c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
New York! I say New York, let black blood flow into your blood.Let it wash the rust from your steel joints, like an oil of life Let it give your bridges the curve of hips and supple vines. Now the ancient age returns, unity is restored, The recociliation of the Lion and Bull and Tree Idea links to action, the ear to the heart, sign to meaning. See your rivers stirring with musk alligators And sea cows with mirage eyes. No need to invent the Sirens. Just open your eyes to the April rainbow And your eyes, especially your ears, to God Who in one burst of saxophone laughter Created heaven and earth in six days, And on the seventh slept a deep Negro sleep.
— Léopold Sédar Senghor, The Collected Poetry
Saki says that youth is like hors d'oeuvres: you are so busy thinking of the next courses you don't notice it. When you've had them, you wish you'd had more hors d'oeuvres.
— Philip Larkin, Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica
Sexual intercourse began in nineteen sixty-three (Which was rather late for me) between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles' first LP.
— Philip Larkin
…wisely mingled poetry and prose.
— Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
The first fact of the world is that it repeats itself. I had been taught to believe that the freshness of children lay in their capacity for wonder at the vividness and strangeness of the particular, but what is fresh in them is that they still experience the power of repetition, from which our first sense of the power of mastery comes. Though predictable is an ugly little world in daily life, in our first experience of it we are clued to the hope of a shapeliness in things. To see that power working on adults, you have to catch them out: the look of foolish happiness on the faces of people who have just sat down to dinner is their knowledge that dinner will be served. Probably, that is the psychological basis for the power and the necessity of artistic form...Maybe our first experience of form is the experience of our own formation...And I am not thinking mainly of poems about form; I’m thinking of the form of a poem, the shape of its understanding. The presence of that shaping constitutes the presence of poetry.
— Robert Hass
someone's senta loving notein lines of returning geeseand as the moon fillsmy western chamberas petals danceover the flowing streamagain I think of youthe two of usliving a sadnessaparta hurt that can't be removedyet when my gaze comes downmy heart stays up
— Orson Scott Card, Xenocide
... unfools of unbeing ... means quite clearly people who are too stereotyped to be eccentric – people who are too dead spiritually to exist at all and who call alive individual fools
— Norman Friedman, E.E. Cummings: The Art of His Poetry
Mon Dieu, la vie est par trop moche.
— Aldous Huxley
If we knew how to find the lost, we would know how to rediscover the parts of our mindsleft behindin battle.
— Margarita Engle, The Surrender Tree: Poems of Cuba's Struggle for Freedom
I can speak of you now to anyone because I’ve stopped wanting anything like what I once wanted from you.
— Carol Guess, Tinderbox Lawn
...the collective wisdom of humanity [is] enshrined in its poetry.
— Robyn Donald, Tiger, Tiger
bad breath and butt smell; that is prison, in a nutshell.
— Raegan Butcher, Rusty String Quartet
I am not obsessing.I am just sitting hereperforating this post-itwith a push-pin.
— Ada Limon, Lucky Wreck
Live for everything, or die for nothing
— Nate Spears
The secret to life is to live as though you know the secret." Barbara Botch
— Barbara Botch, Poet's Crossing
breathe in experience breathe out poetry
— Muriel Rukeyser
Where to start?Everything cracks and shakes,The air trembles with similes,No one world's better than another;the earth moans with metaphors.
— Osip Mandelstam, Selected Poems
If onlyyou could have witnessed howmuch I have changed: sit alonein a disused theatre and feel whatI have felt, see how the world hastransformed me, like the metamorphosisof a caterpillar.
— Kiera Woodhull, Chaos of the Mind
I do strongly feel that among the greatest pieces of luck for high achievement is ordeal. Certain great artists can make out without it, Titian and others, but mostly you need ordeal. My idea is this: the artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business: Beethoven's deafness, Goya's deafness, Milton's blindness, that kind of thing.
— John Berryman
Life is unbearable pain.
— Santosh Kalwar, Obscurity
August is dust here. Droughtstuns the road,but juice gathers in the berries.
— Robert Hass, Praise
It was as important to live poetically as to write poems.
— James Broughton
Where is my oasis? Too far fromhere for me to crawl with thesedead legs, refusing to co-operateHands and fingers clawing uselesslythrough the grains of sand...
— Kiera Woodhull, Chaos of the Mind
Think neither fear nor courage saves us.Unnatural vices are fathered by our heroism. Virtues are forced upon us by our impudent crimes. These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.
— T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Poems
The moon people do not eat by swallowing food but by smelling it. Their money is poetry - actual poems, written out on pieces of paper whose value is determined by the worth of the poem itself.
— Paul Auster, Moon Palace
Sun-struck, stuck in mid tropic strut, it sometimes standsas if considering how to cool avian plastic,dive into the mown lagoon of lawn;how take flight on dayglow flap-doodle wings, no matterif it is ball-bald going nowhere fast.
— Joyce Thomas, Skins: Poems
It is not what they built. It is what they knocked down.It is not the houses. It is the spaces between the houses.It is not the streets that exist. It is the streets that no longer exist.
— James Fenton
L'aube exalteé ainsi qu'un peuple de colombes, et j'ai vu quelquefois ce que l'homme a cru voir!(And dawn, exalted like a host of doves - and then I've seen what men believe they've seen!)
— Arthur Rimbaud
How are poets able to unzip what they see around them, calling forth a truer essence from behind a common fact? Why, reading a verse about a pear, do you see past the fruit in so transcendent a way?
