c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Do not turn me intorestless watersif you cannot promiseto be my stream.
— Sanober  Khan
The Ogre does what ogres can,Deeds quite impossible for Man,But one prize is beyond his reach:The Ogre cannot master speech.About a subjugated plain,Among it's desperate and slain,The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,While drivel gushes from his lips.
— W.H. Auden, Selected Poems
There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you. 
— Seamus Heaney
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise, Into the living sea of waking dreams, Where there is neither sense of life or joys, But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems; Even the dearest that I loved the best Are strange—nay, rather, stranger than the rest.
— John Clare, "I Am": The Selected Poetry of John Clare
Outside the youth center, between the liquor storeand the police station,a little dogwood tree is losing its mind;overflowing with blossomfoam,like a sudsy mug of beer;like a bride ripping off her clothes,dropping snow white petals to the ground in clouds,so Nature’s wastefulness seems quietly obscene.It’s been doing that all week:making beauty,and throwing it away,and making more.
— Tony Hoagland, What Narcissism Means to Me
all right buddah gets a backstage pass but all his friends have to pay
— Jim Carroll, Void of Course
The Pekes and the Pollicles, everyone knows, Are proud and implacable, passionate foes;It is always the same, wherever one goes.And the Pugs and the Poms, although most people saythat they do not like fighting, will often displayEvery symptom of wanting to join in the fray.And theyBark bark bark bark bark barkUntil you can hear them all over the park.
— T.S. Eliot, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats
Gretel in Darkness:This is the world we wanted.All who would have seen us deadare dead. I hear the witch's crybreak in the moonlight through a sheetof sugar: God rewards.Her tongue shrivels into gas....Now, far from women's armsAnd memory of women, in our father's hutwe sleep, are never hungry.Why do I not forget?My father bars the door, bars harmfrom this house, and it is years.No one remembers. Even you, my brother,summer afternoons you look at me as thoughyou meant to leave,as though it never happened.But I killed for you. I see armed firs,the spires of that gleaming kiln--Nights I turn to you to hold mebut you are not there.Am I alone? Spieshiss in the stillness, Hanselwe are there still, and it is real, real,that black forest, and the fire in earnest.
— Louise Glück
But to go to school in a summer morn,O! It drives all joy away;Under a cruel eye outworn,The little ones spend the dayIn sighing and dismay.
— William Blake
MiaowConsider me.I sit here like Tiberius,inscrutable and grand.I will let "I dare not"wait upon "I would"and bear the twanglingof your small guitarbecause you are my owland foster me with milk.Why wet my paw?Just keep me in a bagand no one knows the truth.I am familiar with witchesand stand a better chance in hell than youfor I can dance on hot bricks,leap your heightand land on all fours.I am the servant of the Living God.I worship in my way. Look into these slit green stonesand follow your reflected lights into the dark.Michel, Duc de Montaigne, knew.You don't play with me.I play with you.
— Mark Haddon, The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea: Poems
don't wait for the man standing in the  snowto cut off his arm help him now
— Ikkyu, Crow with No Mouth
What did you think, that joy / was some slight thing?
— Mark Doty
Most people ignore most poetry because poetry ignores most people.
— Adrian Mitchell
The pure playfulness of certain wholly whimsical portions of (Charles) Cros’s work should not obscure the fact that at the center of some of his most beautiful poems a revolver is leveled straight at us.
— André Breton
When one does something, one must do it wholly and well. Those bastard existences where you sell suet all day and write poetry at night are made for mediocre minds – like those horses that are equally good for saddle and carriage, the worst kind, that can neither jump a ditch nor pull a plow.
— Gustave Flaubert, Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour
Catch from the board of beauty/ Such careless crumbs as fall.
— Edna St. Vincent Millay
The fact that Iam writing to youin Englishalready falsifies what Iwanted to tell you.My subject:how to explain to youthat I don't belong to Englishthough I belong nowhere else,if not herein English.
— Gustavo  Perez Firmat
Souls grow on bones but die beneath bankers' hours...
— Gabriel Thy
Is Bliss then, such Abyss,I must not put my foot amissFor fear I spoil my shoe? I'd rather suit my footThan save my Boot --For yet to buy another Pairis possible,At any store -- But Bliss, is sold just once.The Patent lostNone buy it any more --
— Emily Dickinson, I'm Nobody! Who Are You?
The music is a vibration in the brain rather than the ear. 
— Amy Clampitt
Every good poem asks a question, and every good poet asks every question.
— Dorianne Laux, The Poet's Companion: A Guide To The Pleasures Of Writing Poetry
If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?
— Joyce Carol Oates
That mortal is a fool who, prospering, thinks his life has any strong foundation; since our fortune's course of action is the reeling way a madman takes, and no one person is ever happy all the time.
— Euripides, Trojan women: The Trojan women by Euripedes, and Helen, and Orestes by Ritsos
I was the first Chicano to write in complete sentences.
— Gary Soto, New and Selected Poems
Open wide the mind's cage-door,She'll dart forth, and cloudward soar.
— John Keats, The Complete Poems
I bleed myself to be your drink:Is not the blood of poets—ink?
— William Soutar
Weary of myself, and sick of asking What I am, and what I ought to be, At this vessel's prow I stand, which bears me Forwards, forwards, o'er the starlit sea.
