Later Poems, 1837-1864: Volumes I and II
Language has not the power to speak what love inditesThe soul lies buried in the Ink that writes
— John Clare, The Later Poems, 1837-1864: Volumes I and II
evet kimsesizdik ama umudumuz vardıüç ev görsek bir şehir sanıyorduküç güvercin görsek meksika geliyordu aklımızacaddelerde gezmekten hoşlanıyorduk akşamlarıkadınların kocalarını aramasını seviyorduksonra şarap içiyorduk kırmızı yahut beyazbilir bilmez geyikli gece yüzünden
— Turgut Uyar, Büyük Saat - Bütün Şiirleri
during my worst timeson the park benchesin the jailsor living withwhoresI always had this certaincontentment-I wouldn't call ithappiness-it was more of an innerbalancethat settled forwhatever was occuringand it helped in thefactoriesand when relationshipswent wrongwith thegirls.it helpedthrough thewars and thehangoversthe backalley fightsthehospitals.to awaken in a cheap roomin a strange city andpull up the shade-this was the craziest kind ofcontentmentand to walk across the floorto an old dresser with acracked mirror-see myself, ugly,grinning at it all.what matters most ishow well youwalk through thefire.
— Charles Bukowski
ld heads forgetful of their sins,Old, learned, respectable bald headsEdit and annotate the linesThat young men, tossing on their beds,Rhymed out in love’s despairTo flatter beauty’s ignorant ear.They’ll cough in the ink to the world’s end;Wear out the carpet with their shoesEarning respect; have no strange friend;If they have sinned nobody knows.Lord, what would they sayShould their Catullus walk that way?
— W.B. Yeats, The Wild Swans at Coole
I took her to bed with silk and song'Lay still, my love, I won’t be long,I must prepare my body for passion.''O, your body you give, but all else you ration...
— Roman Payne
In a pine tree,A few yards away from my window sill,A brilliant blue jay is springing up and down, up and down,On a branch.I laugh, as I see him abandon himselfTo entire delight, for he knows as well as I doThat the branch will not break.
— James Wright, The Branch Will Not Break
When wounds are healed by love,The scars are beautiful.
— David  Bowles, Shattering and Bricolage
The same hot lightning that burns your blood with passion–– cools your fears with peace.
— Aberjhani, The River of Winged Dreams
The Apache don't have a word for love," he said. "Know what they both say at the marriage? The squaw-taking ceremony?""Tell me.""Varlebena. It means forever. That's all they say.
— Louis L'Amour, Hondo
How you die out in me:down to the lastworn-out knot of breathyou're there, with a splinter of life.
— Paul Celan, Poems of Paul Celan
Publishing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
— Don Marquis
I will meet you on the nape of your neck one day, on the surface of intention, word becoming act.We will breathe into each other the high mountain tales, where the snows come from, where the waters begin.”-In the yellow time of pollen
— Luke Davies
I am waiting for the war to be fought which will make the world safe for anarchy
— Lawrence Ferlinghetti, A Coney Island of the Mind
The way through the worldIs more difficult to find than the way beyond it.
— Wallace Stevens
Only poetry isn't shit.
— Roberto Bolaño
Immortal amarant, a flower which onceIn paradise, fast by the tree of life,Began to bloom; but soon for man's offenceTo heaven removed, where first it grew, there grows,And flowers aloft, shading the fount of life,And where the river of bliss through midst of heavenRolls o'er elysian flowers her amber stream:With these that never fade the spirits electBind their resplendent locks.
— John Milton, Paradise Lost
All a poet can do today is warn.
— Wilfred Owen
Poems are difficult to silence.
— Stephen Greenblatt
Say this city has ten million souls,Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:Yet there’s no place for us, my dear, yet there’s no place for us.
— W.H. Auden
These Songs are not meant to be understood, you understand.They are only meant to terrify & comfort.
— John Berryman, The Dream Songs
Has it ever occurred to you,' he said, 'that the whole history of English poetry has been de-termined by the fact that the English language lacks rhymes?
— George Orwell, 1984
Turning and turning in the widening gyreThe falcon cannot hear the falconer
— Things fall apart
The townspeople took the prince for deadWhen he never returned with the dragon’s headWhen with her, he stayedShe thought he’d be too afraidBut he loved her too much instead.
— Jess C. Scott, Piety, Dragon Poems
The Author To Her BookThou ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain,Who after birth did'st by my side remain,Till snatcht from thence by friends, less wise than true,Who thee abroad exposed to public view,Made thee in rags, halting to th' press to trudge,Where errors were not lessened (all may judge).At thy return my blushing was not small,My rambling brat (in print) should mother call.I cast thee by as one unfit for light,The visage was so irksome in my sight,Yet being mine own, at length affection wouldThy blemishes amend, if so I could.I washed thy face, but more defects I saw,And rubbing off a spot, still made a flaw.I stretcht thy joints to make thee even feet,Yet still thou run'st more hobbling than is meet.In better dress to trim thee was my mind,But nought save home-spun cloth, i' th' house I find.In this array, 'mongst vulgars may'st thou roam.In critic's hands, beware thou dost not come,And take thy way where yet thou art not known.If for thy father askt, say, thou hadst none;And for thy mother, she alas is poor,Which caused her thus to send thee out of door.
— Anne Bradstreet, The Works of Anne Bradstreet
... imaginary gardens with real toads in them ...... if you demand on one hand,the raw material of poetry inall its rawness andthat which is on the other handgenuine, then you are interested in poetry.
— Marianne Moore, Complete Poems
from my chair i can see the street and it seems depressing
— Brandon Scott Gorrell
Writing poetry is talking to oneself; yet it is a mode of talking to oneself in which the self disappears; and the product's something that, though it may not be for everybody, is about everybody.
— Richard Wilbur
I have been right, Basil, haven’t I, to take my love out of poetry, and to find my wife in Shakespeare’s plays? Lips that Shakespeare taught to speak have whispered their secret in my ear. I have had the arms of Rosalind around me, and kissed Juliet on the mouth.
— Oscar Wilde
There's no retirement for an artist,its your way of living so theres no end to it.
— Bono
It's not what you go through that makes you strong: it is how you handle the situation that gives you strength.
— Tanya R. Liverman, Journey to Legacy: A Poetic Timeline of My Life
Love does not claim materialistic possession of any kind, it yields complete freedom.
— Santosh Kalwar
From the mind which thinks to die, let my soul sleep tonight.
— Santosh Kalwar, I Am Dead Man Alive
At breakfast!' said Louise in an awed voice. 'A man who can read poetry at breakfast would be capable of anything.
— Mary  Stewart, Madam, Will You Talk?