— Elizabeth Berg
We are spirits clad in veils.
— Christopher Pearse Cranch
I was compared to Charles Bukowski yesterday. It was the best and worst compliment I've ever gotten.
— Rosa Sophia
One writes a poem when one is so taken up by an emotional concept that one is unable to remain silent.
— Stephen Dobyns, Best Words, Best Order: Essays on Poetry
Each and every words count.Each and every thoughts count.
— Santosh Kalwar, Obscurity
With slouch and swing around the ringWe trod the Fools’ Parade!We did not care: we knew we wereThe Devils’ Own Brigade:And shaven head and feet of leadMake a merry masquerade.
— Oscar Wilde
I am republicI am maoistI am activistand I am thisand I am thatbut why?Why can't
—  I be
Living is the opposite of poetry. Poetry is the recollection of living, or, more often than not, the lament of having not lived. Or worse yet, merely the contemplation of living. My advice to you, Ms. Harper, is this: Live. And keep living. And never stop to look back to write about what you have lived and observed and overcome, lest you turn into a pillar of salt. This desert life is already full of such monoliths.
— P.S. Baber, Cassie Draws the Universe
And when I stand in the receiving linelike Jackie Kennedywithout the pillbox hat,if Jackie were fat and had taken enough Klonopinto still an ox,and you whisperI think of youdon't finish withbecause I've been going to Weight Watcherson Tuesdays and wonder 
— Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno, Slamming Open the Door
The answer to our existence lies in existence itself.
— Santosh Kalwar, The Warrior
To delight the ear and the eye is a mere sensual indulgence
— —true poetry strikes at the soul.
He was weary of himself, of cold ideas and brain dreams. Life a poem? Not when you went about forever poetizing about your own life instead of living it. How innocuous it all was, and empty, empty, empty! This chasing after yourself, craftily observing your own tracks--in a circle, of course.This sham diving into the stream of life while all the time you sat angling after yourself, fishing yourself up in one curious disguise or another! If he could only be overwhelmed by something--life, love, passion--so that he could no longer shape it into poems, but had to let it shape him!
— Jens Peter Jacobsen, Niels Lyhne
The purpose of poetry is to remind us / how difficult it is to remain just one person...
— Czesław Miłosz
There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.
— John Cage
Flow gently, sweet Afton,amang thy green braes,Flow gently, I'll sing theea song in thy praise;My Mary's asleepby thy murmuring stream,Flow gently, sweet Afton,disturb not her dream.Thou stock dove whose echoresounds thro' the glen,Ye wild whistly blackbirdsin yon thorny den,Thou green crested lapwingthy screaming forbear,I charge you, disturb notmy slumbering fair.How lofty, sweet Afton,thy neighboring hills,Far mark'd with the coursesof clear winding rills;There daily I wanderas noon rises high,My flocks and my Mary'ssweet cot in my eye.How pleasant thy banks and green valleys below, Where, wild in the woodlands,the primroses blow;There oft, as mild eveningweeps over the lea,The sweet-scented birk shadesmy Mary and me.Thy crystal stream, Afton,how lovely it glides,And winds by the cot wheremy Mary resides;How wanton thy watersher snowy feet lave,As, gathering sweet flowerets,she stems thy clear wave.Flow gently, sweet Afton,amang thy green braes,Flow gently, sweet river,the theme of my lays; My Mary's asleepby thy murmuring stream,Flow gently, sweet Afton,disturb not her dreams.
— Robert Burns
For the beginning is assuredlythe end- since we know nothing, pureand simple, beyondour own complexities.
— William Carlos Williams
If rape or arson, poison or the knifeHas wove no pleasing patterns in the stuffOf this drab canvas we accept as life -It is because we are not bold enough!
— Charles Baudelaire
I heard a bird congratulating itselfall day for being a jay.Nobody cared. But it was gladall over again, and said so, again.
— William Stafford
Poetry is an orphan of silence.
— Charles Simic
And so I pray I am today as honestwith myself, with life all around me and below and above me,with all who I encounter.
— Jimmy Santiago Baca, Winter Poems Along the Rio Grande
I am she who lifts the mountainsWhen she goes to hunt,Who wears mamba for a headbandAnd a lion for a belt.Beware!I swallow elephants wholeAnd pick my teeth with rhinoceros horns,I drink up rivers to get at the hippos.Let them hear my words!Nhamo is comingAnd her hunger is great.I am she who tosses treesInstead of spears.The ostrich is my pillowAnd the elephant is my footstool!I am NhamoWho makes the river my highwayAnd sends crocodiles scurrying into the reeds!
— Nancy Farmer, A Girl Named Disaster
When people say, "I've told you fifty times," / They mean to scold, and very often do; / When poets say, "I've written fifty rhymes," / They make you dread that they 'II recite them too;In gangs of fifty, thieves commit their crimes; / At fifty love for love is rare, 't is true, / But then, no doubt, it equally as true is, / A good deal may be bought for fifty Louis.
— George Gordon Byron
Don't patronize the chain bookstores. Every time I see some author scheduled to read and sign his books at a chain bookstore, I feel like telling him he's stabbing the independent bookstores in the back.