— Matthew Arnold
CALL YOURSELFLook deep in the mirrorAnd say: 'I LOVE YOU'And immediatelyAn electric current willRipple throughout your soulAnd burst through your eyesLike shooting starsDancing across the skiesIn ecstasy.To tell your soul you love it -Is like rememberingWHO YOU AREAfter being in a comaFor a hundred years.Your face will beam the lightOf a hundred galaxies.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
I do believe in poetry. I believe that there are creatures endowed with the power to put things together and bring them back to life
— Hélène Cixous, The Book of Promethea
So all night long the storm roared on:The morning broke without a sun;In tiny spherule traced with linesOf Nature’s geometric signs,In starry flake, and pellicle,All day the hoary meteor fell;And, when the second morning shone,We looked upon a world unknown,On nothing we could call our own.Around the glistening wonder bentThe blue walls of the firmament,No cloud above, no earth below,—A universe of sky and snow!
— John Greenleaf Whittier, Complete poetical works
I hid my love when young till ICouldn't bear the buzzing of a fly
— I hid my life to my despiteTill I could not bear to look at light:I dare not gaze upon her faceBut left her memory in each place
There is such a shelter in each other.
— Nick Laird
I have only to contemplate myself; man comes from nothing, passes through time, and disappears forever in the bosom of God. He is seen but for a moment wandering on the verge of two abysses, and then is lost.If man were wholly ignorant of himself he would have no poetry in him, for one cannot describe what one does not conceive. If he saw himself clearly, his imagination would remain idle and would have nothing to add to the picture. But the nature of man is sufficiently revealed for him to know something of himself and sufficiently veiled to leave much impenetrable darkness, a darkness in which he ever gropes, forever in vain, trying to understand himself.
— Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
That is what you meant to me: a light that shone through the darkness.” (Your smile, p. 56)
— Chimnese Davids, Muses of Wandering Passions
Remembrance and reflection how allied!What thin partitions Sense from Thought divide!
— Alexander Pope, Essay on Man and Other Poems
That's what I want, that kind of recklessness where the poem is even ahead of you. It's like riding a horse that's a little too wild for you, so there's this tension between what you can do and what the horse decides it's going to do.
— Li-Young Lee, Breaking the Alabaster Jar: Conversations with Li-Young Lee
What is madness but nobility of the soul at odds with circumstance.
— Theodore Roethke, The Collected Poems
...the wet brush of snowflakes was like your kisses everywhere ...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
A way of using words to say things which could not possibly be said in any other way, things which in a sense do not exist till they are born … in poetry.
— Cecil Day-Lewis
. . . chasing after words like trying to grab the tails of comets.
— Libba Bray, The Diviners
For you may palm upon us new for old:All, as they say, that glitters, is not gold.
— John Dryden, The Hind and the Panther
The Dreamfencekittens wait to jump into my dreamseach time I visit heaventhey jump over a dreamfencered clouds are ready for lovingas I lovemy love paints my catsour minds are somehow stuck togetheras we dream togetherof our own heavenamd after tjeu cir
—  i[inside my sweaterwe knit our own heavens.
My heart is small, like a love of buttons or black pepper.
— S. Jane Sloat, In the Voice of a Minor Saint
Know that I loved you and that I belonged to you. And I wouldn't have had it any other way.
— Mia Hollow
The Old FoolsWhat do they think has happened, the old fools,To make them like this ? Do they somehow supposeIt's more grown-up when your mouth hangs open and droolsAnd you keep on pissing yourself, and can't rememberWho called this morning ? Or that, if they only chose,They could alter things back to when they danced all night,Or went to their wedding, or sloped arms some September ?Or do they fancy there's really been no change, And they've always behaved as if they were crippled or tight,Or sat through days of thin continuous dreamingWatching light move ? If they don't (and they can't), it's strange:Why aren't they screaming ?At death, you break up: the bits that were youStart speeding away from each other for everWith no one to see. It's only oblivion, true: We had it before, but then it was going to end,And was all the time merging with a unique endeavourTo bring to bloom the million-petalled flowerOf being here. Next time you can't pretendThere'll be anything else. And these are the first signs:Not knowing how, not hearing who, the powerOf choosing gone. Their looks show that they're for it:Ash hair, toad hands, prune face dried into lines-How can they ignore it ?Perhaps being old is having lighted roomsInside your head, and people in them, acting.People you know, yet can't quite name; each loomsLike a deep loss restored, from known doors turning, Setting down a Iamp, smiling from a stair, extractingA known book from the shelves; or sometimes onlyThe rooms themselves, chairs and a fire burning,The blown bush at the window, or the sun' sFaint friendliness on the wall some lonelyRain-ceased midsummer evening. That is where they live:Not here and now, but where all happened once.This is why they giveAn air of baffled absence, trying to be thereYet being here. For the rooms grow farther, leavingIncompetent cold, the constant wear and tearOf taken breath, and them crouching belowExtinction' s alp, the old fools, never perceivingHow near it is. This must be what keeps them quiet.The peak that stays in view wherever we goFor them is rising ground. Can they never tellWhat is dragging them back, and how it will end ? Not at night?Not when the strangers come ? Never, throughoutThe whole hideous inverted childhood? Well,We shall find out.
— Philip Larkin
Robots are like Mars: they needgirls. Boys won't do
— the memesoup is all wrong. They stompwhen they should kissand they're none too keenon having things shoved inside them...It's not a robotuntil you put a girl inside. Sometimes I feel like that. A junkyard the Company forgot to put a girl in.
