c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
…how it would be nice if, for every sea waiting for us, there would be a river, for us. And someone -a father, a lover, someone- able to take us by the hand and find that river -imagine it, invent it- and put us on its stream, with the lightness of one only word, goodbye. This, really, would be wonderful. It would be sweet, life, every life. And things wouldn’t hurt, but they would get near taken by stream, one could first shave and then touch them and only finally be touched. Be wounded, also. Die because of them. Doesn’t matter. But everything would be, finally, human. It would be enough someone’s fancy -a father, a lover, someone- could invent a way, here in the middle of the silence, in this land which don’t wanna talk. Clement way, and beautiful.A way from here to the sea.
— Alessandro Baricco, Ocean Sea
As if this great outburst of anger had purged all my ills, killed all my hopes, I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world- and finding it so much like myself, in fact so fraternal, I realized that I’d been happy, and that I was still happy. For the final consummation and for me to feel less lonely, my last wish was that there should be a crowd of spectators at my execution and that they should greet me with cries of hatred.
— Albert Camus, The Stranger
Music resembles poetry, in eachAre nameless graces which no methods teach,And which a master hand alone can reach.
— Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism
In your handsThe dog, the donkey, surely they know	They are alive.Who would argue otherwise?But now, after years of consideration,	I am getting beyond that.What about the sunflowers? What about	The tulips, and the pines?Listen, all you have to do is start and	There’ll be no stopping.What about mountains? What about water	Slipping over rocks?And speaking of stones, what about	The little ones you can Hold in your hands, their heartbeats	So secret, so hidden it may take yearsBefore, finally, you hear them?
— Mary Oliver, Swan: Poems and Prose Poems
Thơ ca là thứ vô cùng phù phiếm nhưng vô cùng thiêng liêng. Tôi tin ngay. Cũng như tôi tin ở trền đời có những thứ vô cùng thiêng liêng nhưng vô cùng phù phiếm.
— Nguyễn Nhật Ánh, Tôi Là Bêtô
I think that at a certain age, say fifteen or sixteen, poetry is like masturbation. But later in life good poets burn their early poetry, and bad poets publish it. Thankfully I gave up rather quickly.
— Umberto Eco
I take thee at thy word:Call me but love, and I'll be new baptized;Henceforth I never will be Romeo.
— William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
Critics write out of intellectual exercise, not poets. Poets write straight from the heart.
— Erica Jong
How heron comesIt is a negligence of the mindnot to notice how at duskheron comes to the pond andstands there in his death robes, perfectservant of the system, hungry, his eyesfull of attention, his wingspure light
— Mary Oliver, Swan: Poems and Prose Poems
[Fiction and poetry] are medicines, they're doses, and they heal the rupture that reality makes on the imagination.
— Jeanette Winterson
I love being able to see an un-written future.
— Michael    Jones, Drowning Silence Poetry
Will be but corpses dressed in frocks, who cannot speak to birds or rocks.
— Gary Snyder
Tom Dancer’s gift of a whitebark pine coneYou never know	What opportunity		Is going to travel to you,			Or through you.Once a friend gave me	A small pine cone-		One of a few			He found in the scatOf a grizzly	In Utah maybe,		Or Wyoming.			I took it homeAnd did what I supposed	He was sure I would do-		I ate it,		 ThinkingHow it had traveled 	Through that rough		And holy body.			It was crisp and sweet.It was almost a prayer	Without words.		My gratitude, Tom Dancer, 			For this gift of the world			I adore so much			 And want to belong to.				And thank you too, great bear
— Mary Oliver, Swan: Poems and Prose Poems
Când ne deschidemtu mie şi eu ţie,când ne scufundămtu în mine şi eu în tine,când ne pierdemtu în mine şi eu în tine,Abia atuncieu sunt euşi tu eşti tu.
— Bernhard Schlink, The Reader
Most people in this country are looking for literature that is useful. They feel that just exploring their feelings is good enough - they should be reading about leveraged buy-outs or how to get thin. We live in a culture that is so absolutely, madly focused on commercialism and on creating money and completely turned away from any other kind of creative value. People don't generally turn to poetry unless they're bereaved or have fallen in love. Or in adolescence, when their feelings are very strong and turbulent. I think most of us are dying for lack of spirit in this culture.
— Erica Jong
It came to me on a winter day.Life so full and rich will fade.Though I wish it were not so,One cannot run from an expected fate.And as a steady gust of wind fell upon my face,It was then when I felt a chill and thus did then know;Though I wish it were not true, Life beautiful and sweet shall ripe and pass today. As a petal falls from a rose so shall she blossom and shed;Catching each falling tear, I will not leave a word unsaid.
— Lee Argus
Success is counted sweetest by those ne'er succeed.
— Emily Dickinson
He loves me, he loves me not. How many flowers must I kill before he loves me?” ~He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not
— Kimberly Kinrade, Bits of You & Pieces of Me
Love is as we will it to be." ~ Amunhotep El Bey
— Amunhotep El Bey, The Quotations Book of life and Death
Sevgili Güllük;Yastık kanepenin üzerine konur. Tekme atılarak düşürülür o. Pazar günleri kuru fasulye yenir. Karşılıklı, alt alta, üst üste ve daha değişik şekillerde durulur. Islak vardır. Portakalın içi de dışı gibi portakal rengidir. Köstebeklerin uçma kabiliyeti bulunmaz. Kamyonlar yük taşırlar. Kaza olur. Kaza yaparlar. Süleyman, Çetin, Atıf, Kemal, Necdet gibi erkek isimleri; Zeynep, Burçak, Burçak ve Burçak gibi kız isimleri vardır. Patates cinsleri vardır; kızartmalık ve haşlamalık. Çeşitli ebatlarda düğün pastaları olur. Muz olur.