— Lawrence Ferlinghetti
At the round earth's imagined corners blowYour trumpets, angels, and arise, ariseFrom death, you numberless infinitiesOf souls, and to your scattered bodies go ;All whom the flood did, and fire shall o'erthrow,All whom war, dea[r]th, age, agues, tyrannies,Despair, law, chance hath slain, and you, whose eyesShall behold God, and never taste death's woe.But let them sleep, Lord, and me mourn a space ;For, if above all these my sins abound,'Tis late to ask abundance of Thy grace,When we are there. Here on this lowly ground,Teach me how to repent, for that's as goodAs if Thou hadst seal'd my pardon with Thy blood. 
— John Donne
Everything has its poetry. 94
— Joseph Joubert, The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert
This dream the world is having about itselfincludes a trace on the plains of the Oregon trail,a groove in the grass my father showed us allone day while meadowlarks were trying to tellsomething better about to happen.
— William Stafford, The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems
Bring to me, it said, continual proof / you've been alive.
— Stephen Dunn
Talent is a faucet. When it is on, one must write. Inspiration is a farce that poets have invented to give themselves importance.
— Jean Anouilh
If I'm still wistful about On the Road, I look on the rest of the Kerouac oeuvre--the poems, the poems!--in horror. Read Satori in Paris lately? But if I had never read Jack Kerouac's horrendous poems, I never would have had the guts to write horrendous poems myself. I never would have signed up for Mrs. Safford's poetry class the spring of junior year, which led me to poetry readings, which introduced me to bad red wine, and after that it's all just one big blurry condemned path to journalism and San Francisco.
— Sarah Vowell, Take the Cannoli
If words allow themselves to be handled, it is with the help of infinite carefulness. One has to welcome them, listen to the, before asking any service of them. Words are living things closely involved with human life.
— Paul Nougé
I said: 'A line will take us hours maybe;Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought,Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
— W.B. Yeats
The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful.
— Robert Penn Warren
Laser technology has fulfilled our people's ancient dream of a blade so fine that the person it cuts remains standing and alive until he moves and cleaves. Until we move, none of us can be sure that we have not already been cut in half, or in many pieces, by a blade of light. It is safest to assume that our throats have already been slit, that the slightest alteration in our postures will cause the painless severance of our heads.
— Ben Lerner
Landscape is my religion....God in a green legend, I lean over the poolIn a testament of leaves. I dangle my twinkling mood Before me in a cool cave roofed with branchesAnd floored with a skin of water. 
— Norman MacCaig, The Poems of Norman MacCaig
THIS IS WHYHe will never be given to wonder muchif he was the mouth for some cruel forcethat said it. But if he were(this will comfort her) less than one momentout of millions had he meant it. So many years and so many turnsthey had swerved around the subject.And he will swear for many morethe kitchen and everything in it vanished --the oak table, their guests, the refrigerator doorhe had been surely propped against--all changed to rusted ironwork and ashexcept in the center in her linen caftan:she was not touched.He remembers the silence before he spokeand her nodding a little,as if in the meat of this gray wastehere was the signalfor him to speak what they had long agreed,what somewhere they had prepared together.And this one moment in the desert of ashstretches into forever.They had been having a dinner party.She had been lonely. A friend asked her almost jokingif she had ever felt really crazy,and when she started to unwind her answerin long, lovely sentences like scarves within herhe saw this was the waythey could no longer talk together.And that is when he said it,in front of the guests,because he couldn't bear to hear her.And this is why the guests have leftand she screams as he comes near her. 
— Michael     Ryan, God Hunger
Prison MoonFour a.m. work duty and I beginmy solitary trudge from outer compoundto main building. A shivering guard,chilled in his lonely outpost, strip searchesme until content that my inconsequential nudity.poses no threat and then whispersthe secret code that allows me admittance into the open quarter-mile walkway.I chuff my way into another dayas ice glints on the razor wireand the rifles note my numbed passage,silent but for my huffs and scuffleon the cracked, slippery sidewalk A new moon, veiled in wispy fogand beringed in glory, hangs over the prison, its gaudy glow taunting the halogen spotlights.The moon’s creamy pull upsetssome liquid equilibrium within meand like tides, wolves and all manner of madmen, I surrender disturbed by the certainty that under the bony luminescence of a grinning moon The lunar deliriums grip meand I howl--once, then again, andsurely somewhere an unbound sleeper stirs, penitence is dying a giddy death.I shake myself saneand as the echoes hangin the frigid air I explainto the wild-eyed guard that convicts, like all animals under the leash,must bay at the beauty beyond them.
— Jorge Antonio Renaud
the poet I saw once...but whose words have long beenin my mind, windows of invincible candles... 
— Nathalie Handal, The Neverfield: Poem
Ideas must work through the brains and arms of men, or they are no better than dreams
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is ferocious, life, but it must eat . . .
— Lucia Perillo, Luck Is Luck: Poems
My art unkind, my energy all gone blind;The limbs uneven, the face shallower,Because those who I see are not seen,Those who see me are rude indeed. So blow, blow dear winter, just blow along me!
— Santosh Kalwar, Happening:Poems
it isn't that we're alone or not alonewhose voice do you want mine? yours?
— Ikkyu, Crow with No Mouth
Freedom is the dream you dreamWhile putting thought in chains again --
— Giacomo Leopardi, Canti
There’s no money in poetry, but there’s no poetry in money, either
— Robert Graves
Each arrow you shoot offcarries its own targetinto the decidedlysecrettangle
— Paul Celan, Glottal Stop
Breath, dreams, silence, invincible calm, you triumph.
— Paul Valéry
Amé, fuí amado, el sol acarició mi faz.¡Vida, nada me debes! ¡Vida, estamos en paz!I loved, I was loved, the sun stroked my face.Life, you owe me nothing! Life, we are at peace!