I ask for nothing. / In return I give All. / There is no earning my Love. / No work needed, no effort / Save to listen to what is already heard, / To see what is already seen. / To know what is already known. / Do I seem to ask too little? / Would you give although I ask not? / Then this you can give me and I will accept. / I will take your heart. / You will find it waiting for you / When you return.
— Ki Longfellow, Flow Down Like Silver: Hypatia of Alexandria
Don't you just love poetry that gives you a crinkly feeling up and down your back?
— L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
Poetry isn't like any writing I've ever heard before. I don't understand all of it, just bits of images, sentences that appear half-finished, all fluttering together like brightly colored ribbons in the wind.
— Lauren Oliver, Delirium
I - will have poetry in my life. And adventure. And love. Love above all.
— Marc Norman, Shakespeare in Love: A Screenplay
If I bet on humanity, I'd never cash a ticket.
— Charles Bukowski
The future says:Dear mortals;I know you are busy with your colourful lives;I have no wish to waste the little time that remainsOn arguments and heated debates;But before I can appearPlease, close your eyes, sit stillAnd listen carefullyTo what I am about to say;I haven't happened yet, but I will.I can't pretend it's going to beBusiness as usual.Things are going to change.I'm going to be unrecognisable.Please, don't open your eyes, not yet.I'm not trying to frighten you.All I ask is that you think of meNot as a wish or a nightmare, but as a storyYou have to tell yourselves -Not with an endingIn which everyone lives happily ever after,Or a B-movie apocalypse,But maybe starting with the line'To be continued...'And see what happens next.Remember this; I am notWritten in stoneBut in time - So please don't shrug and sayWhat can we do?It's too late, etc, etc, etc.Dear mortals,You are such strange creaturesWith your greed and your kindness,And your hearts like broken toys;You carry fear with you everywhereLike a tiny godIn its box of shadows.You love festivals and musicAnd good food.You lie to yourselvesBecause you're afraid of the dark.But the truth is: you are in my handsAnd I am in yours.We are in this together,Face to face and eye to eye;We're made for each other.Now those of you who are still here;Open your eyes and tell me what you see.
— Nick Drake
Il était tard; ainsi qu'une médaille neuveLa pleine lune s'étalait,Et la solennité de la nuit, comme un fleuveSur Paris dormant ruisselait.
— Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal
As a poet and as a mathematician, he would reason well; as a mere mathematician, he could not have reasoned at all.
— Edgar Allan Poe, The Purloined Letter
I think it was Milosz, the Polish poet, who when he lay in a doorway and watched the bullets lifting the cobbles out of the street beside him realised that most poetry is not equipped for life in a world where people actually die. But some is.
— Ted Hughes, Winter Pollen: Occasional Prose
A skillful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect. If his very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition there should be no words written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design. And by such means, with such care and skill, a picture is at length painted which leaves in the mind of him who contemplates it with a kindred art, a sense of the fullest satisfaction. The idea of the tale has been presented unblemished because undisturbed: and this is an end unattainable by the novel. Undue brevity is just as exceptionable here as in the poem; but undue length is yet more to be avoided.
— Edgar Allan Poe
She has learned to love. To fear. To hate. And then to love again. Through it all, she writes.” ~Once Upon A Time There Was A Girl
— Kimberly Kinrade, Bits of You & Pieces of Me
. . . We love fog becauseit shifts old anomalies into the elementssurrounding them. It gives relief from a way of seeing
— Eavan Boland, Domestic Violence: Poems
Falling in love was easy-when romantic attraction was combined with hungry, unsated desire, they formed a glamorous, glittering bauble as fragile as it was alluring, a bauble that could shatter as soon as it was grasped.Tenderness was a different story. It had staying power and the promise of a future.
— Robyn Donald, Tiger, Tiger
A poet could kill the dead.
— Cameron Conaway, Caged: Memoirs of a Cage-Fighting Poet
I love my love with a b because she is peculiar.
— Gertrude Stein, Narration: Four Lectures by Gertrude Stein
We made love outdoorsWithout a roof, I like most, Without stove, to make love, assuming the weather be fair and balmy, and the earth beneath be clean. Our souls intertwined and gushing of dew.
— Roman Payne
My best testimonies are from the times I thought I couldn't survive.
— Tanya R. Liverman, Journey to Legacy: A Poetic Timeline of My Life
Across the centuries the moral systems from medival chivalry to Bruce Springsteen love anthems have worked the same basic way. They take immediate selfish interests and enmesh them within transcendent, spiritual meanings. Love becomes a holy cause, an act of self-sacrifice and selfless commitment.But texting and the utilitarian mind-set are naturally corrosive toward poetry and imagination. A coat of ironic detachment is required for anyone who hopes to withstand the brutal feedback of the marketplace. In today's world, the choice of a Prius can be a more sanctified act than the choice of an erotic partner.This does not mean that young people today are worse or shallower than young people in the past. It does mean they get less help. People once lived within a pattern of being, which educated the emotions, guided the temporary toward the permanent and linked everyday urges to higher things. The accumulated wisdom of the community steered couples as they tried to earn each other's commitment.Today there are fewer norms that guide that way. Today's technology seems to threaten the sort of recurring and stable reciprocity that is the building block of trust.