— A.H. Muhsin Ünlü
No one could say the stories were uselessfor as the tongue clackedfive or forty fingers stitchedcorn was grated from the huskpathwork was piecedor the darning was done...(from 'The Storyteller Poems')
— Liz Lochhead, Dreaming Frankenstein...
Let This Darkness Be a Bell TowerQuiet friend who has come so far,feel how your breathing makes more space around you.Let this darkness be a bell towerand you the bell. As you ring,what batters you becomes your strength.Move back and forth into the change.What is it like, such intensity of pain?If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.In this uncontainable night,be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,the meaning discovered there.And if the world has ceased to hear you,say to the silent earth: I flow.To the rushing water, speak: I am.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus
We live in a modern society. Husbands and wives don'tgrow on trees, like in the old days. So wheredoes one find love? When you're sixteen it's easy, like being unleashed with a credit cardin a department store of kisses. There's the first kiss.The sloppy kiss. The peck.The sympathy kiss. The backseat smooch. The weshouldn't be doing this kiss. The but your lipstaste so good kiss. The bury me in an avalanche of tingles kiss.The I wish you'd quit smoking kiss.The I accept your apology, but you make me really madsometimes kiss. The I knowyour tongue like the back of my hand kiss. As you getolder, kisses become scarce. You'll be drivinghome and see a damaged kiss on the side of the road, with its purple thumb out. If youwere younger, you'd pull over, slide open the mouth'sred door just to see how it fits. Oh wheredoes one find love? If you rub two glances, you get a smile.Rub two smiles, you get a warm feeling.Rub two warm feelings and presto-you have a kiss. Now what? Don't invite the kiss overand answer the door in your underwear. It'll get suspiciousand stare at your toes. Don't water the kiss with whiskey. It'll turn bright pink and explode into a thousand luscious splinters, but in the morning it'll be ashamed and sneak out ofyour body without saying good-bye, and you'll remember that kiss forever by all the little cuts it lefton the inside of your mouth. You mustnurture the kiss. Turn out the lights. Notice how itilluminates the room. Hold it to your chestand wonder if the sand inside hourglasses comes from aspecial beach. Place it on the tongue's pillow, then look up the first recorded kiss in an encyclopedia: beneatha Babylonian olive tree in 1200 B.C.But one kiss levitates above all the others. Theintersection of function and desire. The I do kiss.The I'll love you through a brick wall kiss. Even when I'm dead, I'll swim through the Earth, like a mermaid of the soil, just to be next to your bones.
— Jeffrey McDaniel
Tell me, enigmatical man, whom do you love best, your father,Your mother, your sister, or your brother?I have neither father, nor mother, nor sister, nor brother.Your friends?Now you use a word whose meaning I have never known.Your country?I do not know in what latitude it lies.Beauty?I could indeed love her, Goddess and Immortal.Gold?I hate it as you hate God.Then, what do you love, extraordinary stranger?I love the clouds the clouds that pass up thereUp there the wonderful clouds!
— Charles Baudelaire
The soil under the grass is dreaming of a young forest, and under the pavement the soil is dreaming of grass.
— Wendell Berry, Given
Once I dated a woman I only liked 43%.So I only listened to 43% of what she said.Only told the truth 43% of the time.And only kissed with 43% of my lips.Some say you can't quantify desire, attaching a number to passion isn't right, that the human heart doesn't work like that.But for me it does-I walk down the streetand numbers appear on the foreheadsof the people I look at. In bars, it's worse.With each drink, the numbers go upuntil every woman in the joint has a blurryeighty something above her eyebrows, and the next day I can only remember 17%of what actually happened. That's the problemwith booze-it screws with your math.
— Jeffrey McDaniel
Poetry most often communicates emotions, not directly, but by creating imaginatively the grounds for those emotions. It therefore communicates something more than the emotion; only by means of that something more does it communicate the emotion at all.
— C.S. Lewis, Studies in Words
You know what I do? I listen to other people, stumbling about with their half thoughts and half sentences and their clumsy feelings that they can't express, and it hurts me. So I go home and burnish it and polish it and weld it to a rhythmic frame, make the dull colors gleam, mute the garish artificiality to pastels, so it doesn't hurt any more: that's my poem. I know what they want to say, and I say it for them.
— Samuel R. Delany, Babel-17
Words are power. The more words you know and can recognize, use, define, understand, the more power you will have as a human being... The more language you know, the more likely it is that no one can get over on you."selection from book: Our Difficult Sunlight: A Guide to Poetry, Literacy & Social Justice in Classroom & Community
— Quraysh Ali Lansana & Georgia A. Popoff
Poetry is only the highest eloquence of passion, the most vivid form of expression that can be given to our conception of anything, whether pleasurable or painful, mean or dignified, delightful or distressing. It is the perfect coincidence of the image and the words with the feeling we have, and of which we cannot get rid in any other way, that gives an instant "satisfaction to the thought." This is equally the origin of wit and fancy, of comedy and tragedy, of the sublime and pathetic.