— Amado Nervo
rush of pine scent (once upon a time),the unlicensed convictionthere ought to be another wayof sayingthis.
— Paul Celan, Glottal Stop
I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job
— Seamus Heaney
Mute in that golden silence hung with green,Come down from heaven and bring me in your eyesRemembrance of all beauty that has been,And stillness from the pools of Paradise.
— Siegfried Sassoon, Counter-Attack and Other Poems
… the fisherman’s daughter grinding serenity in her coffee grinder.
— Yiannis Ritsos, The Fourth Dimension
How can the confessor teach/ those who are lost and sick at heart,/ when he himself, among the sinners,/ is worst, and most forsaken?/ It is only a game we play/ with other people's sins./ Besides, everyone knows/ that everyone lies confessing.
— Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Stolen Apples
What if the mightiest word is love, love beyond marital, filial, national. Love that casts a widening pool of light. Love with no need to preempt grievance.In today's sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun.On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp -- praise song for walking forward in that light.
— Elizabeth Alexander
i have had my ups and downsbut wotthehell wotthehellyesterday sceptres and crownsfried oysters and velvet gownsand today i herd with bumsbut wotthehell wotthehelli wake the world from sleepas i caper and sing and leapwhen i sing my wild free tunewotthehell wotthehellunder the blear eyed mooni am pelted with cast off shoonbut wotthehell wotthehell
— Don Marquis, The Annotated Archy and Mehitabel
Sharing one umbrella,We have to hold each other,Round the waist to keep together,You ask me why I'm smiling-It's because I'm thinking,I want it to rain forever.
— Vicki Feaver
The poem has a social effect of some kind whether or not the poet wills it to have. It has a kenetic force, it sets in motion...elements in the reader that would otherwise remain stagnant.
— Denise Levertov
The fear of poetry is an indication that we are cut off from our own reality.
— Muriel Rukeyser
They mutilate they torment each otherwith silences with wordsas if they had anotherlife to livethey do soas if they had forgottenthat their bodiesare inclined to deaththat the insides of men easily break downruthless with each otherthey are weakerthan plants and animalsthey can be killed by a wordby a smile by a look 
— Tadeusz Różewicz
How could poetry and literature have arisen from something as plebian as the cuneiform equivalent of grocery-store bar codes? I prefer the version in which Prometheus brought writing to man from the gods. But then I remind myself that…we should not be too fastidious about where great ideas come from. Ultimately, they all come from a wrinkled organ that at its healthiest has the color and consistency of toothpaste, and in the end only withers and dies.
— Alice W. Flaherty, The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain
There will never be an endTo this droning of the surf.
— Wallace Stevens
Thirsty for being, the poet ceaselessly reaches out to reality, seeking with the indefatigable harpoon of the poem a reality that is always better hidden, more re(g)al. The poem’s power is as an instrument of possession but at the same time, ineffably, it expresses the desire for possession, like a net that fishes by itself, a hook that is also the desire of the fish. To be a poet is to desire and, at the same time, to obtain, in the exact shape of the desire.
— Julio Cortázar, Around the Day in Eighty Worlds
I am talking about the responsibility of the poet, who is irresponsible by definition, an anarchist enamored of a solar order and never of the new order or whatever slogan makes five or six hundred million men march in step in a parody of order.
— Julio Cortázar, Around the Day in Eighty Worlds
Like poetry, in times of intense emotion the image returns to me. Like poetry, it stroked my soul and, by turns, lulled and stoked my senses.
— Lisa St. Aubin de Terán, The Palace the Palace
Many have referred to [Lewis] Carroll's rhymes as nonsense, but in my childhood world — Los Angeles in the '50s — they made perfect sense.
— Wanda Coleman, Riot Inside Me: More Trials and Tremors
The yard was a little centre of regeneration. Here, with keen edges and smooth curves, were forms in the exact likeness of those he had seen abraded and time-eaten on the walls. These were the ideas in modern prose which the lichened colleges presented in old poetry. Even some of those antiques might have been called prose when they were new. They had done nothing but wait, and had become poetical. How easy to the smallest building; how impossible to most men.
— Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure
Poetry is a will to put things right, an imaginary solution, a way of avoiding a catastrophe that already happened. Poetry is an escape, perhaps intelligent, perhaps idiotic, from a senile situation. It is a dialectical movement, it keeps tearing open the wounds while trying to heal them. Here we see the only acceptable path open up towards an existence worthy of human beings. Here the seriousness is unfaltering and absolute. Where it will lead no one knows.
— Aase Berg
I placed a jar in Tennessee and round it was upon a hill.
— Wallace Stevens
All that we call sacred history attests that the birth of a poet is the principal event in chronology.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
I care for you, darling, I love you,the only reason I fucked L. is because you fuckedZ. and then I fucked R. and you fucked N.and because you fucked N. I had to fuckY. But I think of you constantly, I feel youhere in my belly like a baby, love I'd call it,no matter what happens I'd call it love, and soyou fucked C. and then before I could moveyou fucked W., so I had to fuck D. ButI want you to know that I love you, I think of youconstantly, I don't think I've ever loved anybodylike I love you.
— Charles Bukowski, Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit
I breathe in...the fragranceof love, and moist sandthe onehis roses lefton both my handsI just keep on breathingevery momentas much as I canpreserving it, in my bodyfor the dayit can’t.