— David Brooks
You can make a difference in another person's life and not realize it, just by giving them One Moment of your time, One Memory to recall, One Motion that tells them they are not alone! OM!
— Deb Simpson, One Moment, One Memory, One Motion
All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking
— Robert Hass
That night we made love "the real way" which we had not yet attemptedalthough married six months.Big mystery. No one knew where to put their leg and to this day I'm not surewe got it right.He seemed happy. You're like Venice he said beautifully.Early next dayI wrote a short talk ("On Defloration") which he stole and had publishedin a small quarterly magazine.Overall this was a characteristic interaction between us.Or should I say ideal.Neither of us had ever seen Venice.
— Anne Carson
I do not write to you, but of you,/because the paper that we write on/is our perishable skin.
— Melissa Lee-Houghton, A Body Made of You
So very lovely His blood on her swollen lips His first vampireSo very lovely He would have to remember Each salacious cutHe took her slowly Bled her of secrets and screams He smiled contemplating That vampires bled just like whores.
— Wrath James White, Vicious Romantic
Every poet... finds himself born in the midst of prose. He has to struggle from the littleness and obstruction of an actual world into the freedom and infinitude of an ideal.
— Thomas Carlyle
The Way It IsThere’s a thread you follow. It goes amongthings that change. But it doesn’t change.People wonder about what you are pursuing.You have to explain about the thread.But it is hard for others to see.While you hold it you can’t get lost.Tragedies happen
—  people get hurtor die
A garden should make you feel you've entered privileged space -- a place not just set apart but reverberant -- and it seems to me that, to achieve this, the gardener must put some kind of twist on the existing landscape, turn its prose into something nearer poetry.
— Michael Pollan, Second Nature: A Gardener's Education
Why are there trees I never walk under but large and melodious thoughts descend upon me?
— Walt Whitman
I yearn to make these scars disappearAnd to forget about the past.To throw away all of my fearsAnd to be happy at last.
— Atarah L. Poling, Hidden Light
We must listen to poets.
— Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
The new world is as yetbehind the veil of destinyIn my eyes, howeverits dawn has been unveiled
— Muhammad Iqbal
I write in order to comprehend, not to express myself.
— Anna Kamieńska
You are my brother and I love you. I love you worshipping in your church, kneeling in your temple, and praying in your mosque. You and I and all are children of one religion, for the varied paths of religion are but the fingers of the loving hand of the Supreme Being, extended to all, offering completeness of spirit to all, anxious to receive all.
— Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet and Other Writings
Much Madness is Divinest Sense, to a Discerning Eye....
— Emily Dickinson
As she bends for a Kleenex in the dark, I am thinking of other girls: the girl I loved who fell in love with a lion--she lost her head over it--we just necked a lot; of the girl who fell in love with the tightrope, got addicted to getting high wired and nothing else was enough; all the beautiful, damaged women who have come through my life and I wonder what would have happened if I'd met them sooner, what they were like before they were so badly wounded. All this time I thought I'd been kissing, but maybe I'm always doing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, kissing dead girls in hopes that the heart will start again. Where there's breath, I've heard, there's hope.
— Daphne Gottlieb, Kissing Dead Girls
Higgledy piggledy, my black hen,She lays eggs for gentlemen.Gentlemen come every dayTo count what my black hen doth lay.If perchance she lays too many,They fine my hen a pretty penny;If perchance she fails to lay,The gentlemen a bonus pay.Mumbledy pumbledy, my red cow,She’s cooperating now.At first she didn’t understandThat milk production must be planned;She didn’t understand at firstShe either had to plan or burst,But now the government reportsShe’s giving pints instead of quarts.Fiddle de dee, my next-door neighbors,They are giggling at their labors.First they plant the tiny seed,Then they water, then they weed,Then they hoe and prune and lop,They they raise a record crop,Then they laugh their sides asunder,And plow the whole caboodle under.Abracadabra, thus we learnThe more you create, the less you earn.The less you earn, the more you’re given,The less you lead, the more you’re driven,The more destroyed, the more they feed,The more you pay, the more they need,The more you earn, the less you keep,And now I lay me down to sleep.I pray the Lord my soul to takeIf the tax-collector hasn’t got it before I wake.
— Ogden Nash
There is nothinggoing on. I took nothingyou wanted. You can'thave it back.
— Daphne Gottlieb, Final Girl
He feeds upon her face by day and night,And she with true kind eyes looks back on him,Fair as the moon and joyful as the light:Not wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim;Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright;Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.
— Christina Rossetti
What happens to a dream deferred?
— Langston Hughes
No matter how you feel you have to actlike you are very popular with yourself
— very relaxed and purposefulvery unconfusedand notlike you are walking through the sunshinesingingin chains.
But neither money nor machines can create. They shuttle tokens of energy, but they do not transform. A civilization based on them puts people out of touch with their creative powers.
— Lewis Hyde, Alcohol and Poetry: John Berryman and the Booze Talking
Song of myselfSmile O voluptuous cool-breath'd earth! Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees! Earth of departed sunset--earth of the mountains misty-topt! Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon just tinged with blue! Earth of shine and dark mottling the tide of the river! Earth of the limpid gray of clouds brighter and clearer for my sake! Far-swooping elbow'd earth--rich apple-blossom'd earth! Smile, for your lover comes.
