c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Say you could view a time lapse film of our planet: what would you see? Transparent images moving through light, “an infinite storm of beauty.”The beginning is swaddled in mists, blasted by random blinding flashes. Lava pours and cools; seas boil and flood. Clouds materialize and shift; now you can see the earth’s face through only random patches of clarity. The land shudders and splits, like pack ice rent by widening lead. Mountains burst up, jutting, and dull and soften before your eyes, clothed in forests like felt. The ice rolls up, grinding green land under water forever; the ice rolls back. Forests erupt and disappear like fairy rings. The ice rolls up- mountains are mowed into lakes, land rises wet from the sea like a surfacing whale- the ice rolls back. A blue-green streaks the highest ridges, a yellow-green spreads from the south like a wave up a strand. A red dye seems to leak from the north down the ridges and into the valleys, seeping south; a white follows the red, then yellow-green washes north, then red spreads again, then white, over and over, making patterns of color too intricate to follow. Slow the film. You see dust storms, locusts, floods, in dizzying flash-frames.Zero in on a well-watered shore and see smoke from fires drifting. Stone cities rise, spread, and crumble, like paths of alpine blossoms that flourish for a day an inch above the permafrost, that iced earth no root can suck, and wither in a hour. New cities appear, and rivers sift silt onto their rooftops; more cities emerge and spread in lobes like lichen on rock. The great human figures of history, those intricate, spirited tissues whose split second in the light was too brief an exposure to yield any image but the hunched shadowless figures of ghosts.Slow it down more, come closer still. A dot appears, a flesh-flake. It swells like a balloon; it moves, circles, slows, and vanishes. This is your life.
— Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Often one spends weeks trying to write a poem out of the conscious mind that never comes to anything - these are sort of 'ideal' poems that one feels ought to be written, but don't because (I fancy) they lack the vital spark of self-interest. A 'real' poem is a pleasure to write.
— Philip Larkin, Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica
When people talk about poetry as a project, they suggest that the road through a poem is a single line. When really the road through a poem is a series of lines, like a constellation, all interconnected. Poems take place in the realm of chance, where the self and the universal combine, where life exist. I can’t suggest to you that going through a line that is more like a constellation than a road is easy—or that the blurring of the self and the universal doesn’t shred a poet a little bit in the process. The terrain of a poem is unmapped (including the shapes of the trees along the constellation-road). A great poet knows never to expect sun or rain or cold or wind in the process of creating a poem. In a great poem all can come to the fore at once. It would be worse yet, if none are there at all.
— Dorothea Lasky
I’ve come down from the skylike some damned ghost, delayedtoo long…To the abandoned fieldsthe trees returned and grew.They stand and grow. Time comesTo them, time goes, the treesStand; the only placeThey go is where they are.Those wholly patient ones…They do no wrong, and theyAre beautiful. What moreCould we have thought to ask?...I stand and wait for lightto open the dark night.I stand and wait for prayerto come and find me here.” Sabbaths 2000 IX
— Wendell Berry, Given
Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed. Having once experienced the mystery, plenitude, contradiction, and composure of a work of art, we afterward have a built-in resistance to the slogans and propaganda of oversimplification that have often contributed to the destruction of human life. Poetry is a verbal means to a nonverbal source. It is a motion to no-motion, to the still point of contemplation and deep realization.
— A.R. Ammons
Men call you fayre, and you doe credit it,For that your self ye daily such doe see:But the trew fayre, that is the gentle wit,And vertuous mind, is much more praysd of me.For all the rest, how ever fayre it be,Shall turne to nought and loose that glorious hew:But onely that is permanent and freeFrom frayle corruption, that doth flesh ensew.That is true beautie: that doth argue youTo be divine and borne of heavenly seed:Deriv'd from that fayre Spirit, from whom al trueAnd perfect beauty did at first proceed.He onely fayre, and what he fayre hath made,All other fayre lyke flowres untymely fade.
— Edmund Spenser, Amoretti and Epithalamion
How hard it is, to be forced to the conclusion that people should be, nine tenths of the time, left alone! - When there is that in me that longs for absolute commitment. One of the poem-ideas I had was that one could respect only the people who knew that cups had to be washed up and put away after drinking, and knew that a Monday of work follows a Sunday in the water meadows, and that old age with its distorting-mirror memories follows youth and its raw pleasures, but that it's quite impossible to love such people, for what we want in love is release from our beliefs, not confirmation in them. That is where the 'courage of love' comes in - to have the courage to commit yourself to something you don't believe, because it is what - for the moment, anyway - thrills your by its audacity. (Some of the phrasing of this is odd, but it would make a good poem if it had any words...)
— Philip Larkin, Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica
How they are all about, these gentlemenIn chamberlains' apparel, stocked and laced,Like night around their order's star and gemAnd growing ever darker, stony-faced,And these, their ladies, fragile, wan, but proppedHigh by their bodice, one hand loosely dropped,Small like its collar, on the toy King-Charles:How they surround each one of these who stoppedTo read and contemplate the objects d'art,Of which some pieces still are theirs, not ours.Whit exquisite decorum they allow usA life of whose dimensions we seem sureAnd which they cannot grasp. They were aliveTo bloom, that is be fair; we, to mature,That is to be of darkness and to strive.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, The Best of Rilke: 72 Form-true Verse Translations with Facing Originals, Commentary and Compact Biography
Rather a thousand times the county jail than to lie under this marble figure with wings and this granite pedestal bearing the words "pro patria." What do they mean anyway?