— Sanober  Khan, A touch, a tear, a tempest
Author's PrayerIf I speak for the dead, I mustleave this animal of my body,I must write the same poem over and overfor the empty page is a white flag of their surrender.If I speak of them, I must walkon the edge of myself, I must live as a blind manwho runs through the rooms withouttouching the furniture.Yes, I live. I can cross the streets asking "What yearis it?"I can dance in my sleep and laughin front of the mirror.Even sleep is a prayer, Lord,I will praise your madness, andin a language not mine, speakof music that wakes us, musicin which we move. For whatever I sayis a kind of petition and the darkest daysmust I praise.
— Ilya Kaminsky, Dancing in Odessa
I love to feel the temperature drop and the wind increase just before a thunderstorm. Then I climb in bed with the thunder.
— Amanda Mosher, Better to be able to love than to be loveable
Poetry is the sound of the human animal.
— Suniti Namjoshi, St Suniti & the Dragon
Now is History as fast as the mind remembers.
— Kirby Wright
Matched with an aged wife, I mete and doleUnequal laws unto a savage race,That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
— Alfred Tennyson
If the incision of our words amounts to nothing but a feeling, a slow motion, it will still cut a better swath than the factory model, the corporate model, the penitentiary model, which by my lights are one and the same.
— C.D. Wright, Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil
moonrisesettle back with muffins and teauntil the window empties
— R. Willmott
The inkstand is full of ink, and the paper lies white and unspotted, in the round of light thrown by a candle. Puffs of darkness sweep into the corners, and keep rolling through the room behind his chair. The air is silver and pearl, for the night is liquid with moonlight.See how the roof glitters, like ice!Over there, a slice of yellow cuts into the silver-blue, and beside it stand two geraniums, purple because the light is silver-blue, to-night.
— Amy Lowell, Selected Poems
Deep feeling doesn't make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.
— Thom Gunn
The novel is a formidable mass, and it is so amorphous - no mountain in it to climb, no Parnassus or Helicon, not even a Pisgah. It is most distinctly one of the moister areas of literature - irrigated by a hundred rills and occasionally degenerating into a swamp. I do not wonder that the poets despise it, though they sometimes find themselves in it by accident. And I am not surprised at the annoyance of the historians when by accident it finds itself among them.
— E.M. Forster
Up the airy mountain,Down the rushy glen,We daren't go a-huntingFor fear of little men.
— William Allingham, The Fairies: A Poem
Then you are a poet?' she asked, fingering the flyer in her pocket.'No not at all,' he waved his hand. 'I am merely a character in a poem.
— Karen Tei Yamashita, Tropic of Orange
‘Paradise Lost’ was printed in an edition of no more than 1,500 copies and transformed the English language. Took a while. Wordsworth had new ideas about nature: Thoreau read Wordsworth, Muir read Thoreau, Teddy Roosevelt read Muir, and we got a lot of national parks. Took a century. What poetry gives us is an archive, the fullest existent archive of what human beings have thought and felt by the kind of artists who loved language in a way that allowed them to labor over how you make a music of words to render experience exactly and fully.
— Robert Hass
Some plant lips on Mother Earth in a display of gratitude.Meanwhile, she is kissing the soles of your feet, recognizing the one to be worshiped is you.
— Taylor Patton
It’s your privilege to find me incomprehensible. I gave you my minutes
—  let them remain ours. I hope I haunt you.
Where are You Now? I was there whilst you cried,I was there to comfort you with smile,I was there to give you a hand,when all faith was lost.I was there to open doors of opportunities,I was there to share my passion for life,I was there to feed you,when you were hungry.I was there to listen to your turmoil,I was there to lift your spiritwhen you were broken.I was there when you were ill and alone.I was there when you were betrayed,lied to and ridiculed.I was there to understand,to care and to share.I was there …to play, to sing, to dance,to write, to love, to create and innovate.I was there …Where are you now? …by Natasha Parker
— Luisa Natasha Parker, Natasha a Journey to Freedom, Love and Happiness
PRETENDING TO DROWNThe only regret is that I waitedlonger than a breathto scatter the sun's reflectionwith my body.New stars burst upon the waterwhen you pulled me in.On the shore, our clothesbegged us to be good boys again.Every stick our feet toucheda snapping turtle, every shadowa water moccasin.Excuses to swim closer to one another.I sank into the depths to see youas the lake saw you: cut in halfby the surface, taut legs kicking,the rest of you sky.Suddenly still, a clear viewof what you knew I wantedto see.When I resurfaced, slick grin,knowing glance; you pushed meback under.I pretended to drown,then swallowed you whole.
— Saeed Jones, Prelude to Bruise
Stardust If you came to me with a face I have not seen, with a voice I have never heard, I would still know you. Even if centuries separated us, I would still feel you. Somewhere between the sand and the stardust, through every collapse and creation, there is a pulse that echoes of you and I. When we leave this world, we give up all our possessions and our memories. Love is the only thing we take with us. It is all we carry from one life to the next.
— Lang Leav
I fall asleepCall it deep while all is well be-Cause my life seems like a freestyle mean-While asleep on the couch I dream it's a written piece and nowThe symphony's soundingShouting out to these feet whose leaps feel foul but quite loudBut howI'm allowed to live my dreamsMy Chimeran team brings the Siberian breedRiding reality free 'til these tires they freezeIn mires in dire need of wires, fire and heat butI love a dark, hard cold heart in the wintery breeze
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
I had embraced you...long before i hugged you.
— Sanober  Khan, A Thousand Flamingos
moonlight disappears down the hillsmountains vanish into fogand i vanish into poetry.