— Walt Whitman
Hold your venomDo you recognise the instinctin me, fellow scorpion?
— Kiera Woodhull, Chaos of the Mind
The masters of information have forgotten about poetry, where words may have a meaning quite different from what the lexicon says, where the metaphoric spark is always one jump ahead of the decoding function, where another, unforeseen reading is always possible.
— J.M. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year
A young gratuitous smile; trust and distrust;Promiscuities of bed and board and road; The one assured treasureA life, in recollection, truly possessed.
— Robert Wells
I will reveal you who I am. I am your reflection.
— Santosh Kalwar
Enjoy yourselves. And Hap: Don't let Umber near the arrows and bows; he's liable to shoot himself in the nose." Dodd grinned and snapped the reins, and the carriage rolled away. Umber sniffed. "One of his lesser poems. Come, Hap.
— P.W. Catanese, Dragon Games
They kept me in a cage for too long because now every room I am standing in is just another cell.
— Raegan Butcher, Rusty String Quartet
Poetry is the language of the soul;Poetic Prose, the language of my heart.Each line must flow as in a song,and strike a chord that rings forever.To me, words are music!
— Lori R. Lopez
Everything is nothing.
— Azaam Yahoo
With each kiss that we shared we experienced the meaning of love. With the passing glances of passion we surrendered our hearts to the silence of the storm of intoxication. Holding on to each other till the roots of our souls have become entwined in the eternal desire of each other." Poem: "The Silence of Love
— Anthony F. Rando
i want to go to the gymand pretend the weight machines are drumsand play the longest drum solo on them
— Megan Boyle
I opened my veins. Unstoppablylife spurts out with no remedy.Now I set out bowls and plates.Every bowl will be shallow.Every plate will be small.And overflowing their rims,into the black earth, to nourishthe rushes unstoppablywithout cure, gushespoetry ...
— Marina Tsvetaeva, Selected Poems
Wherever we go we do harm, forgivingourselves as wheels do cement for wearingeach other out. We set this houseon fire, forgetting that we live within.(from "To a Meadowlark," for M.L. Smoker)
— Jim Harrison
Imagination is a very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study, but by the intellect being where and what it sees, by sharing the path, or circuits of things through forms, and so making them translucid to others.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
One can not understand language because language cannot understand itself
—  does not want to understand
i laced my shoes with sorrowand walked a weary roaddead end streetsdon't come undonewith double knots wing tipped shoesthat walk on airthrough vacant lots
— Saul Williams
I drink from a small spring, my thirst exceeds the ocean.
— Adam Zagajewski, Without End: New and Selected Poems
Poetry is a sort of truancy, a dream within the dream of life, a wild flower planted among our wheat.
— Michael Oakeshott
Title: Blue Light Lounge Sutra For The Performance Poets At Harold Park Hotelthe need gotta beso deep words can'tanswer simple questionsall night long notesstumble off the tongue& color the air indigoso deep fragments of gut& flesh cling to the songyou gotta get into itso deep salt crystalizes on eyelashesthe need gotta beso deep you can vomit up ghosts& not feel brokentill you are no morethan a half ounce of goldin painful brightnessyou gotta get into itblow that saxophoneso deep all the sex & dope in this worldcan't erase your needto howl against the skythe need gotta beso deep you can'tjust wiggle your hips& rise up out of itchaos in the cosmosmodern man in the pepperpotyou gotta get hookedinto every hungry grooveso deep the bomb lockedin rust opens like a fistinto it into it so deeprhythm is pre-memorythe need gotta be basicanimal need to see& know the terrorwe are made of honeycause if you wanna dancethis boogie be readyto let the devil use your headfor a drum
— Yusef Komunyakaa
Your friends, and your associates, and the people around you, and the environment that you live in, and the speakers around you - the speakers around you - and the communicators around you, are the poetry makers.If your mother tells you stories, she is a poetry maker.If your father says stories, he is a poetry maker.If your grandma tells you stories, she is a poetry maker.And that’s who forms our poetics.
— Juan Felipe Herrera
[P]oetry resembles metaphysics: one does not mind one's own, but one does not like anyone else's.
— Samuel Butler
...if you do not even understand what words say, how can you expect to pass judgement on what words conceal?
— H.D.
Even the moon is only poetical because there is a man in the moon.
— G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday
My heart was full of softening showers,I used to swing like this for hours,I did not care for war or death,I was glad to draw my breath.
— Stevie Smith, Selected Poems
[Short Talk on Sylvia Plath] Did you see her mother on television? She said plain, burned things. She said I thought it an excellent poem but it hurt me. She did not say jungle fear. She did not say jungle hatred wild jungle weeping chop it back chop it. She said self-government she said end of the road. She did not say humming in the middle of the air what you came for chop.
— Anne Carson
Verses which do not teach men new and moving truths do not deserve to be read.
— Voltaire
A poet must discover that it’s his own story that is true, even if the truth is small indeed.
— Jim Harrison
A violent order is disorder
—  and a great disorder is an order.These two things are one.
I came here to be for all and with all,and what I do today in my solitudewill be echoed tomorrow by the multitude.What I say now with one heartwill be said tomorrow by thousands of hearts...
— Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet and Other Writings
It was not like everyone had said.Not like being needed,or needing; not desperate;it did not whisperthat I'd come to harm. I didn't losemy head. No, I was notgoing to leap from a greatheight and flapmy wings.It was in factthe opposite of flying:it contained the wishto be toppled, to be on the floor,the ground, anywhere I mightlie down. . . .On my back, and you on me.
