c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests
—  snug as a gun.
There is another world, and it is in this one.
— Paul Éluard
The aching in my chest isn't because I miss you,it's realizing that you have become someone I no longer know,your fears, your 4 am thoughts, your achievements,are things I no longer have an equivalent to.Who we were and who we are are four different people, and the me from now doesn't relate to the me from then, let alone to the you from now.-Tanzy Sayadi and Jarod Kintz
— Tanzy Sayadi, liQUID PROse QUOtes
There is no Space or TimeOnly intensity, And tame thingsHave no immensity
— Mina Loy, The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems of Mina Loy
I love you. I love you, but I’m turning to my versesand my heart is closinglike a fist.
— Frank O'Hara, Meditations in an Emergency
the worstthing that ever happenedtothe worldwasthe white man coming across gun powder.–– the end of the world | the beginning of white supremacy
— Nayyirah Waheed, Salt
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I feel my fate in what I cannot fear. I learn by going where I have to go.
— Theodore Roethke, The Collected Poems
If you cannot be a poet, be the poem.
— David Carradine
Some men are born sodomites, some achieve sodomy, and some have sodomy thrust upon them...
— Aleister Crowley, The Scented Garden Of Abdullah The Satirist Of Shiraz
The season was waning fastOur nights were growing cold at lastI took her to bed with silk and song,'Lay still, my love, I won’t be long;I must prepare my body for passion.''O, your body you give, but all else you ration.''It is because of these dreams of a sylvan scene:A bleeding nymph to leave me serene...I have dreams of a trembling wench.''You have dreams,' she said, 'that cannot be quenched.''Our passion,' said I, 'should never be feared;As our longing for love can never be cured.Our want is our way and our way is our will,We have the love, my love, that no one can kill.''If night is your love, then in dreams you’ll fulfill...This love, our love, that no one can kill.'Yet want is my way, and my way is my will,Thus I killed my love with a sleeping pill.
— Roman Payne
Under the greenwood tree,Who loves to lie with meAnd tune his merry note,Unto the sweet bird's throat;Come hither, come hither, come hither.Here shall he seeNo enemyBut winter and rough weather.
— William Shakespeare, As You Like It
You may write me down in historyWith your bitter, twisted lies,You may tread me in the very dirtBut still, like dust, I'll rise.Does my sassiness upset you? Why are you beset with gloom? 'Cause I walk like I've got oil wellsPumping in my living room.Just like moons and like suns,With the certainty of tides,Just like hopes springing high,Still I'll rise.Did you want to see me broken? Bowed head and lowered eyes? Shoulders falling down like teardrops.Weakened by my soulful cries.Does my haughtiness offend you? Don't you take it awful hard'Cause I laugh like I've got gold minesDiggin' in my own back yard.You may shoot me with your words,You may cut me with your eyes,You may kill me with your hatefulness,But still, like air, I'll rise.Does my sexiness upset you? Does it come as a surpriseThat I dance like I've got diamondsAt the meeting of my thighs? Out of the huts of history's shameI riseUp from a past that's rooted in painI riseI'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.Leaving behind nights of terror and fearI riseInto a daybreak that's wondrously clearI riseBringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,I am the dream and the hope of the slave.I riseI riseI rise.
— Maya Angelou
Fear of joy is the darkest of captivities.
— Phil Kaye
all they want to dois tie the poem to a chair with ropeand torture a confession out of it.They begin beating it with a hoseto find out what it really means.
— Billy Collins, The Apple that Astonished Paris
And death shall have no dominion.Under the windings of the seaThey lying long shall not die windily;Twisting on racks when sinews give way,Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;Faith in their hands shall snap in two,And the unicorn evils run them through;Split all ends up they shan't crack;And death shall have no dominion.
— Dylan Thomas
But you hate poetry!Yes, but you make me want to write it.
— Cassandra Clare
My friend, you thought you lost Him;that all your life you've been separated from Him.Filled with wonder, you've always looked outside for Him,and haven't searched within your own house.
— Jalaluddin Rumi
Deprivation is the mother of poetry.
— Leonard Cohen, The Favorite Game
The night has a thousand eyes,And the day but one; Yet the light of the bright world dies With the dying sun. The mind has a thousand eyes, And the heart but one: Yet the light of a whole life dies When love is done.
— Francis William Bourdillon
But some nights, I must tell you,I go down there after everyone has fallen asleep.I swim back and forth in the echoing blackness.I sing a love song as well as I can,lost for a while in the home of the rain. 
— Billy Collins, Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems
Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.
— Aristotle
I don't wish to be everything to everyone, but I would like to be something to someone.
— Javan, Something to Someone
Living is no laughing matter:You must take it seriously.So much so and to such a degreethat, for example, your hands tiedbehind your back,your back to the wallor else in a laboratoryin your white coat and safety glasses,you can die for people –even for people whose faces you’venever seen,even though you know livingis the most real, most beautifulthing.I mean, you must take living soseriouslythat even at seventy, for example, you’llplant olive trees –and not for your children, either,but because, although you fear death youdon’t believe it,because living, I mean, weighs heavier.- "On Living
— Nâzım Hikmet
For you she learned to wear a short black slipand red lipstick,how to order a glass of red wineand finish it. She learned to reach outas if to touch your arm and then nottouch it, changing the subject.she'd begin, orTo call your best friendsby their schoolboy namesand give them kisses good-bye,to look away when they say! So your confidence grows.She doesn't ask what you wantbecause she knows.Isn't that what you think?When actually she was only waitingto be stunned, and then do this,never rehearsed, but perfectly obvious:in one motion up, over, and gone,the X of her arms crossing and uncrossing,her face flashing away from you in the fabricso that you couldn't say if she wasappearing or disappearing.