— Edgar Lee Masters
Лотова ЖенаИ праведник шел за посланником Бога,Огромный и светлый, по черной горе.Но громко жене говорила тревога:Не поздно, ты можешь еще посмотретьНа красные башни родного Содома,На площадь, где пела, на двор, где пряла,На окна пустые высокого дома,Где милому мужу детей родила.Взглянула - и, скованы смертною болью,Глаза ее больше смотреть не могли;И сделалось тело прозрачною солью,И быстрые ноги к земле приросли.Кто женщину эту оплакивать будет?Не меньшей ли мнится она из утрат?Лишь сердце мое никогда не забудетОтдавшую жизнь за единственный взгляд.
— Анна Ахматова, Избранное
the inletour friend looks as he didwhen we first knew him,and until I wake I believeI will die of grief, for I knowthat this boy grew into a manwho was a faithful friendwho died.
— Wendell Berry, Given
Onwetend van dit alles maakte ik eind vorige eeuw mijn entree in dit discours door aan een tijdschrift te vertellen dat poëzie volgens mij entertainment is. Als iemand dat platvloers vindt, voegde ik er behulpzaam aan toe, had hij volgens mij een te lage dunk van entertainment.
— Ingmar Heytze
Cut off from the land that bore us,Betrayed by the land we find,Where the brightest have gone before us,And the dullest are most behind - Stand, stand to your glasses, steady!'T is all we have left to prize:One cup to the dead already - Hurrah for the next that dies!
— Bartholomew Dowling
A poet is a verb that blossoms light in gardens of dawn, or sometimes midnight.
— Aberjhani
Authors can write stories without people assuming that they are autobiographies, but songwriters and poets are often considered to be the characters in their works. I like Michelangelo's vision, 'I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.
— Criss Jami, Salomé: In Every Inch In Every Mile
There is a master way with words which is not learned but is instead developed: a deaf man develops exceptional vision, a blind man exceptional hearing, a silent man, when given a piece of paper...
— Criss Jami, Venus in Arms
There is only beauty / and it has only one perfect expression / poetry. All the rest is a lie /except for those who live by the body, love, and, that love of the mind, friendship. For me, Poetry takes the place of love, because it is enamored of itself, and because its sensual delight falls back deliciously in my soul.
— Stéphane Mallarmé
Language signifies when instead of copying thought it lets itself be taken apart and put together again by thought. Language bears the sense of thought as a footprint signifies the movement and effort of a body. The empirical use of already established language should be distinguished from its creative use. Empirical language can only be the result of creative language. Speech in the sense of empirical language - that is, the opportune recollection of a preestablished sign – is not speech in respect to an authentic language. It is, as Mallarmé said, the worn coin placed silently in my hand. True speech, on the contrary - speech which signifies, which finally renders "l'absente de tous bouquets" present and frees the sense captive in the thing - is only silence in respect to empirical usage, for it does not go so far as to become a common noun. Language is oblique and autonomous, and if it sometimes signifies a thought or a thing directly, that is only a secondary power derived from its inner life. Like the weaver, the writer works on the wrong side of his material. He has only to do with the language, and it is thus that he suddenly finds himself surrounded by sense.
— Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs
I wouldn't be surprised if poetry - poetry in the broadest sense, in the sense of a world filled with metaphor, rhyme, and recurring patterns, shapes, and designs - is how the world works. The world isn't logical; it's a song.
— David Byrne, Bicycle Diaries
I leave the kitchen table to bathe, and to dress for church. If only my closet held on its shelves an array of faces I could wear rather than dresses, I would know which face to put on today. As for the dresses, I haven't a clue.
— Tim Cummings, ORPHANS
It is probably always disastrous not to be a poet.
— Lytton Strachey, Elizabeth and Essex
Literature is news which stays news.
— Ezra Pound
We are metered only by our own machines,while the book is a clock that forgets her machanics.
— Amy King
crawled like a blind slug into the web
— Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last
It was useless trying to explain to Cecila that poetry wasn't a commodity, that it could never be bought or sold, that it was, in fact, unteansferrable, remaining forever a part of the one who wrote it.
— Tennessee Williams, Collected Stories
Poetry, if it is not to be a lifeless repetition of forms, must be constantly exploring "the frontiers of the spirit." But these frontiers are not like the surveys of geographical explorers, conquered once for all and settled. The frontiers of the spirit are more like the jungle which, unless continuously kept under control, is always ready to encroach and eventually obliterate the cultivated area.
— T.S. Eliot
For the past thirty years or so, much American poetry has been marked by an earnestness that rejects the comic. This has nothing to do with seriousness. The comic can be very serious. The trouble with the earnest is that it seeks to be commended. It seeks to be praised for its intention more than for what it is saying.
— Stephen Dobyns, Next Word, Better Word: The Craft of Writing Poetry
Forge your iron; shape it by force, not into a flower you already know but into what can also be a flower if you think it is and it is so.
— João Cabral de Melo Neto, Education by Stone
An artist is identical with an anarchist,' he cried. 'You might transpose the words anywhere. An anarchist is an artist. The man who throws a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment to everything. He sees how much more valuable is one burst of blazing light, one peal of perfect thunder, than the mere common bodies of a few shapeless policemen. An artist disregards all governments, abolishes all conventions. The poet delights in disorder only. If it were not so, the most poetical thing in the world would be the Underground Railway.''So it is,' said Mr. Syme.'Nonsense!' said Gregory, who was very rational when any one else attempted paradox.