— William Hazlitt
Mathematicians still don’t understandthe ball our hands made, or howyour electrocuted grandparents made it possiblefor you to light my cigarettes with your eyes.It isn’t as simple as me climbing into the windowto leave six ounces of orange juiceand a doughnut by the bed, or me becomingthe sand you dug your toes in,on the beach, when you wishedto hide them from the sun and the fixed eyesof strangers, and your breath broke in wavesover my earlobe, splashing through my head, spilling outover the opposite lobe, and my first poemsunder your door in the unshaven light of dawn:Your eyes remind me of a brick wallabout to be hammered by a drunkdriver. I’m that driver. All nightI’ve swallowed you in the bar.Once I kissed the scar, stretching its sealedeyelid along your inner arm, driedraining strands of hair, full of pheromones, discoveredall your idiosyncratic passageways, so I’d knowwhere to run when the cops came.Your body is the country I’ll never return to.The man in charge of what crosses my mindwill lose fingernails, for not turning youaway at the border. But at this momentwhen sweat tingles from me, andblame is as meaningless as shooting up a cow with milk,I realise my kisses filled the halls of your bodywith smoke, and the lies camelike a season. Most drunks don’t die in accidentsthey orchestrate, and I swalloweda hand grenade that never stops exploding.
— Jeffrey McDaniel
This is freedom. This is the face of faith, nobody getswhat they want. Never again are you the same. The longingis to be pure. What you get is to be changed. More and more byeach glistening minute, through which infinity threads itself.Also oblivion, of course, the aftershocks of somethingat sea. Here hands full of sand, letting it sift through in the wind, I look in and say take this, hurry. And if I listennow? Listen, I was not saying anything. It was onlysomething I did. I could not chose words. I am free to go.I cannot, of course, come back. Not to this. Never.It is a ghost posed on my lips. Here: never.
— Jorie Graham, Never
If you are the lantern, I am the flame;If you are the lake, then I am the rain;If you are the desert, I am the sea;If you are the blossom, I am the bee;If you are the fruit, then I am the core;If you are the rock, then I am the ore;If you are the ballad, I am the word;If you are the sheath, then I am the sword.
— Cecilia Dart-Thornton, The Lady of the Sorrows
I do not know how it is elsewhere, but here, in this country, poetry is a healing, life-giving thing, and people have not lost the gift of being able to drink of its inner strength. People can be killed for poetry herea sign of unparalleled respectbecause they are still capable of living by it.
— Osip Mandelstam
I learned a long, long time ago, that I could accomplish things in this place we call reality and yet still spend most of my time in the better reality of my mind.
— Kevin  Walker, These Moments Pass: Poems
Women who have been disappeared by violence are howling. The voices of disappeared women are echoing. I sing with these voices.
— Kim Hyesoon
Sólo la fiebre y la poesía provocan visiones. / Sólo el amor y la memoria. / No estos caminos ni estas llanuras. / No estos laberintos.
— Roberto Bolaño, The Romantic Dogs
I believe the visionaries and true reflections of society will be rewarded after their lives. Those being rewarded now are giving the public what it needs now, usually applauding its current state and clearing consciences.
— Hollace M. Metzger
Faith is the poetry of our dreams
—  action is the builder of our reality.
More sailors have drowned in words than in the sea.
— Marty Rubin
Ik vind het doodzonde van mijn tijd om me te verdiepen in de organische geesteswoekeringen van een dichter die me niets beters te melden heeft dan het niets, de leegte, het onverstaanbare. Het onverstaanbare heb ik thuis ook, als ik door de WC-deur heen probeer te praten met mijn vriendin. Het onzegbare, dat roeren wij thuis door de muesli. Ik wil poëzie die me meeneemt naar een wereld die ik nog niet ken, naar een inzicht dat ik nog niet had, naar een uitzicht dat ik nergens anders had kunnen vinden. Ik wil een gedicht dat zo goed is, dat ik bijna vergeet dat het, zoals elk gedicht, een taalbouwsel is – een volmaakt bedrieglijke travestie waar het grote niets doorheen schijnt, een van zijn eigen leugenachtigheid getuigende leugen van inkt. Ik wil een gedicht als een huis, dat me op één steen na laat geloven dat ik er werkelijk in zou kunnen wonen.
— Ingmar Heytze
say what you mean and mean what you say
— Angel Silva, Love and Deceit
Such a small, pure object a poem could be, made of nothing but air a tiny string of letters, maybe small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. But it could blow everybody's head off.
— Mary Karr, Lit
It’s easier for me to make sense of it that way than it is for me to face the other way—reality. And yet, those evil spirits that were unleashed—be they fake entities from a stupid carnival ride, or cruel malevolencies from dark spiritual chasms of our universe—have stayed with me all these years
— Tim Cummings, ORPHANS
Poetry destroyed? Genius banished? No! Mediocrity, no: do not let envy prompt you to the thought. No; they not only live, but reign, and redeem: and without their divine influence spread everywhere, you would be in hell--the hell of your own meanness.
— Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
Music straightjackets a poem and prevents it from breathing on its own, whereas it liberates a lyric. Poetry doesn't need music; lyrics do.
— Stephen Sondheim, Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics, 1954-1981, With Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines, and Anecdotes
If I knew what to doI'd do more than write a song for you
— Criss Jami, Venus in Arms
Dying is a universe of its own. 
— Arlene Ang, Seeing Birds in Church Is a Kind of Adieu
Voll Blüten steht der Pfirsichbaum nicht jede wächst zur Frucht sie schimmern hell wie Rosenschaum durch Blau und Wolkenflucht. Wie Blüten geh'n Gedanken auf hundert an jedem Tag -- lass' blühen, lass' dem Ding den Lauf frag' nicht nach dem Ertrag! Es muss auch Spiel und Unschuld sein und Blütenüberfluss sonst wär' die Welt uns viel zu klein und Leben kein Genuss.