— Sanober  Khan, A Thousand Flamingos
we must bringour own lightto thedarkness.
— Charles Bukowski
Some women marry houses.
— Anne Sexton
there is some achingthat will only heal...in the mosque of sleep.
— Sanober  Khan, Turquoise Silence
Tell me..how do you stand there?filling the doorway....of my life.
— Sanober  Khan, A touch, a tear, a tempest
Live as many lives as you can.
— Sanober  Khan
i want to stay curled and cosiedand chocolated....foreverin my mother’s arms.
— Sanober  Khan, Turquoise Silence
To be the other womanis to be a seasonthat is always about to end,when the air is floweredwith jasmine and peach,and the weather day after dayis flawless,and the forecastis hurricane.
— Linda Pastan, The Imperfect Paradise
Now a promise made is a debt unpaid, and the trail has its own stern code.
— Robert W. Service, The Cremation of Sam McGee
Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.Eagerly I wished the morrow; — vainly I had sought to borrow From my books surcease of sorrow — sorrow for the lost Lenore.
— Edgar Allan Poe, The Complete Stories and Poems
I’m happy. But some beauty is nonesuch - The gently sloping path across the wood, The wretched bridge that’s just a little skewed And that, for which, I won’t be waiting much.
— Anna Akhmatova, White Flock
Hill tops like hot iron glitter bright in the sun, And the rivers we're eying burn to gold as they run; Burning hot is the ground, liquid gold is the air; Whoever looks round sees Eternity there.
— John Clare, Poems Chiefly from Manuscript
The Waves is an extraordinary achievement ... It is trembling on the edge. A little less - and it would lose its poetry. A little more - and it would be over into the abyss, and be dull and arty. It is her greatest book.
— E.M. Forster
I put a chameleon on a red dildo... He blushed
— Bo Burnham, Egghead: Or, You Can't Survive on Ideas Alone
Alles wat ik van het leven weet maakte ik me buiten de muren van de school eigen, en zodra ik me binnen die muren bevond leek het of ik achterwaarts leefde.
— Gerrit Komrij
You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you.
— Joseph Joubert
Outside our small safe place flies mystery.
— A.S. Byatt, Possession
A savage place! as holy and enchanted As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan
And yet this self, containsTides, continents and stars―a myriad selves,Is small and solitary as one grass-bladePassed over by the windAmongst a myriad grasses on the prairie.
— Cecil Day-Lewis
Where joy in an old pencil is not absurd.
— May Sarton, Selected Poems
Now therefore, while the youthful hue Sits on thy skin like morning dew, And while thy willing soul transpiresAt every pore with instant fires, Now let us sport us while we may, And now, like amorous birds of prey, Rather at once our time devour Than languish in his slow-chapt power.
— Andrew Marvell, The Complete Poems
the glory of the protagonist is always paid for by a lot of secondary characters
— Tony Hoagland
Poetry had always seemed something I could turn to in need - an emergency exit, a lifebuoy, as well as a justification.
— John Fowles, The Magus
Every time your work is read, you die several deaths for every word, and poetry is like being flayed alive.
— Mary  Stewart, The Stormy Petrel
Man is no star, but a quick coalOf mortal fire:Who blows it not, nor doth controlA faint desire,
— George Herbert, The Temple: The Poetry of George Herbert
As when, O lady mine,With chiselled touchThe stone unhewn and coldBecomes a living mould,The more the marble wastes,The more the statue grows.
— Michelangelo Buonarroti
Still must the poet as of old,In barren attic bleak and cold,Starve, freeze, and fashion verses toSuch things as flowers and song and you;Still as of old his being giveIn Beauty's name, while she may live,Beauty that may not die as longAs there are flowers and you and song.
— Edna St. Vincent Millay, A Few Figs from Thistles
An orphan's curse would drag to hell A spirit from on high; But oh! more horrible than that Is the curse in a dead man's eye! Seven days, seven nights, I saw that curse, And yet I could not die.
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Where were you then?Who else was there?Saying what?Why will the whole of love come on me suddenly when I am sad and feel you are far away?
— Pablo Neruda
The computer is incredibly fast, accurate, and stupid.Man is unbelievably slow, inaccurate, and brilliant.The marriage of the two is a force beyond calculation.
— Waseem Latif
She was remembering His gaze, those deep pools of blue, crystalline in nature, peering deep into her soul. She remembered the first night she had looked into that darkness – no, into that light in his eyes – they were level and straight, kind and compassionate, without any ado, Her hands in His, offerings of comfort and concern for Her station, the concern she felt for those close to Her, each to their own heaven or hell, and the law of attraction began to build.
— Frank L. DeSilva, Tales of Love and LIght Here, Now, and All Ways
poems open doors
— that don't even exist.
To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape. And my feelings, at the end of that wretched term, were those of a man who knows he's in a cage, exposed to the jeers of all his old ambitions until he dies.
— John Fowles, The Magus
...much of poetry in the making is the fiddle with a few items. You lay a word against another and wait. You try another word. And another. Yet another. You wait. You begin again. Listening. Looking. For the elusive inevitable thing which has to arrive before it is recognised. And, like Odysseus, may not be recognised at first.
— Craig Raine, Heartbreak
A fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.
— Rudyard Kipling
Here they have no time for the fine gracesof poetry, unless it freely growsin deep compulsion, like water in the well,woven into the texture of the soilin a strong pattern.