— G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare
Though the body is itsgenesis, a poem is the vision of a processCarved in space, vision your poor eye's singlearmor against winter spring summer fall
— Frank Bidart, Watching the Spring Festival: Poems
Poetry is the whispering of a truth by the shouting of the best possible lies
— Oscar Sparrow, I Threw a Stone: A Collection of Poems
It [Bach's cello suites] is like a great diamond," said [Mischa] Maisky in a thick Russian accent, "with so many different cuts that reflect light in so many different ways.
— Eric Siblin, The Cello Suites
The first inkling of this notion had come to him the Christmas before, at his daughter's place in Vermont. On Christmas Eve, as indifferent evening took hold in the blue squares of the windows, he sat alone in the crepuscular kitchen, imbued with a profound sense of the identity of winter and twilight, of twilight and time, of time and memory, of his childhood and that church which on this night waited to celebrate the second greatest of its feasts. For a moment or an hour as he sat, become one with the blue of the snow and the silence, a congruity of star, cradle, winter, sacrament, self, it was as though he listened to a voice that had long been trying to catch his attention, to tell him, Yes, this was the subject long withheld from him, which he now knew, and must eventually act on.He had managed, though, to avoid it. He only brought it out now to please his editor, at the same time aware that it wasn't what she had in mind at all. But he couldn't do better; he had really only the one subject, if subject was the word for it, this idea of a notion or a holy thing growing clear in the stream of time, being made manifest in unexpected ways to an assortment of people: the revelation itself wasn't important, it could be anything, almost. Beyond that he had only one interest, the seasons, which he could describe endlessly and with all the passion of a country-bred boy grown old in the city. He was beginning to doubt (he said) whether these were sufficient to make any more novels out of, though he knew that writers of genius had made great ones out of less. He supposed really (he didn't say) that he wasn't a novelist at all, but a failed poet, like a failed priest, one who had perceived that in fact he had no vocation, had renounced his vows, and yet had found nothing at all else in the world worth doing when measured by the calling he didn't have, and went on through life fatally attracted to whatever of the sacerdotal he could find or invent in whatever occupation he fell into, plumbing or psychiatry or tending bar. ("Novelty")
— John Crowley, American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940's Until Now
You say you are a poet of law
—  I saw you are a contradiction in terms. I only wonder there were not comets and earthquakes on the night you appeared in this garden
...red sings like summer in the shadows, hot on my tongue...
— Nell Grey
When he was in college, a famous poet made a useful distinction for him. He had drunk enough in the poet's company to be compelled to describe to him a poem he was thinking of. It would be a monologue of sorts, the self-contemplation of a student on a summer afternoon who is reading Euphues. The poem itself would be a subtle series of euphuisms, translating the heat, the day, the student's concerns, into symmetrical posies; translating even his contempt and boredom with that famously foolish book into a euphuism.The poet nodded his big head in a sympathetic, rhythmic way as this was explained to him, then told him that there are two kinds of poems. There is the kind you write; there is the kind you talk about in bars. Both kinds have value and both are poems; but it's fatal to confuse them.In the Seventh Saint, many years later, it had struck him that the difference between himself and Shakespeare wasn't talent - not especially - but nerve. The capacity not to be frightened by his largest and most potent conceptions, to simply (simply!) sit down and execute them. The dreadful lassitude he felt when something really large and multifarious came suddenly clear to him, something Lear-sized yet sonnet-precise. If only they didn't rush on him whole, all at once, massive and perfect, leaving him frightened and nerveless at the prospect of articulating them word by scene by page. He would try to believe they were of the kind told in bars, not the kind to be written, though there was no way to be sure of this except to attempt the writing; he would raise a finger (the novelist in the bar mirror raising the obverse finger) and push forward his change. Wailing like a neglected ghost, the vast notion would beat its wings into the void.Sometimes it would pursue him for days and years as he fled desperately. Sometimes he would turn to face it, and do battle. Once, twice, he had been victorious, objectively at least. Out of an immense concatenation of feeling, thought, word, transcendent meaning had come his first novel, a slim, pageant of a book, tombstone for his slain conception. A publisher had taken it, gingerly; had slipped it quietly into the deep pool of spring releases, where it sank without a ripple, and where he supposes it lies still, its calm Bodoni gone long since green. A second, just as slim but more lurid, nightmarish even, about imaginary murders in an imaginary exotic locale, had been sold for a movie, though the movie had never been made. He felt guilt for the producer's failure (which perhaps the producer didn't feel), having known the book could not be filmed; he had made a large sum, enough to finance years of this kind of thing, on a book whose first printing was largely returned.
— John Crowley, Novelty: Four Stories
Tăcerea coboară-n spiraleRotunde şi-ovale,Ca nişte confeti de-aceeaşi culoare...
— Ion Minulescu
To Your eyes a thousand years are like yesterday come and gone, no more than a watch in the night.You sweep men away like a dream, like grass which springs up in the morning.In the morning it springs up and flowers, by evening it withers and fades.So we are destroyed in Your anger, struck with terror in Your fury.Our guilt lies open before You; our secrets in the light of Your face.All our days pass away in Your anger. Our life is over like a sigh.Our span is seventy years or eighty for those who are strong. And most of these are emptiness and pain, they pass swiftly and we are gone.