— Hermann Hesse, Bäume. Betrachtungen und Gedichte
The heart's actionsare neither the sentence nor its reprieve. Salt hay and thistles, above the cold granite. One bird singing back to another because it can't not.
— Jane Hirshfield, Come, Thief: Poems
She was, in short, melted by his distress, as so often happens with the female sex. Poets have frequently commented on this. You are probably familiar with the one who said, "Oh, woman in our hours of ease tum tumty tiddly something please, when something something something brow, a something something something thou.
— P.G. Wodehouse, How Right You Are, Jeeves
It was a scary thought. A man could be surrounded by poetry reading and not know it.
— Richard Russo, Nobody's Fool
Listen, we’ll come visit you. Okay? I’ll dress up as William Shakespeare, Lucent as Emily Dickinson, and beautiful ‘Ray’ as someone dashing and manly like Jules Verne or Ernest Hemingway...and we’ll write on your white-room walls. We’ll write you out of your supposed insanity. I love you, Micky Affias.-James (from "Descendants of the Eminent")
— Tim Cummings
No one can usurp the heights...But those to whom the miseries of the worldAre misery, and will not let them rest.
— John Keats
It is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem,—a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing. The thought and the form are equal in the order of time, but in the order of genesis the thought is prior to the form.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson
... in the world, it will be women, mostly colored and poor. women will have to bury children, and support themselves through grief.
— Suheir Hammad, Zaatardiva
The subtleties of the mind cannot be transmitted in words, but can be seen in words.
— Juefan Huihong
How do you knowyou're a girl?I'm wearing a frock.And if you take it off?I get cold, so I putit back on.If I was a boy, I don't know what I'd do.
— Ivor Cutler, Scots Wa' Straw
I say every dog looks like no otherbut that isn't true. Not entirely.Difference is slippery.
— Mary Jo Bang
The one who pulls the puppet strings knows fairytales can heal.
— Sally Odgers
Don’t forget to collect the memories on your journey. Remember, if you only focus on your destination, you will miss out on the benefits of the journey.
— Tanya R. Liverman, Journey to Legacy: A Poetic Timeline of My Life
For it has come about, by the wise economy of nature, that our modern spirit can almost dispense with language; the commonest expressions do, since no expressions do; hence the most ordinary conversation is often the most poetic, and the most poetic is precisely that which cannot be written down.
— Virginia Woolf, Orlando
The talked about their messed-up, dysfunctional families, carefully respecting boundaries, never probing too deep in any one sitting. And they always ended up laughing. Even when the subject matter was intense or macabre, Henry’s sick and twisted and often politically incorrect sense of humor was infectious…Gloria laughed more in these first weeks at Oxford then she remembered laughing almost anywhere.
— Andrea Kayne Kaufman, Oxford Messed Up
I will Basquiat the canvas of your body like a Broadway Junction wall…and Gordon Parks you for those dark midnights when your scent fades.
— Brandi L. Bates
an English girl might well believethat time is how you spend your love.
— Nick Laird, To a Fault
This is no occupation for an adult who can look other adults in the eye, carry his own weight, and count himself one of them.
— Franz Wright, Kindertotenwald: Prose Poems
Alma: ¿Dónde está el oro aquel que viste? Todo ha cambiado cuando estuvo enfrente
—  mis ojos tocan realidad tan triste que digo: es el presente.
A teacher will be frustrated if she is only motivated to teach what she has learned. Yet, if she is motivated because of the students, then she will learn from them how to teach.
— Tanya R. Liverman, Memoirs of an Educarer: An Inspiration for Education
I'm Artistry through Fluent and Flowing Poetry in Motion and I'm Letting it Flow.....
— De Ann "Native" Townes Jr., Peer Inside My Soul and See Me
Far over misty mountains coldTo dungeons deep and caverns oldWe must away, ere break of day,To find our long-forgotten gold.
— J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit
In summer the empire of insects spreads.
— Adam Zagajewski
the poem doesn’t have stanzas, it has a body, the poem doesn’t have lines,/ it has blood, the poem is not written with letters, it’s written/ with grains of sand and kisses, petals and moments, shouts and/ uncertainties.
— José Luís Peixoto, A Criança em Ruínas
Thus I, gone forth, as spiders do,In spider’s web a truth discerning,Attach one silken strand to youFor my returning.
— E.B. White
What am I to do?What is my destiny?I have no idea, not a clueFeeling lost and empty.What is my dream?What is my future?I beg thee to listen to me,I beg thee to answer.
— Atarah L. Poling, Hidden Light
A rua dos cataventosDa vez primeira em que me assassinaram,Perdi um jeito de sorrir que eu tinha.Depois, a cada vez que me mataram,Foram levando qualquer coisa minha.Hoje, dos meu cadáveres eu souO mais desnudo, o que não tem mais nada.Arde um toco de Vela amarelada,Como único bem que me ficou.Vinde! Corvos, chacais, ladrões de estrada!Pois dessa mão avaramente aduncaNão haverão de arracar a luz sagrada!Aves da noite! Asas do horror! Voejai!Que a luz trêmula e triste como um ai,A luz de um morto não se apaga nunca!
— Mario Quintana
Good morning, daddy!Ain't you heardThe boogie-woogie rumbleOf a dream deferred?Listen closely:You'll hear their feetBeating out and beating out a -You thinkIt's a happy beat?Listen to it closely:Ain't you heardsomething underneathlike a -What did I say?Sure,I'm happy!Take it away!Dream BoogieHey, pop!Re-bop!Mop!Y-e-a-h!
— Langston Hughes
Yet gold all is not, that doth gold seem,Nor all good knights, that shake well spear and shield:The worth of all men by their end esteem,And then praise, or due reproach them yield.
— Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Book Two
BeautyIs the fume-track of necessity. This thought Is therapeutic.If, after severalApplications, you do not findRelief, consult your family physician
— Robert Penn Warren, The Collected Poems of Robert Penn Warren
Once upon a time, son,  they used to laugh with their hearts and laugh with their eyes;  but now they only laugh with their teeth, while their ice-block-cold eyes search behind my shadow. There was a time indeed they used to shake hands with their hearts;  but that’s gone, son. Now they shake hands without hearts while their left hands search my empty pockets.
— Gabriel Okara
ONE WORDOne word— one stonein a cold river.One more stone—I'll need many stonesif I'm going to get over.
— Olav H. Hauge
Along the field as we came byA year ago, my love and I,The aspen over stile and stoneWas talking to itself alone.'Oh who are these that kiss and pass?A country lover and his lass;Two lovers looking to be wed;And time shall put them both to bed,But she shall lie with earth above,And he beside another love.'And sure enough beneath the treeThere walks another love with me, And overhead the aspen heavesIts rainy-sounding silver leaves;And I spell nothing in their stir,But now perhaps they speak to her,And plain for her to understandThey talk about a time at handWhen I shall sleep with clover clad,And she beside another lad.
— A.E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad
In the country whereto I goI shall not see the face of my friendNor her hair the color of sunburnt grasses;Together we shall not findThe land on whose hills bends the new moonIn air traversed of birds.What have I thought of love?I have said, "It is beauty and sorrow."I have thought that it would bring me lost delights, and splendorAs a wind out of old time . . .But there is only the evening here,And the sound of willowsNow and again dipping their long oval leaves in the water.-- from "Betrothed
— Louise Bogan, The Blue Estuaries
Song of myselfA child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he. I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven. Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord, A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt, Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose? Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.
— Walt Whitman
No thought is a stupid thought, those who are thoughtless are thought of as stupid.
— Nate Spears, Inspiration 2 Smile
Remember Rio de Janeiro, the size of God’s hand, sardines fleshed-open at the market, the way I entered you and moved inside? Looking down, is this the kind of density you can live with? What is the slightness of our bodies to stay, to be good at loving a second time? My mouth pretends it is an oar when it lives inside your mouth, but you are far away.
— Stacie Cassarino, Zero at the Bone
The world and the friends that lived in it are shadows: you alone remain real in this drowsing room.
— Aldous Huxley
There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three hundred years ago, says that which lies close to my own soul, that which I also had wellnigh thought and said.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
When the lad for longing sighs,Mute and dull of cheer and pale,If at death's own door he lies,Maiden, you can heal his ail.Lovers' ills are all to buy:The wan look, the hollow tone,The hung head, the sunken eye,You can have them for your own.Buy them, buy them: eve and mornLovers' ills are all to sell.Then you can lie down forlorn;But the lover will be well.
— A.E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad
What else is a poem about?The rhythm and the images buried in the language. All the ways you can build an emotion with words, but you can't just write 'I feel sad.' I mean, you can, but it's not poetry... I think it has to be experienced instead of studied. You step into it.
— Garret Weyr, also Freymann-Weyr, After the Moment
We lay our words like tenuous plats, build a bridge over itsunsinkable depth: Not a sea of longing,but the brack of wanting what’s physicalto help us forget we are physical.
— Cate Marvin
Make me, dear Lord, polite and kind, To everyone, I pray.And may I ask you how you find Yourself, dear Lord, today?
— John B. Tabb
...Thought lengths it, pulls an invisible world through a needle's eye one detail at a time, ...
— Jennifer Grotz, The Needle
If you can't beat em: Poem.
— David  Rowe
Poetry is dancing with words.
— Ana Monnar
May the energy of the day always call for celebration." Barbara Botch
— Barbara Botch, Poet's Crossing
Poetry is never abandon it is only remixed.
— James Schwartz, The Literary Party: Growing Up Gay and Amish in America
One day I might feel Mean,And squinched up inside,Like a mouth sucking on a Lemon.The next day I couldFeelWhole and happyAnd right,Like an unbitten apple.
— Mary Neville
Heavy as such things areAfter the wordslide, the writing begins."From "Word Quake
— Eileen Granfors, And More White Sheets: An expanded text edition
This fellow is wise enough to play the fool;And to do that well craves a kind of wit:He must observe their mood on whom he jests,The quality of persons, and the time,And, like the haggard, check at every featherThat comes before his eye. This is a practiseAs full of labour as a wise man's artFor folly that he wisely shows is fit;But wise men, folly-fall'n, quite taint their wit.
— William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
When a reader enters the pages of a book of poetry, he or she enters a world where dreams transform the past into knowledge made applicable to the present, and where visions shape the present into extraordinary possibilities for the future.
— Aberjhani, Collected Visions of a Skylark Dressed in Black
Nostalgia locates desire in the past where it suffers no active conflict and can be yearned toward pleasantly.
— Robert Hass, Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry
SOWING LIGHTNINGSeizeBolts of lightning from the skyAnd plant them in fields of life.They will grow like tender sprouts of fire.Charge somber thoughtsWith unexpected flash,You, my lightning in the soil!
— Visar Zhiti, The Condemned Apple: Selected Poetry
Little deer, I've stuffed all the world's diseases inside you. / Your veins are thorns // and the good cells are lost in the deep dark woods / of your organs.