— Iain Crichton Smith, New Collected Poems: Iain Crichton Smith
Poetry purrs like a kitten on the tip of our tongue. Each word fluidly floating from our lips, like little crystalline snowflakes, before settling onto an emotional wonderland of forgotten feelings. It has the power to pull our deepest emotions to the surface of consciousness and to serenade our soul with the haunting melody of a self, lost... and finally found.
— Jaeda DeWalt
Mi táctica es mirarte aprender como sos quererte como sosmi táctica es hablarte y escucharte construir con palabras un puente indestructiblemi táctica es quedarme en tu recuerdo no sé cómo ni sé con qué pretexto pero quedarme en vosmi táctica es ser franco y saber que sos franca y que no nos vendamos simulacros para que entre los dosno haya telón ni abismosmi estrategia es en cambio más profunda y más simple mi estrategia es que un día cualquiera no sé cómo ni sé con qué pretexto por fin me necesites
— Mario Benedetti Táctica y estrategia
At first I protested and rebelled against poetry. I was about to deny my poetic worlds. I was doing violence to my illusions with analysis, science, and learning Henry’s language, entering Henry’s world. I wanted to destroy by violence and animalism my tenuous fantasies and illusions and my hypersensitivity. A kind of suicide. The ignominy awakened me. Then June came and answered the cravings of my imagination and saved me. Or perhaps she killed me, for now I am started on a course of madness.
— Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934
The skies bend, the time stops, the lanes move and the fires dance,It can mean only one thing that I am with you.You are enigmatic yet so beautiful that I have lost my sense, You are as immaculate as the unadulterated morning dew And your beauty leaves me in a mystified trance.I do not foresee what you and I will beBut I promise to be with you till the rocks keep meeting the sea.
— Faraaz Kazi
To Have Without Holding:Learning to love differently is hard,love with the hands wide open, lovewith the doors banging on their hinges,the cupboard unlocked, the windroaring and whimpering in the roomsrustling the sheets and snapping the blindsthat thwack like rubber bandsin an open palm.It hurts to love wide openstretching the muscles that feelas if they are made of wet plaster,then of blunt knives, thenof sharp knives.It hurts to thwart the reflexesof grab, of clutch, to love and letgo again and again. It pesters to rememberthe lover who is not in the bed,to hold back what is owed to the workthat gutters like a candle in a cavewithout air, to love consciously,conscientiously, concretely, constructively.I can't do it, you say it's killingme, but you thrive, you glowon the street like a neon raspberry,You float and sail, a helium balloonbright bachelor's buttons blue and bobbingon the cold and hot winds of our breath,as we make and unmake in passionatediastole and systole the rhythmof our unbound bonding, to haveand not to hold, to lovewith minimized malice, hungerand anger moment by moment balanced.
— Marge Piercy
You ask me why I don't speakNot a word at willBut write so much worth well over a mill'Well I value words like I value kissesA sober one, a closer one penetrates the heartDarling it's how it mends it
— Criss Jami, Diotima, Battery, Electric Personality
OvermodulationBy Charlotte M Liebel-FawlsYou're a cavity in my oasis,You're a porthole in my sea,You're a stretch of the imagination every time you look at me.You're an ocean in my wineglass,You're a Steinway on the beach,You're a captivating audience, an exciting Rembrandt,A Masterpiece.
— Charlotte M. Liebel
one must verge on the unknown, write toward the truth hitherto unrecognizable of one’s own sincerity, including the avoidable beauty of doom, shame, and embarrassment, that very area of personal self-recognition,(detailed individual is universal remember) which formal conventions, internalized, keep us from discovering in ourselves and others
— Allen Ginsberg
We made love outdoors—without a roof, I like most, without stove, my favorite place, assuming the weather be fair and balmy, and the earth beneath be clean. Our souls intertwined and dripping with dew, and our love for each other was seen. Our love for the world was new.
— Roman Payne
Why there isn't any drama in my lifeSo I'll crawl on the cottonfield with a fifeWhy to have a dream in vain my life begsAm a house gecko, I eat flies and lay eggsMy death surely doesn't yield a headline and allI'll break law by pissing on a castle's wallFor my death there wouldn't be a weeping meniFrom the name of Lady Canning there's ledikeniOne foot on heaven and one foot on hell, hangingOne cannon and two cannonballs dangling.
— Nabarun Bhattacharya
For if in careless summer daysIn groves of Ashtaroth we whored,Repentant now, when winds blow cold,We kneel before our rightful lord;The lord of all, the money-god,Who rules us blood and hand and brain,Who gives the roof that stops the wind,And, giving, takes away again;Who spies with jealous, watchful care,Our thoughts, our dreams, our secret ways,Who picks our words and cuts our clothes,And maps the pattern of our days;Who chills our anger, curbs our hope,And buys our lives and pays with toys,Who claims as tribute broken faith,Accepted insults, muted joys;Who binds with chains the poet’s wit,The navvy’s strength, the soldier’s pride,And lays the sleek, estranging shieldBetween the lover and his bride.
— George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying
yo te amo para comenzar a amarte,para recomenzar el infinitoy para no dejar de amarte nunca:por eso no te amo todavía.
— Pablo Neruda, Cien sonetos de amor + las piedras del cielo + maremoto
A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret suffrings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music. People corwd around the poet and say to him: "Sing for us soon again;" that is as much to say, "May new sufferings torment your soul.