— Anonymous
in der Fußgängerzone kam Wind auf wie immer Wind aufkommt bei der Suche nach jenem richtigen Ort der sich stets weit entfernt zeigt, die Abfallpapiere am Boden verrutschten, mein Mantel flatterte, und, als wäre dies schon ein Grund mich selbst zu den Dingen zu zählen als wäre dies schon ein Grund blieb ich ungefragt stehen
— Marion Poschmann, Geistersehen: Gedichte
Thinking has a quiet skin. But I feel the  and  of things inside it. Blue hills most gentle in calm light, then stretches of assailAnd ransack. Such tangles of charred wreckage, shrapnel-bits Singling and singeing where they fall. I feel the stumbling gait of what I am,The quiet uproar of undone, how to be hidden is a tempting, violent thing— Each thought breaking always in another.All the unlawful elsewheres rushing in.
— Laure Sheck
When I took my poetry class in school. I read an e. e. cummings poem. I don’t mind eels except how they feels and maybe as meals. I knew there was hope for me.
— Stanley Victor Paskavich, Stantasyland: Poetic Verses
I could give all to Time except -- exceptWhat I myself have held. But why declareThe things forbidden that while the Customs sleptI have crossed to Safety with? For I am There,And what I would not part with I have kept.
— Robert Frost, The Poetry of Robert Frost
The life spills over, some days.She cannot be at rest,Wishes she could explodeLike that red tree—The one that bursts into fireAll this week.Senses her infinite smallnessBut can’t seize it,Recognizes the folly of desire,The folly of withdrawal—Kicks at the curb, the pavement,If only she could, at this moment,When what she’s doing is ploddingTo the bus stop, to go to school,Passing that fiery tree—if only she couldBe making love,Be making a painting,Be exploding, be speeding through the universeLike a photon, like a showerOf yellow flames—She believes if she could only catch upWith the riding rhythm of things, of her own electrons,Then she would be at rest—If she could forget school,Climb the tree,Be the tree,burn like that.
— Alicia Suskin Ostriker
A poem is a frozen momentmelted by each reader for themselvesto flow into the here and now.
— Hilde Domin
I could have been 23 next July I gambled on what mattered most, the dice were cast. I lost.
— Hannah Senesh, Hannah Senesh: Her Life and Diary, the First Complete Edition
Which the Chicken and Which the Egg?He drinks because she scolds, he thinks;She thinks she scolds because he drinks;And nether will admit what's true,That he's a sot and she's a shrew.
— Ogden Nash
Moon, that against the lintel of the westYour forehead lean until the gate be swung,Longing to leave the world and be at rest,Being worn with faring and no longer young,Do you recall at all the Carian hillWhere worn with loving, loving late you lay,Halting the sun because you lingered still,While wondering candles lit the Carian day?Ah, if indeed this memory to your mindRecall some sweet employment, pity me,That even now the dawn's dim herald see!I charge you, goddess, in the name of oneYou loved as well: endure, hold off the sun.
— Edna St. Vincent Millay, Unknown Book 7720699
Why covet a knowledge of new facts? Day and night, house and garden, a few books, a few actions, serve us as well as would all trades and all spectacles. We are far from having exhausted the significance of the few symbols we use. We can come to use them yet with a terrible simplicity.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson
My heart in the East But the rest of me far in the West— How can I savor this life, even taste what I eat? How, in the bonds of the Moor, Zion chained to the Cross, Can I do what I’ve vowed to and must? Gladly I’d leave All the best of grand Spain For one glimpse of the ruined Shrine’s dust.
— Yehuda HaLevi
Recuerdo que algún día yo le hablé de mi río  y una como tormenta se agitó en sus estrañas. No sé si fue mi pecho que tembló de recuerdo  o si fueron mis ojos que asomaron nostalgias." "I remember a day when I spoke of my river  and something like a storm stirred in his being. Was it my breast that trembled with the memory  Was it nostalgia that showed through my eyes
— Julia de Burgos
But he never forgot how once by not knowing time,He escaped into the clockless land of ever,Where time hides tick-less waiting to be born.
— U.A. Fanthorpe, New and Collected Poems
Terror is an artery. Running unfailing channels of bloodied thoroughfares by dint of the wilds beyond our knowing. Fluctuations and murmurs are audible within the splintered leeway of our preserve as a consequence of interstices modeled in such brutality. This appended artery offers no direction; idle and at times desultory. Bloodstained tracks and avenues guide casualties. Terror, like death, is not complicated, nor is it simple. It is but routine—natural. To call it otherwise is to parsimoniously say that birth is effortless, hurricanes are facile, and earthquakes are meek when they are a lot more.Myths, parables, and allegories lie in the construct of terror. Kings have fallen and succeeded in the yarns of terror. Simple men have been turned into heroes due to terror. Villains have been great orchestrators in the art of terror, allowing sole individuals and denizens to feel their makings. A soul never needed God to feel terror. The most nihilistic can undergo such a dreadful emotion. Animals are perfect examples of this. They are well-equipped creations to the world of terror and death, holding no cognizance to deity or creator.Terror is quite exclusive as it is a function of the mind, conducted by the intersections and throughways of nerves and bounded to that alone. Although it approaches with university, like hunger or sickness, it is selfish by fashion and segregating in nature. But death is quite opposite… death is all embracing. Disregarded and glossed over, it is never reserved or inaudible, especially if you listen hard enough.Death transmits a signal that can be discerned if you listen hard enough. Frail in birthing, the airing is not limited to the clairvoyant, though they are a standard audience. The most simple-minded can hear this. But they choose to ignore it for whatever grounds. Even in the obviousness of it when it comes in dream, awaking its public in night terrors and cold sweats, it should be heeded.In lurk of dark uncertainties the signal should be adhered in this societal horrific caprice.Death is a declaration waiting to broadcast the haunting awareness of our own deterrence.And within these pages is its proclamation.