— Pascale Petit, What the Water Gave Me
At last everything was satisfactorily arranged, and I could not help admiring the setting: these mingled touches betrayed on a small scale the inspiration of a poet, the research of a scientist, the good taste of an artist, the gourmet’s fondness for good food, and the love of flowers, which concealed in their delicate shadows a hint of the love of women
— August Strindberg, Madman's Defence
with shrunken fingerswe ate our oranges and bread,shivering in the parked car;though we know we had neverbeen there before,we knew we had been there before.
— Margaret Atwood, Procedures For Underground
Poetry...... a place for the genuine,Hands that can grasp, eyesthat can dilate, hair that can rise
— Marianne Moore, Complete Poems
And blue-lung'd combers lumbered to the kill.
— Robert Lowell, Lord Weary's Castle
How do I feel today? I feel as unfit as an unfiddle,And it is the result of a certain turbulence in the mind and an uncertain burbulence in the middle.What was it, anyway, that angry thing that flew at me?I am unused to banshees crying Boo at me.Your wife can’t be a banshee—Or can she?
— Ogden Nash, Private Dining-room and Other New Verses
Some thirty inches from my noseThe frontier of my Person goes,And all the untilled air betweenIs private pagus or demesne.Stranger, unless with bedroom eyesI beckon you to fraternize,Beware of rudely crossing it:I have no gun, but I can spit.
— W.H. Auden
O dear Himalaya...why are you so amazing, can I kiss your peak or can I just let your silence speak...O dear Himalaya...
— Santosh Kalwar
The worm doth woo the mortal, death claims a living bride, Night unto day is married, morn unto eventide, Earth a merry damsel, and heaven a knight so true,And Earth is quite coquettish, and beseemeth in vain to sue.
— Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
For a lot of people, poetry tends to be dull. It's not read much. It takes a special kind of training and a lot of practice to read poetry with pleasure. It's like learning to like asparagus.
— Thomas M. Disch
from "Semele Recycled"But then your great voice rang out under the skiesmy name!-- and all those private namesfor the parts and places that had loved you best.And they stirred in their nest of hay and dung.The distraught old ladies chasing their lost altar,and the seers pursuing my skull, their lost employment,and the tumbling boys, who wanted the magic marbles,and the runaway groom, and the fisherman's thirteen children,set up such a clamor, with their cries of "Miracle!"that our two bodies met like a thunderclapin midday-- right at the corner of that wretched fieldwith its broken fenceposts and startled, skinny cattle.We fell in a heap on the compost heapand all our loving parts made love at once,while the bystanders cheered and prayed and hid their eyesand then went decently about their business.And here is is, moonlight again; we've bathed in the riverand are sweet and wholesome once more.We kneel side by side in the sand;we worship each other in whispers.But the inner parts remember fermenting hay,the comfortable odor of dung, the animal incense,and passion, its bloody labor,its birth and rebirth and decay.
— Carolyn Kizer
What is a woman that you forsake herAnd the hearth fire and the home acreTo go with that old grey widow-maker?
— Rudyard Kipling
The birth of a true poet is neither an insignificant event nor an easy delivery. Complications generally begin long before the fated soul carries its dubious light into whatever womb has been kind enough to volunteer the intricate machinery of its blood and prayers and muscles for a gestation period much longer than nine months or even nine years.
— Aberjhani, The American Poet Who Went Home Again
A true poet is one who can appreciate the disciplines and structures of any and all styles of poetry.
— David J. Delaney
Nobody knows the aftermath.
— Santosh Kalwar, Obscurity
I'm heading for a clean-named placelike Wisconsin, and mad as a jack-o'-lantern, will get therewithout help and nosy proclivities.
— John Ashbery
May, and after a rainy springWe walk streets gallant with rhododendrons.
— Alicia Suskin Ostriker, The Crack In Everything
We can’t choose our poetic fathers any more than our biological ones — but we can choose how to come to terms with them.
— Rodger Kamenetz
In my more rebellious days I tried to doubt the existence of the sacred, but the universe kept dancing and life kept writing poetry across my life. (Beyond Religion, p. 81)
— David N. Elkins
HOUSE Grow high. The devil can't find you. Grow deep. Buddha can't find you. Build a house and live there. Gourd creepers will climb over it, their flowers dazzling at midnight. 
— Ko Un, What? 108 Zen Poems
Two such as you with such a master speedCannot be parted nor be swept awayFrom one another once you are agreedThat life is only life forevermoreTogether wing to wing and oar to oar
— Robert Frost
When you're a student of poetry, you're lucky if you don't realize how untalented you are until you get a little better. Otherwise, you would just stop.
— Tony Hoagland, Ploughshares
Only in Russia poetry is respected--it gets people killed.
— Osip Mandelstam
A sentence is like a tune. A memorable sentence gives its emotion a melodic shape. You want to hear it again, say it—in a way, to hum it to yourself. You desire, if only in the sound studio of your imagination, to repeat the physical experience of that sentence. That craving, emotional and intellectual but beginning in the body with a certain gesture of sound, is near the heart of poetry. 
— Robert Pinsky
Come, drunks and drug-takers; come perverts unnerved!Receive the laurel, given, though late, on merit; to whom and wherever deserved.Parochial punks, trimmers, nice people, joiners true-blue,Get the hell out of the way of the laurel. It is deathless And it isn't for you.
— Louise Bogan, The Blue Estuaries
If you don't know the kind of person I amand I don't know the kind of person you area pattern that others made may prevail in the worldand following the wrong god home we may miss our star.
— William Stafford, The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems
Poetry is the least imposition on silence in a world of chatter.
— Marvin Bell
Hak cihâna tolıdur kimseler Hakk’ı bilmez / Anı sen senden iste o senden ayru olmaz.