— Deborah Garrison, A Working Girl Can't Win
a joy that hurts with sadnessa sadness that is pleasurablea pleasure full of terrora terror that excitesan excitement that calmsa calmness that frightens.
— Aidan Chambers, Nik: Now I Know
His vision, from the constantly passing bars,has grown so weary that it cannot holdanything else. It seems to him there area thousand bars, and behind the bars, no world.As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,the movement of his powerful soft stridesis like a ritual dance around a centerin which a mighty will stands paralyzed.Only at times, the curtain of the pupilslifts, quietly. An image enters in,rushes down through the tense, arrested muscles,plunges into the heart and is gone.
— Rainer Maria Rilke
Shit is disgusting and horrible. A lot of people and things are disgusting and horrible, and I want to be a nice person, and I am. When you are speaking about rejected people whose suffering makes them disgusting, you are speaking about shit. I do not mean that we should all eat shit and love what we can’t help rejecting. I am saying that I tried to do that, just to see if it was possible.It’s not possible. 
— Ariana Reines
Poetry is the scholar's art.
— Wallace Stevens
...few young poets [are] testing their poems against the ear. They're writing for the page, and the page, let me tell you, is a cold bed.
— Stanley Kunitz
Pensar incomoda como andar à chuvaQuando o vento cresce e parece que chove mais.
— Alberto Caeiro, The Keeper of Sheep
One cannot make bargains for blissesOr catch them like fishes in netsAnd sometimes the things that life misses Help more than the things that it gets. 
— Alice Carey
We are each what never leaves us, what we never seethe back ofis the self. But what loves usis at the back, as Eurydice wasescorting him outwithout his knowing.
— Christina Davis, Forth A Raven
in the afterglowof an evening raini lay downin the grass and think of youmy body acheslike an after-kissbreaking in soft firesand wildflowersmy dear, i will always bethis tender for you.
— Sanober  Khan, A Thousand Flamingos
i'm glad to be alive in a world wherehis gently awakening eyesnourish the morning sun.
— Sanober  Khan, Turquoise Silence
a silent night. - the most eloquent poem i have ever read.
— Sanober  Khan
Maple. MaypoleCatch and carry.Ash and Ember.Elderberry.Woolen. Woman.Moon at night.Willow. Window.Candlelight.Fallow farrow.Ash and oak.Bide and borrow.Chimney smoke.Barrel. Barley.Stone and stave.Wind and water.Misbehave.
— Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear
Let your love flow where the beautiful things are and something beautiful will always come your way.
— Robert M. Drake
Poems can getsleepless tooand becomethe loneliest thingin the universe.
— Sanober  Khan
I have no riches but my thoughts, Yet these are wealth enough for me
— Sara Teasdale
Let me remember you, soon will the winter be on us,Snow-hushed and heartless.
— Sara Teasdale, Rivers to the Sea
Why does a heart wear its eyesinto helllike slivers of false sunshine
— Fanny Howe
I will try to disappoint youbetter than anyone else has.
— Stephen Dunn, Different Hours
And in the end,she left a scarand I knew that washow she wanted tobe remembered.She wanted to leaveher mark in theworldwithout gettingher heart tooattached to it.
— Robert M. Drake, Black Butterfly
By the craggy hill-side,Through the mosses bare,They have planted thorn-treesFor pleasure here and there.If any man so daringAs dig them up in spite,He shall find their sharpest thornsIn his bed at night.
— William Allingham, The Fairies: A Poem
Go then, O my inseperable, this once more,
— Donald Justice, Collected Poems
On the shining yards of heavenSee a wider dawn unfurled. . . . The eternal slaves of beautyAre the masters of the world.
— Bliss Carman, Songs from Vagabondia
There have been times I've felt so much art in my soul I grew sick of artists.
— Criss Jami, Healology
What do I care, in the dreams and the languor of spring,That my songs do not show me at all?For they are a fragrance, and I am a flint and a fire,I am an answer, they are only a call
— Sara Teasdale, Flame and Shadow
Every poet has his dream reader: mine keeps a look out for curious prosodic fauna like bacchics and choriambs.
— W.H. Auden
what if I fall? oh, my darling, but if you fly?
— Erin Hanson
The business of love is cruelty which,by our wills, we transform to live together.
— William Carlos Williams
I had a dove and the sweet dove died; And I have thought it died of grieving: O, what could it grieve for? Its feet were tied, With a silken thread of my own hand's weaving.
— John Keats, The Complete Poems
Slogans are mere wordsuck...
— Gabriel Thy
O, how this spring of love resemblethThe uncertain glory of an April day,Which now shows all the beauty of the sun,And by and by a cloud takes all away!
— William Shakespeare, The Two Gentlemen of Verona
If Springtime crawls out of thewild mouths of flowers, thensurely, Winter crawls out of mine.
— Cecilia Llompart, The Wingless
‎I was satisfied with haiku until I met you, jar of octopus, cuckoo's cry, 5-7-5, but now I want a russian novel, a 50-page description of you sleeping, another 75 of what you think staring at your window.
— Dean Young
How they had dreamed together, he and she... how they had planned, and laughed, and loved. They had lived for a while in the very heart of poetry.