— J.C. Whitfield
You and those shot-glass eyes, deep swirling pools of 80-proof firewater, with the depth and profundity of Saturn’s spinning pulsars…
— Brandi L. Bates
ink marks the page/where you execute your will like a doe announcing an/ox-stern mate with a single, bleary blink.
— Melissa Lee-Houghton, A Body Made of You
He calls me desperate (on my tombstone)I hope poetic license will allow: HUNGRY
— Eli Coppola
[H]e initially conceived of Olivier as a man of the greatest promise destroyed by a fatal flaw, the unreasoning passion for a woman dissolving into violence, desperately weakening everything he tried to do. For how could learning and poetry be defended when it produced such dreadful results and was advanced by such imperfect creatures? At least Julien did not see the desperate fate of the ruined lover as a nineteenth-century novelist or a poet might have done, recasting the tale to create some appealing romantic hero, dashed to pieces against the unyielding society that produced him. Rather, his initial opinion -- held almost to the last -- was of Olivier as a failure, ruined by a terible weakness.
— Iain Pears, The Dream of Scipio
Behold yon rough and flinty roadWhere youth, now youth no more,Gropes whining, seeking crumbs of loavesHe cast away of yore.
— Emma Ghent Curtis
Children are our future. We teach them today
—  what will they do tomorrow?
The future belongs to all who, refusing to look back at the past move ahead with the clock as it ticks.
— Odo Simon Agbo, The Dancing Sun
When I examine my mind and try to discern clearly in the matter, I cannot satisfy myself that there are any such things as poetical ideas. No truth, it seems to me, is too precious, no observation too profound, and no sentiment too exalted to be expressed in prose. The utmost I could admit is that some ideas do, while others do not, lend themselves kindly to poetical expression; and that those receive from poetry an enhancement which glorifies and almost transfigures them, and which is not perceived to be a separate thing except by analysis.
— A.E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad
An educator will teach the students. An Educarer will reach the students.
— Tanya R. Liverman, Memoirs of an Educarer: An Inspiration for Education
If there has been one overriding change in poetic practice, it is that under the influence of free verse the poets have made a primary virtue out of exactitude and economy of meaning: this has replaced metrical skill as the first thing the poet tunes to.
— Martin Langford
Receio que a poesia é pior que o sexo tântrico: não mexe nem sai de cima.I'm afraid that poetry is worse than tantric sex: it does not not move or get off.
— Victor Eustáquio
Le vin est la gaieté, dit-on ; comment cet océan de vin qui submerge la commune de Bercy n’égaye-t-il pas un peu ces navrants paysages ? Tout Bacchus est là ; Bacchus, chanté avec tant de constance par nos poètes ébriolants. Bacchus ne peut-il rasséréner ces horizons en deuil ? ou faut-il croire que Bacchus lui-même, ennemi de l’eau, est incommodé par le voisinage de la rivière ?
— Paul Féval père, Le Chevalier Ténèbre
Приспособяваме се тихо към живота,доволни и от бледите утехи,които вятърът довяваи пуска в празните ни джобове.Но още храним обич към светащом спираме пред гладно котенце на прага,готови да го приютим в протрития ръкав,да го спасим от улицата - шумна и жестока.(...)Играта е такава - кара ни да се усмихваме насила.И все пак виждаме луната, спряла над самотна уличка,да преобръща празна кофа в искряща чаша на смеха,и все пак чуваме през веселия шум и нашите стремежигласа на котенце, което вика сред пустинята.
— Hart Crane
Take you example by this thing,/ And yield to each his right,/ Lest God with such like miserye/ Your wicked minds requite
— Various
He had not been able to see it in himself, but looking at Hungerford, he was able at least to speculate on the possibility that fear, raw, physical fear, had a kind of gift to give, too. Who but the terrified has heard his own heart pounding, listened to his own stertorous breathing, wishing that heart and lungs would be more quiet, and yet learning in their pulsation the lessons of rhythm and metrics? (Anagrams, p. 80)
— David R. Slavitt
We must remember that there is a great difference between a myth and a miracle. A myth is the idealization of a fact. A miracle is the counterfeit of a fact. There is the same difference between a myth and a miracle that there is between fiction and falsehood -- between poetry and perjury. Miracles belong to the far past and the far future. The little line of sand, called the present, between the seas, belongs to common sense to the natural.
— Robert G. Ingersoll
I hate the day, because it lendeth lightTo see all things, but not my love to see.
— Edmund Spenser, Daphna
Think of your woods and orchards without birds!Of empty nests that cling to boughs and beamsAs in an idiot's brain remembered wordsHang empty 'mid the cobwebs of his dreams!