— Yunus Emre, Poemas
O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fallFrightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed.
— Gerard Manley Hopkins
The heart under your heart is not the one you shareso readily so full of pleasantry & tendernessit is a single blackberry at the heart of a brambleor else some larger fruit heavy the size of a fist
— Craig Arnold
Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement.
— William Stafford
Every evening words, not stars, light the sky. No rest in life like life itself.
— Umberto Saba
...It's not that the worm forgives the plough; it gives it no mind. (Pain occurs, in passing.) (lines 37-39 in the poem 'Fantasia on a Theme from IKEA')
— Philip Gross, The Water Table
Poetry must be as new as foam, and as old as the rock.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Some wrong eternity that wouldn’t budge, like trying to move a wardrobe or a safe, only to feel how light I was.
— Deborah Digges
...always-the sharp,plaintive edgeon the rimof the spoonof my giving.(lines 8-13 of the poem 'Confessions')
— Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno, Slamming Open the Door
. . . On a sandbarsunlight stretches out its limbs, or is ita sycamore, so brazen, so clean and bold?
— William Stafford
I like the imp / in impossibility 
— Pierre Joris
Must be going crazy---my favorite poet latelyhas been me!
— Wayne Kaumualii Westlake, Westlake: Poems by Wayne Kaumualii Westlake
She reads his poems gratefully in her small Mississippi town. It's an undramatic life, yet these past months she seems to have found the intensity he yearns for, This also sounds like bragging, though she doesn't mean it to. If she could, she'd let him bear her secret. She'd let all great men bear it, for s few hours. Then, when she too it back, they'd remember how it feels to be inhabited.
— Beth Ann Fennelly, Unmentionables: Poems
The sea is dangerous, they say, but not if you're the sea.
— Sarah Maclay
I recall that now and I recall everything for what do we have but the past to parent us?
— Kathleen Driskell, Seed Across Snow
With heaven in our hearts,life is romancing uswith glimpses ofthe universe dancing.
— Ann Louise Ramsey
Logic, when applied to people, fails miserably!
— Joseph J. Breunig 3rd, Reaching Towards His Unbounded Glory
Jen's Mum Will WriteJen's mum writes advertising copy.She specializes in white goods:washing machines, dryers, fridges,freezers, dishwashers.She hates these applianceshulkingin corners,power-hungry and fractious.One day, she will have a wood stove,and she'll write about things that matter-she will write about birth and death,about love and the absence of love,about fathers and children,about mothers and daughters,about lovers and friends.She'll write about the whole goddamnwonderful, awful businessof loving and being loved
— Margaret Wild, Jinx
Écoutez le monde blanchorriblement las de son effort immenseses articulations rebelles craquer sous les étoiles duresses raideurs d'acier bleu transperçant la chair mystiqueécoute ses victoires proditoires trompeter ses défaitesécoute aux alibis grandioses son piètre trébuchementPitié pour nos vainquers omniscients et naïfs !
— Aimé Césaire, Cahier d'un retour au pays natal
By giving words the latitude she does, (Marianne) Van Hirtum emphasizes their contagious qualities: they become almost like viruses, with which it is necessary to put oneself in harmony by sympathetic magic if one is not to be overwhelmed. ... What is essential is to become one with the sickness, that is, in the context of language as a whole, to enter into contact with words.
— Michael Richardson, Dedalus Book of Surrealism 2: The Myth of the World
Wer ein Theater füllen will, bedient sich der Dramaturgie. Um es zu leeren genügt Ideologie.
— Oliver Hassencamp
When a poet settled down to write a poem, could he foresee the lines he would write? Did his head constantly spin with riddles and rhymes and was his only job to put them down? What if he couldn’t get them to make sense, and no one, not even the person he cared for most, could have pleasure in reading it? What would he do?
— Alysha Speer, Sharden
that stone Buddha deserves all the  birdshit it getsI wave my skinny arms like a tall  flower in the wind
— Ikkyu, Crow with No Mouth
I'd love to give you somethingbut what would help?
— Ikkyu, Crow with No Mouth
The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy!The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and handand asshole holy!Everything is holy! everybody's holy! everywhere isholy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman's anangel!
— Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems
Hearing a crow with no mouthCry in the deepDarkness of the night,I feel a longing forMy father before he was born.
— Ikkyu, Crow with No Mouth
I give you the end of a golden string,Only wind it into a ball,It will lead you in at Heaven's gateBuilt in Jerusalem's wall.
— William Blake
A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer... He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring.
— E.B. White
And I think that it is certainly possible that the objective universe can be affected by the poet. I mean, you recall Orpheus made the trees and the stones dance and so forth, and this is something which is in almost all primitive cultures. I think it has some definite basis to it. I'm not sure what. It's like telekinesis, which I know very well on a pinball machine is perfectly possible.
— Jack Spicer, The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures
The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
LIFE IS SUBVERSIVE
— Ernesto Cardenal, Zero Hour And Other Documentary Poems
... You can't be with God and be neutral. / True contemplation is resistance. And poetry, / gazing at clouds is resistance I found out in jail.
— Ernesto Cardenal, Zero Hour And Other Documentary Poems
L'artGreen arsenic smeared on an egg-white cloth, Crushed strawberries! Come, let us feast our eyes.