— Elizabeth von Arnim, The Enchanted April
She's always looking for poetry and passion and sensitivity, the whole Romantic kitchen. I live on a rather simpler diet.' 'Prose and pudding?''I don't expect attractive men necessarily to have attractive souls.
— John Fowles, The Magus
I do not write poetry
—  I take words and dip them in feelings.
Some who grow dull religious straight commenceAnd gain in morals what they lose in sense.
— Alexander Pope, Minor Poems
How blest am I in this discovering thee!To enter in these bonds is to be free;Then where my hand is set, my seal shall be. Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee,As souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be
— John Donne, The Complete English Poems
And then I feel the sun itselfas it blazes over the hills,like a million flowers on fire --clearly I'm not needed,yet I feel myself turninginto something of inexplicable value.-from The Buddha's Last Instruction
— Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Vol. 1
If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.
— Emily Dickinson
April is the cruelest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixingMemory and desire, stirringDull roots with spring rain.Winter kept us warm, coveringEarth in forgetful snow, feedingA little life with dried tubers.Summer surprised us, coming over the StarnbergerseeWith a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch. And when we were children, staying at the arch-duke's,My cousin's, he took me out on a sled,And I was frightened. He said, Marie,Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.In the mountains, there you feel free.I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
— T.S. Eliot
In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent; A thing brought forth that we didn't know we had in us, So we blink our eyes, as if a tiger had sprung out And stood in the light, licking its tail.
— Czesław Miłosz
Henceforth an individual solace dear; Part of my Soul I seek thee, and thee claim My other half: with that thy gentle hand Seisd mine, I yielded, and from that time see How beauty is excelld by manly grace.
— John Milton, Paradise Lost
The aim of science is to make difficult things understandable in a simpler way
—  the aim of poetry is to state simple things in an incomprehensible way. The two are incompatible.
Straight between them ran the pathway,Never grew the grass upon it
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Song of Hiawatha
O friend unseen, unborn, unknown,Student of our sweet English tongue,Read out my words at night, alone:I was a poet, I was young.Since I can never see your face,And never shake you by the hand,I send my soul through time and spaceTo greet you. You will understand.
— James Elroy Flecker
Spend all you have for loveliness,Buy it and never count the cost;For one white singing hour of peaceCount many a year of strife well lost,And for a breath of ecstasyGive all you have been, or could be.
— Sara Teasdale, Love Songs
Then all the charm Is broken--all that phantom-world so fair Vanishes, and a thousand circlets spread, And each mis-shape the other.
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan
Once upon a timeI fell in loveLost myselfAnd find another one.
— Arzum Uzun
Every particle of dust on a patch of earthWas a sun-cheek or brow of the morning star;Shake the dust off your sleeve carefully--That too was a delicate, fair face.
— Omar Khayyám, Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
In an old family albumEver again you return, Melancholy,O meekness of the solitary soul.A golden day glows and expires.Humbly the patient man surrenders to painRinging with melodious sound and soft madness.Look! There's the twilight.Night returns once more and a mortal thing lamentsAnd another suffers in sympathy.Shuddering under autumn starsYearly the head is bowed deeper.-Georg Trakl (1887-1914)
— Georg Trakl
I began a poem in lines of one syllable. It's rather difficult, but the merit of all things lies in their difficulty. The subject matter is gallant. I'll read you the first canto; it's four hundred verses long and takes one minute.
— Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers
I wanted to write some words you'd remember.Words so alert they'd leap from the paper,crawl up your shoulder, lie by your ears,and purr themselves to you like baby kittens,but it was rainy, so I laid there and daydreamed about you.
— C.L. Foster, Best Thing I Never Had
When When it’s over, it’s over, and we don’t know any of us, what happens then.So I try not to miss anything.I think, in my whole life, I have never missed The full moonor the slipper of its coming back.Or, a kiss.Well, yes, especially a kiss.
— Mary Oliver, Swan: Poems and Prose Poems
Most people are much better at saying things in letters than in conversation, and some people can write artistic, inventive letters, but when they try a poem or story or novel they become pretentious.
— Charles Bukowski, Women
Te amo sin saber cómo, ni cuándo, ni de dónde, te amo directamente sin problemas ni orgullo: así te amo porque no sé amar de otra manera, sino así de este modo en que no soy ni eres, tan cerca que tu mano sobre mi pecho es mía, tan cerca que se cierran tus ojos con mi sueño.
— Pablo Neruda, The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems
To pray you open your whole selfTo sky, to earth, to sun, to moonTo one whole voice that is youAnd know there is moreThat you can't see, can't hearCan't know except in momentsSteadly growing, and in languagesThat aren't always sound but otherCircles of motion.Like eagle that Sunday morningOver Salt River. Circled in blue skyIn wind, swept our hearts cleanWith sacred wings.We see you, see ourselves and knowThat we must take the utmost careAnd kindness in all things.Breathe in, knowing we are made ofAll this, and breathe, knowingWe are truly blessed because weWere born, and die soon within aTrue circle of motion,Like eagle rounding out the morningInside us.We pray that it will be doneIn beauty.In beauty.
— Joy Harjo
The first kiss and the first glass of wine are the best.