— Søren Kierkegaard
From the shadow of domes in the city of domes,A snowflake, a blizzard of one, weightless, entered your roomAnd made its way to the arm of the chair where you, looking upFrom your book, saw it the moment it landed. That's allThere was to it.
— Mark Strand, Blizzard of One
The touch of your fingersgrazing minedelicate asa single drop of winein a crystal goblet.Rolling it round,I savor it on my tongue,try tomake it lastforever.The words Iloveyouform in the airand melt. Your palm againstmy cheek,light asa snowflake.
— Eve Merriam
Memang sulit menulis puisi. Dan untuk apa mempersulit diri sendiri.
— Danarto, Berhala: Kumpulan Cerita Pendek
Stani walks in later, glaring at them both.“Bloody bastards. One minute punching each other, next minute reading poetry. What’s wrong with everyone this week?”Tom can tell that
— Melina Marchetta, The Piper's Son
Always learn poems by heart,' she said. 'They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like fluoride in the water, they'll make your soul impervious to the world's soft decay.
— Janet Fitch, White Oleander
The place trembled with sound. I didn't need to do anything. They would do it all. But you had to be careful. Drunk as they were they could immediately detect any false gesture, any false word. You could never underestimate an audience. They had paid to get in; they had paid for drinks; they intended to get something and if you didn't give it to them they'd run you right into the ocean.
— Charles Bukowski, Women
Learning to be a lady / is like learning / to live within a shell, / to be a crustacean encased / in a small white / uncomfortable world.
— Stephanie Hemphill, Sisters of Glass
I live my life in growing orbits which move out over the things of the world.
— Rainer Maria Rilke
Ninja beats pirate. Pirate beats ghost.Ghost beats zombie. Zombie beats most.Werewolf beats vampire. Vamp beats Imp.Imp beats fiend. Fiend beats wimp.Wizard beats cyrborg. Cyborg surely beats troll.Troll beats goblin. Goblin eats a hermit’s soul.Hermit beats child. Child beats wagon.Wagon beats moon snake. Moon snake beats dragon.Dragon beats hydra. Hydra beats sailor.Sailor beats teacher. Teacher beats tailor.Tailor beats sun worm. Sun worm beats clown.Clown beats robo-squid. Robo-squid beats town.Town fights jackals. Town will win.Town fights mummies. Town won’t fight again.Zookeeper beats hell hound. Hell hound beats giant.Giant beats accountant. Accountant beats client.Client beats frog. Frog beats himself.Knight beats Big Foot. Big Foot beats elf.Elf beats pixie. Pixie beats specter.Specter beats sea hag. Sea hag beats Hector.Hector beats serpent. Serpent beats rat.Rat beats Grandma. Grandma beats cat.Lava beats demon. Demon beats warlock.Warlock beats dinosaur. Dino beats Spock.Spock beats Lando. Lando beats Qui-Gon.Qui-Gon beats Jar-Jar. Jar-Jar beats none.Rock beats scissors. Scissors beat paper.Paper beats insect. Insect beats vapor.Wood Woman beats Tree Man. Tree Man beats the dark.The dark kills spider-fish. Spider-fish beats shark.You beat me. I beat a dentist.The dentist beats the barber. The barber is menaced.These are the rules, and never forget.Now hand over your money and place your bet.
— Dan Bergstein
I want to tie one thousand balloons around my neckand float upwhile slowly dying of happiness.
— Matthew Donahoo, tao lin's third novel
The surge of his ardour swept through him in climatic release, filling her womb with his final, mortal sowing.
— Georgina Anne Taylor, The Woman of the Well
I sing the song of my heartstrings, alone in the eternal muteness, in the face of God.
— Yone Noguchi
I would like The Discovery of Poetry to be a field guide to the natural pleasures of language - a happiness we were born to have.
— Frances Mayes
in a slapfight with Jesusmy face bleedsbecause no one cut their fingernails back then
— Daniel Bailey, Hallelujah, Giant Space Wolf
The poet dreams of the mountainSometimes I grow weary of the days, with all their fits and starts.I want to climb some old gray mountains, slowly, takingThe rest of my lifetime to do it, resting often, sleepingUnder the pines or, above them, on the unclothed rocks.I want to see how many stars are still in the skyThat we have smothered for years now, a century at least.I want to look back at everything, forgiving it all,And peaceful, knowing the last thing there is to know.All that urgency! Not what the earth is about!How silent the trees, their poetry being of themselves only.I want to take slow steps, and think appropriate thoughts.In ten thousand years, maybe, a piece of the mountain will fall.
— Mary Oliver, Swan: Poems and Prose Poems
The sweetness of dogs (fifteen) What do you say, Percy? I am thinkingof sitting out on the sand to watchthe moon rise. Full tonight.So we goand the moon rises, so beautiful it makes me shudder, makes me think abouttime and space, makes me takemeasure of myself: one iotapondering heaven. Thus we sit,I thinking how grateful I am for the moon’s perfect beauty and also, oh! How richit is to love the world. Percy, meanwhile, leans against me and gazes up intomy face. As though I werehis perfect moon.
— Mary Oliver, Swan: Poems and Prose Poems
On the beach, at dawn:Four small stones clearlyHugging each other.How many kinds of loveMight there be in the world,And how many formations might they makeAnd who am I everTo imagine I could knowSuch a marvelous business?When the sun brokeIt poured willingly its lightOver the stonesThat did not move, not at all,Just as, to its always generous term,It shed its light on me,My own body that loves, Equally, to hug another body.
— Mary Oliver, Swan: Poems and Prose Poems