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Calligraphy may well be simply an artistic version of another form, that is the ideograms which make up the poem, but then not only does it reflect the character and temperament of the artist but . . . also betrays his heart rate, his breathing.
— Dai Sijie, Once on a Moonless Night
The same that oft-times hath charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam of perilous seas, in fairy lands forlorn.
— John Keats
In The Sunset SkyThe sunset sky dazzling with the golden hues, Taking bow in brilliant sparkle of experienceIs it not a climax, of the story so far, that was today?Or is it building anticipation of the night yet to come. Watch the days go, some proud of their accomplishmentsSome leaving sighs of disappointments, Leaving all in awe of its Amaranthine twists and turns And the fortunate get to see the moon trying to steal the show from setting sun,Oh she is such a show off, isn't she, basking in reflected gloryIts magical, the sunset sky,Puzzling, sometimes just like a riddle,Leaving the nature stunned and amazed For it has been filling the canvas whole day with colours And now the sunset threatens to hide them all And in dark all the colours will be sameA cue for the wise.Sunset sky has so much to offer, is she not a fine exampleof how uncertain a life can beOften reminding no matter what you planned, there will besome unexpected returnsFor End has its own brain, its own scriptCharting its own courseSo why just the beginning,every moment of the life should be grand, meted with equal passion and fervorShe has been so clever; the sunset skyLeaving Twinkling cryptic messages for the night skyFor even the dark has sparkle and hope if you keep your head up, A constant reminder that exuberance is an attitude of deep,rich, warm heartsI want my sunset sky to be grand, magical, and full of stories of my life that has been And its memories to linger on in this world, in the tomorrow and a few more years to come
— Soma Mukherjee
When I composed those verses I was preoccupied less with music than with an experience—an experience in which that beautiful musical allegory had shown its moral side, had become an awakening and a summons to a life vocation. The imperative form of the poem which specially displeases you is not the expression of a command and a will to teach but a command and warning directed towards myself. Even if you were not fully aware of this, my friend, you could have read it in the closing lines. I experienced an insight, you see, a realization and an inner vision, and wished to impress and hammer the moral of this vision into myself. That is the reason why this poem has remained in my memory. Whether the verses are good or bad they have achieved their aim, for the warning has lived on within me and has not been forgotten. It rings anew for me again to-day, and that is a wonderful little experience which your scorn cannot take away from me.
— Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game
I've never been able to write poetry without having vast tracts of dead time. Poetry requires a certain kind of disciplined indolence that the world, including many prose writers, doesn't recognize as discipline. It is, though. It's the discipline to endure hours that you refuse to fill with anything but the possibility of poetry, though you may in fact not be able to write a word of it just then, and though it may be playing practical havoc with your life. It's the discipline of preparedness.
— Christian Wiman, Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet
Just EnoughSoil for legsAxe for handsFlower for eyesBird for earsMushrooms for noseSmile for mouthSongs for lungsSweat for skinWind for mind
— Nanao Sakaki
I suppose that's how it looks in prose. But it's very different if you look at it through poetry…and I think it's nicer…' Anne recovered herself and her eyes shone and her cheeks flushed… 'to look at it through poetry.
— L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Avonlea
Songs of myselfClear and sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul. Lack one lacks both, and the unseen is proved by the seen, Till that becomes unseen and receives proof in its turn.
— Walt Whitman
Where even ravi (the sun) cannot reach, there will go a kavi (poet)." - Vimalananda
— Robert E. Svoboda, Aghora II: Kundalini
Poems have ideas. The ideas of poems come out of their emotions and their emotions are carried on images.
— E.L. Doctorow
As Henry Moore carvedor modelled his sculpture every day,he strove to surpass Donatello4. and failed, but woke the next morningelated for another try.
— Donald Hall
Death makes its own choices. Has reasoning an order has a taste…
— Angelo Tsanatelis, The Dark Notes, Book I
to split the very sea into ours and theirs." Border at the BeachAnd More White Sheets
— Eileen Granfors
The distinctive features of the world's civilisations are not simply and solely the giraffe and the city of Rome, as the children may perhaps have been led to imagine on the first evening, but also the elephant and the country of Denmark, beside many other things. Yes, everyday brought its new animal and its new country, its new kings and its new gods, its quota of those tough little figures which seem to have no significance, but are nevertheless endowed with a life and a value of their own, and may be added together or subtracted from one another at will. And finally poetry, which is grater than any country ; poetry with its bright palaces.
— Halldór Laxness, Independent People
Who will read these poems when the people are gone?
— Dominic Owen Mallary, Destroyer of Man: Selected Poems
victor hugo, Les Contemplations, MorsJe vis cette faucheuse. Elle était dans son champ. Elle allait à grands pas moissonnant et fauchant, Noir squelette laissant passer le crépuscule. Dans l'ombre où l'on dirait que tout tremble et recule, L'homme suivait des yeux les lueurs de la faulx.Et les triomphateurs sous les arcs triomphaux Tombaient ; elle changeait en désert Babylone, Le trône en échafaud et l'échafaud en trône, Les roses en fumier, les enfants en oiseaux,L'or en cendre, et les yeux des mères en ruisseaux. Et les femmes criaient : - Rends-nous ce petit être. Pour le faire mourir, pourquoi l'avoir fait naître ? -Ce n'était qu'un sanglot sur terre, en haut, en bas ; Des mains aux doigts osseux sortaient des noirs grabats ; Un vent froid bruissait dans les linceuls sans nombre ; Les peuples éperdus semblaient sous la faulx sombre Un troupeau frissonnant qui dans l'ombre s'enfuit ; Tout était sous ses pieds deuil, épouvante et nuit.Derrière elle, le front baigné de douces flammes, Un ange souriant portait la gerbe d'âmes.