— Marty Rubin
We may feel bitterly how little our poems can do in the face of seemingly out of control technological power and seemingly limitless corporate greed, yet it has always been true that poetry can break isolation, show us to ourselves when we are outlawed or made invisible, remind us of beauty where no beauty seems possible, remind us kinship where all is represented as separation.", The Nation, October 7, 1996)
— Adrienne Rich
where some god pissed a rain of reason to make things grow only to die,
— Charles Bukowski
I will turn human anatomy into roses and stars and sea. I will dissect the beloveds body in metaphor.
— Siri Hustvedt, The Summer Without Men
Kiss me, so long but as a kiss may last!
— Percy Bysshe Shelley
At first first nothing will happen to usand later on it will happen to us again.
— Leonard Cohen
So live, that when thy summons comes to join The innumerable caravan which movesTo that mysterious realm where each shall take His chamber in the silent halls of death, Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,Scourged to his dungeon; but, sustain'd and soothed By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams."Thanatopsis
— William Cullen Bryant, Thanatopsis; To a Waterfowl; A Midsummer Sonnet - Pamphlet
DogfishI wantedThe past to go away, I wantedTo leave it, like another country; I wantedMy life to close, and openLike a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song Where it fallsDown over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery; I wanted To hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know,Whoever I was, I wasAliveFor a little while.…mostly, I want to be kind.And nobody, of course, is kind,Or mean,For a simple reason.And nobody gets out of it, having to Swim through the fires to stay inThis world.
— Mary Oliver
Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were behind you, like the winter that has just gone by. For among these winters there is one so endlessly winterthat only by wintering through it will your heart survive.
— Rainer Maria Rilke
You are not worthless. Even if you've been called that your entire life.
— Kevin  Walker, These Moments Pass: Poems
Poetry is as necessary to comprehension as science. It is as impossible to live without reverence as it is without joy.
— Henry Beston, The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod
as some strings, untouched,sound when no one is speaking.So it was when love slipped inside us.
— Jane Hirshfield, Come, Thief: Poems
There's a book of poetryin the lines of my handsthat no one wants to read
— Holly Schindler, A Blue So Dark
Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music, without the idea, is simply music; the idea, without the music, is prose, from its very definitiveness.
— Edgar Allan Poe
These poems, with all their crudities, doubts and confusions, are written for the love of man and in Praise of God, and I'd be a damn fool if they weren't.
— Dylan Thomas
The campus, an academy of trees,under which some hand, the wind's I guess,had scattered the pale lightof thousands of spring beauties,petals stained with pink veins;secret, blooming for themselves.We sat among them.Your long fingers, thin body,and long bones of improbable genius;some scattered gene as Kafka must have had.Your deep voice, this passing dust of miracles.That simple that was myself, half conscious,as though each moment was a pagewhere words appeared; the bent hammer of the typestruck against the moving ribbon.The light air, the restless leaves;the ripple of time warped by our longing.There, as if we were paintedby some unknown impressionist.
— Ruth Stone, In the Next Galaxy
Un día habré dormido con un sueño tan largo que ni tus besos puedan avivar el letargo. Un día estaré sola, como está la montaña entre el largo desierto y la mar que la baña.
— Alfonsina Storni
. . .because we had survivedsisters and brothers, daughters and sons,we discovered bones that rosefrom the dark earth and sangas white birds in the treesBecause the story of our lifebecomes our lifeBecause each of us tells the same storybut tells it differentlyand none of us tells it the same way twice . . (from, Why We Tell Stories)
— Lisel Mueller, The Private Life: Poems
Base words are uttered only by the baseAnd can for such at once be understood;But noble platitudes — ah, there's a caseWhere the most careful scrutiny is neededTo tell a voice that's genuinely goodFrom one that's base but merely has succeeded.
— W.H. Auden, Collected Poems
Her belly ruptures full of parasites, Her eyes sink back in her skull Her butchered wrists, dangle From the edge of the bathtubHer children cuddle against her Desperate for love she cannot give
— Wrath James White
we want it visible	to showwhen even the most 	visible joy		will reveal itselfonly when we have		transformed it within.there’s nowhere, my love, the world can existexpect within.
— Rainer Maria Rilke
I’ve been here before, dreaming myselfbackwards, among grappling hooks of light.True to the seasons, I’ve lived every wordspoken. Did I walk into someone’s nightmare?
— Yusef Komunyakaa
In this universe there are no time machines or keys that can turn hearts back around.
— Sarah Tregay
I could not have climbed any mountains while looking from the ground... I would not have flown... or dived... or surfed... or swum... I am not a tourist nor a spectator... this is the life I have left, and I will not waste it like some rubber-neck
— Kem, Tales of a Chocolate Smuggler: My Life with Dragons
I feel the only thing you can do about life is to preserve it, by art if you're an artist, by children if you're not.
— Philip Larkin, Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica
How can the bird that is born for joySit in a cage and sing?How can a child, when fears annoy,But droop his tender wing,And forget his youthful spring?
— William Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience
Again I see you, But me I don't see!, The magical mirror in which I saw myself has been broken, And only a piece of me I see in each fatal fragment - Only a piece of you and me!...
— Fernando Pessoa, Poems of Fernando Pessoa
The muffled syllables that Nature speaksFill us with deeper longing for her word; She hides a meaning that the spirit seeks,She makes a sweeter music than is heard.
— George Santayana
This is where I belong, burning in these flames. For everything I have done wrong, I know I am to blame.
— Atarah L. Poling, Hidden Light