— Ezra Pound
You bend the nailBut keep hammering becauseHammering makes the world
— Dean Young, Skid
noone knows and noone seeswe lovers doing what we pleasebut people stop and point at theseten milk bottles a-turning into cheese
— Roger McGough
I was the solitary plovera pencil for a wing-boneFrom the secret notesI must tiltupon the pressureexecute and adjust In us sea-air rhythm"We live by the urgent waveof the verse
— Lorine Niedecker
NexusI wrote stubbornly into the evening.At the window, a giant praying mantisrubbed his monkey wrench head against the glass,begging vacantly with pale eyes;and the commas leapt at me like wormsor miniature scythes blackened with age.the praying mantis screeched louder,his ragged jaws opening into formlessness.I walked outside;the grass hissed at my heels.Up ahead in the lapping darknesshe wobbled, magnified and absurdly green,a brontosaurus, a poet.
— Rita Dove
Wild creatures' eyes, the colonel said,Are innocent and fathomlessAnd when I look at them I seeThat they are not aware of meAnd oh I find and oh I blessA comfort in this emptinessThey only see me when they wantTo pounce upon me at the hunt;But in the tame varietyThere couches an anxietyAs if they yearned, yet knew not whatThey yearned for, nor they yearned for not.And so my dog would look at meAnd it was pitiful to seeSuch love and such dependency.The human heart is not at easeWith animals that look like these.
— Stevie Smith
I am five, I will never understandwhy we are stranded in our selvesbut in this moment I knowmy own storyis understanding our singlenessthat I am destined to move my body and timeinto the body-timethe storyof Others.
— Sharon Doubiago, Hard Country
Ted: A fucking good poem is a weapon. It's-- and not like a--a popgun or something.- It's a bomb.It's like a bloody big bomb. Sylvia: That’s why they make childrenlearn them in school.They don't want them messing aboutwith them on their own. I mean, just imagineif a sonnet went off accidentally. Boom.
— John Brownlow, Sylvia: The Shooting Script
the next time you hear someone in a workshop remarking on how good a particular free-verse line or passage sounds, scan it. The odds are that it will fall into a regular metrical pattern.
— Annie Finch
A Rough GuideBe polite at the reception desk.Not all the knives are in the museum.The waitresses know that a nice boyis formed in the same way as a deckchair.Pay for the beer and send flowers.Introduce yourself as Richard.Do not refer to what somebody didat a particular time in the past.Remember, every Friday we used to gofor a walk. I walked. You walked.Everything in the past is irregular.This steak is very good. Sit down.There is no wine, but there is ice cream.Eat slowly. I have many matches. 
— Mark Haddon, The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea: Poems
It is not growing like a treeIn bulk, doth make Man better be;Or standing long an oak, three hundred year,To fall a log at last, dry, bald, and sere:A lily of a dayIs fairer far in MayAlthough it fall and die that night;It was the plant and flower of Light.In small proportions we just beauties see;And in short measures life may perfect be (Ben Jonson)
— Aidan Chambers, Postcards from No Man's Land
Poetry is a way of coming to know the realness of things
—  fiction is a way of coming to know the world of relationships
. . .criticism is to poetry as air is to a noise: it allows it to be heard; and even if we can't see it or feel it, it is there, shaping how we hear.
— Annie Finch, The Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self
Tho' you're tired and weary, still journey on, Till you come to your happy abode,Where all the love you've been dreaming of,Will be there at the end of the road.
— Harry Lauder, Between You and Me
. . . poetry, like all imaginative creations, divines the human enterprise. This is poetry's social value.
— Major Jackson
Know that there is often hidden in us a dormant poet, always young and alive.
— Paul de Musset
The journey back is always longer than the forward run.
— Rod McKuen
And round about there is a rabbleOf the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor.They shall inherit the earth.
— Ezra Pound, Selected Poems of Ezra Pound
My vegetable love will growVaster than empires, and more slow.
— Andrew Marvell
Evil is not good's absence but gravity'severlasting bedrock and its fatal chainsinert, violent, the suffrage of our days.
— Geoffrey Hill, Canaan
We left you there, lonely,Beauty your power,Wisdom your watchman,To hold the clay tower.from 'The Tale of the Tiger Tree
— Vachel Lindsay
Yo, múltiple, como en contradicción
— Julia de Burgos, Song of the Simple Truth: The Complete Poems of Julia de Burgos
My name used to be in the papers dailyAs having dined somewhere,Or traveled somewhere,Or rented a house in Paris,Where I entertained the nobility.I was forever eating or traveling,Or taking the cure at Baden-Baden.Now I am here to do honorTo Spoon River, here beside the family whence I sprang.No one cares now where I dined,Or lived, or whom I entertained,Or how often I took the cure at Baden-Baden!
— Edgar Lee Masters
Streets paved with opal sadness,Lead me counterclockwise, to pockets of joy,And jazz.
— Bob Kaufman, Cranial Guitar: Selected Poems
The Plot Against The GiantFirst GirlWhen this yokel comes maundering,Whetting his hacker,I shall run before him,Diffusing the civilest odorsOut of geraniums and unsmelled flowers.It will check him.Second GirlI shall run before him,Arching cloths besprinkled with colorsAs small as fish-eggs.The threadsWill abash him.Third GirlOh, la...le pauvre!I shall run before him,With a curious puffing.He will bend his ear then.I shall whisperHeavenly labials in a world of gutturals.It will undo him.
— Wallace Stevens, Harmonium
Snub end of a dismal year, deep in the dwarf orchard, The sky with its undercoat of blackwash and point stars,I stand in the dark and answer toMy life, this shirt I want to take off,which is on fire . . .
— Charles Wright
Our Beasts and our Thieves and our ChattelsHave weight for good or for ill;But the Poor are only His image,His presence, His word, His will; -And so Lazarus lies at our doorstepAnd Dives neglects him still.
— Adelaide Anne Procter