— Victor Hugo
It comes down to this: we're pieces of equipmentTo be counted and signed for. On occasion some of us break down,And those parts which can't be salvagedAre replaced with other GI parts, that's all.
— Rolando Hinojosa, Korean Love Songs From Klail City Death Trip
Lineation can make your break your poems.
— Katerina Stoykova Klemer
Parent-Teacher ConferenceAt the parent-teacher conference,my father made a scene.He scared my fifth-grade teacher,with his mask from Halloween. She showed him all my science gradesand said she was concerned,but he just stuck his tongue outwhen my teacher’s back was turned. He drew a monster on the boardand claimed it was her twin.He even shook her soda,which expolded on her chin. My angry teacher crossed her armsand said, “This meeting’s done!I now see where he gets it from—you act just like your son!
— Darren Sardelli
Não estatize meus sentimentos. Pra seu governo, o meu estado é independente.
— Renato Russo
I didn't know how to hold my lips.
— Lesle Lewis
Painted desert, ocean of colorsun's worshiper, moon's loverpicture of a coyote's voicesandbox of angels, another toy.
— Trine Daely, Life Games
Any hand can condem, but it takes a helping hand to build.
— Nate Spears, Inspiration 2 Smile
Unless you are here: this garden refuses to exist.Pink dragonflies fall from the airand become scorpions scratching blood out of rocks.The rainbows that dangle upon this mist: shatter. Like the smile of a child separatedfrom his mother’s milk for the very first time.--from poem Blood and Blossoms
— Aberjhani, I Made My Boy Out of Poetry
In an age when nations and individuals routinely exchange murder for murder, when the healing grace of authentic spirituality is usurped by the divisive politics of religious organizations, and when broken hearts bleed pain in darkness without the relief of compassion, the voice of an exceptional poet producing exceptional work is not something the world can afford to dismiss.
— Aberjhani, The American Poet Who Went Home Again
We have no quarrel with the German nation,One would not quarrel with a flock of sheep.But, generation after generation,They throw up leaders who disturb our sleep.
— Alan Herbert
If it chance your eye offends you,Pluck it out lad, and be sound:'Twill hurt, but here are salves to friend you,And many a balsam grows on ground.And if your hand or foot offend you,Cut it off, lad, and be whole;But play the man, stand up and end you,When your sickness is your soul.
— A.E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad
From morn to noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve, a summer's day; and with the setting sun dropped from the zenith like a falling star.
— John Milton
Hesitancy is the surest destroyer of talent. One cannot be timorous and reticent, one must be original and loud. New metaphors, new rhythms, new expressions of emotion can only spring from unhindered gall. Nothing should interfere with that intuition--not the fear of appearing stupid, nor of offending somebody, nor jeopardizing publication, nor being trivial. The intuition must be as unhindered as a karate chop.
— Stephen Dobyns, Best Words, Best Order: Essays on Poetry
…Perses, hear me out on justice, and take what I have to say to heart; cease thinking of violence. For the son of Kronos, Zeus, has ordained this law to men: that fishes and wild beasts and winged birds should devour one another, since there is no justice in them; but to mankind he gave justice which proves for the best.
— Hesiod
you told me onceabout how they usedto build whole city statesout of poemshow everything you see hereis made out ofthe bones of dreamshow having a stiffdrink with lorca meantyou had to writeeverything down right awaylately the words justwon’t come
— John Dorsey
To whom shall I offer this book, young and sprightly,Neat, polished, wide-margined, and finished politely?To you, my Cornelius, whose learning pedantic,Has dared to set forth in three volumes giganticThe history of ages—ye gods, what a labor!—And still to enjoy the small wit of a neighbor.A man who can be light and learned at once, sir,By life's subtle logic is far from a dunce, sir.So take my small book—if it meet with your favor.The passing of years cannot dull its sweet savor.
— Catullus, Selections From Catullus: Translated into English verse with an Introduction on the theory of Translation
Nobody reads poetry anymoreSo who the hell are youI see bent over this book?
— Aleksandar Ristović
I don't tolerate politics that come from anger. I want a politics derived from beauty... I don't admire politicians, but poets. (Rubem Alves, p. 189)
— Mev Puleo, The Struggle Is One: Voices and Visions of Liberation
Suddenly, I was stopped by a quiet song . .Somebody stood, swaying slowly on the road,In the darkest shadow by a puddle,And low above it a small tree grew . .It might’ve been a wild cherry tree . .He kept singing, watching the puddle fill . .I dragged the pine through the water,And with my other hand steadied my sack,Where a bottle of red vino dangled . .He didn’t move, but kept on singing . .Should I have stopped thereAnd joined his singing? . .Had he foundThe one happy tree? . .No one knows where it grows—Or what it looks like . .And who is allowed to recognize it? . .I never stood under it,Even to wait for rain to passOr watch between the dropsThe silent froth appear . .Swaying, he kept on singing . .Otherwise, he would have fallenAnd the rain stopped . .He danced his own rainUnder that tree . .I can’t do such things . .Perhaps it was a wolf? . .
— Oleh Lysheha, The Selected Poems
Right words are born in courage, which results from our struggle to make sense of our various predicaments. Cheer is what words are "trying to tell us/... It's native to the words/and what they want us always to know/even when it seems quite impossible to do.
— William Meredith, Effort at Speech: New and Selected Poems
Carry out your literary dream, no matter how unlikely it may seem...
— Terry A. O'Neal
It nods and curtseys and recoversWhen the wind blows above,The nettle on the graves of loversThat hanged themselves for love.The nettle nods, the wind blows over,The man, he does not move,The lover of the grave, the loverThat hanged himself for love.
— A.E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad
EpitaphDen Tigern ertrann ichDie Wanzen nährte ichAufgefressen wurde ichVon den Mittelmäßigkeiten.
— Bertolt Brecht, Hundert (100) Gedichte
But usually not. Usually she thinks of the path to his house, whether deer had eaten the tops of the fiddleheads, why they don't eat the peppermint saprophytes sprouting along the creek; or she visualizes the approach to the cabin, its large windows, the fuchsias in front of it where Anna's hummingbirds always hover with dirty green plumage and jeweled throats. Sometimes she thinks about her dream, the one in which her mother wakes up with no hands. The cabin smells of oil paint, but also of pine. The painter's touch is sexual and not sexual, as she herself is....When the memory of that time came to her, it was touched by strangeness because it formed no pattern with the other events in her life. It lay in her memory like one piece of broken tile, salmon-coloured or the deep green of wet leaves, beautiful in itself but unusable in the design she was making
— Robert Hass, Human Wishes
Plût au ciel que le lecteur, enhardi et devenu momentanément féroce comme ce qu’il lit, trouve, sans se désorienter, son chemin abrupt et sauvage, à travers les marécages désolés de ces pages sombres et pleines de poison ; car, à moins qu'il n’apporte dans sa lecture une logique rigoureuse et une tension d’esprit égale au moins à sa défiance, les émanations mortelles de ce livre imbiberont son âme comme l’eau le sucre. Il n’est pas bon que tout le monde lise les pages qui vont suivre ; quelques-uns seuls savoureront ce fruit amer sans danger. Par conséquent, âme timide, avant de pénétrer plus loin dans de pareilles landes inexplorées, dirige tes talons en arrière et non en avant. Écoute bien ce que je te dis : dirige tes talons en arrière et non en avant.
— Comte de Lautréamont, Maldoror = Les Chants de Maldoror, together with a translation of Lautréamont's Poésies
See--two who dreamed that dream, and you were one.
— Caris Brooke
If I could sum up my poetry in a few well-chosen words, the result might be a poem. Several years ago, when I was asked to say something on this topic, I came up with the notion that for me the making of poems is both a commemoration (a moment captured) and an evocation (the archaeologist manqué side of me digging into something buried and bringing it to light). But I also said that I find the processes that bring poems into being mysterious, and I wouldn't really wish to know them; the thread that links the first unwilled impulse to the object I acknowledge as the completed poem is a tenuous one, easily broken. If I knew the answers to these riddles, I would write more poems, and better ones. "Simple Poem" is as close as I can get to a credo':Simple PoemI shall make it simple so you understand.Making it simple will make it clear for me.When you have read it, take me by the handAs children do, loving simplicity.This is the simple poem I have made.Tell me you understand. But when you doDon't ask me in return if I have saidAll that I meant, or whether it is true.
— Anthony Thwaite
The poetry of love is the greatest gift God gave us.
— Sorin Cerin, Wisdom Collection: The Book of Wisdom
So it's off with the shellsuit and on with the Armanis,Bring out the champagne and the caviar sarnies
— Roger McGough
unless you're the lead dog the view never changes...mercy out does justice every time:always find your way back home/
— Bob Mitchley, Breaking Through
Min ene sko knirker af mangel på stjerneskud
— Benny Andersen
Contemporary poets got so obscure that poetry kind of fell out of favor,
— Paul Ruffin
They went forth to battle, but they always fell;	 Their eyes were fixed above the sullen shields;	Nobly they fought and bravely, but not well,	And sank heart-wounded by a subtle spell.	 They knew not fear that to the foeman yields,	  They were not weak, as one who vainly wields	A futile weapon; yet the sad scrolls tell	How on the hard-fought field they always fell.	It was a secret music that they heard,	 A sad sweet plea for pity and for peace;	 And that which pierced the heart was but a word,	Though the white breast was red-lipped where the sword	 Pressed a fierce cruel kiss, to put surcease	 On its hot thirst, but drank a hot increase.	Ah, they by some strange troubling doubt were stirred,	 And died for hearing what no foeman heard.
— Shaemus O'Sheel
Neither pathway is correct.
— Azaam Yahoo
I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.
— C.S. Lewis
Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens.
— J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
And still, after all this time,The sun never says to the earth,"You owe Me."Look what happens withA love like that,It lights the Whole Sky.
— Hafez
Sometimes beautiful things come into our lives out of nowhere. We can't always understand them, but we have to trust in them. I know you want to question everything, but sometimes it pays to just have a little faith.
— Lauren Kate, Torment
Faith is not the belief that God will do what you want. It is the belief that God will do what is right.
— Max Lucado, He Still Moves Stones