— Deborah Garrison, A Working Girl Can't Win
Our love was bornoutside the walls,in the wind,in the night,in the earth,and that's why the clay and the flower,the mud and the rootsknow your name.
— Pablo Neruda
Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces.
— Virginia Woolf, Orlando
Living together/ is one move closer/ to living apart
— Kristi Maxwell
No one wants to read poetry. You have to make it impossible for them to put the poem down--impossible for them to stop reading it, word after word. You have to keep them from closing the book.
— Muriel Rukeyser
My brain hums with scraps of poetry and madness.
— Virginia Woolf, Selected Letters
To the Virgins, To Make much of TimeGather ye rose-buds while ye may,Old Time is still a-flying;And this same flower that smiles today,	Tomorrow will be dying.The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,	The higher he’s a-getting,The sooner will his race be run,	And nearer he is to setting.That age is best which is the first,	When youth and blood are warmer;But being spent, the worse, and worst	Times still succeed the former.Then be not coy, but use your time,	And while you may, go marry;For having lost but once your prime,	You may for ever tarry.
— Robert  Herrick
Wild Nights – Wild Nights!Were I with theeWild Nights should beOur luxury!Futile – the winds –To a heart in port –Done with the compass –Done with the chart!Rowing in Eden –Ah, the sea!Might I moor – Tonight –In thee!
— Emily Dickinson, Selected Poems
Sometimes I dreamthat everything in the world is here, in my room, in a great closet, named and orderly,and I am here too, in front of it, hardly able to see for the flash and the brightness—and sometimes I am that madcap person clapping my hands and singing; and sometimes I am that quiet person down on my knees.
— Mary Oliver
The stars are forth, the moon above the topsOf the snow-shining mountains.—Beautiful!I linger yet with Nature, for the nightHath been to me a more familiar faceThan that of man; and in her starry shadeOf dim and solitary loveliness,I learn'd the language of another world.
— George Gordon Byron, Manfred
We didn't start the fireIt was always burningSince the world's been turningWe didn't start the fireNo we didn't light itBut we tried to fight it
— Billy Joel
I wrote too many poems in a language I did not yet know how to speakBut I know now it doesn't matter how well I say grace if I am sitting at a table where I am offering no bread to eatSo this is my wheat fieldyou can have every acre, Lovethis is my garden songthis is my fist fightwith that bitter frosttonight I begged another stage light to become that back alley street lamp that we danced beneaththe night your warm mouth fell on my timid cheekas i sang maybe i need youoff keybut in tunemaybe i need you the way that big moon needs that open seamaybe i didn't even know i was here til i saw you holding megive me one room to come home togive me the palm of your handevery strand of my hair is a kite stringand I have been blue in the face with your skycrying a flood over Iowa so you mother will wake to Venice Lover, I smashed my glass slipper to build a stained glass window for every wall inside my chestnow my heart is a pressed flower and a tattered bibleit is the one verse you can trustso I'm putting all of my words in the collection plateI am setting the table with bread and gracemy knees are bentlike the corner of a pageI am saving your place
— Andrea Gibson
Inebriate of Air — am I —And Debauchee of Dew —Reeling — thro endless summer days —From Inns of Molten Blue —
— Emily Dickinson, Selected Poems
The poet must always, in every instance, have the vibrant word... that by it's trenchancy can so wound my soul that it whimpers.... One must know and recognize not merely the direct but the secret power of the word; one must be able to give one's writing unexpected effects. It must have a hectic, anguished vehemence, so that it rushes past like a gust of air, and it must have a latent, roistering tenderness so that it creeps and steals one's mind; it must be able to ring out like a sea-shanty in a tremendous hour, in the time of the tempest, and it must be able to sigh like one who, in tearful mood, sobs in his inmost heart.
— Knut Hamsun
TO what purpose, April, do you return again? Beauty is not enough. You can no longer quiet me with the redness Of little leaves opening stickily. I know what I know. The sun is hot on my neck as I observe The spikes of the crocus. The smell of the earth is good. It is apparent that there is no death. But what does that signify? Not only under ground are the brains of men Eaten by maggots. Life in itself Is nothing, An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs. It is not enough that yearly, down this hill, April Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.
— Edna St. Vincent Millay
We flatter those we scarcely know,We please the fleeting guest;And deal full many a thoughtless blow,To those who love us best.
— Ella Wheeler Wilcox
I sent my Soul through the Invisible, Some letter of that After-life to spell: And by and by my Soul return'd to me, And answer'd: 'I Myself am Heav'n and Hell
— Omar Khayyám
There is a time for reciting poems and a time for fists.
— Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives
How to be a Poet (to remind myself)Make a place to sit down. Sit down. Be quiet. You must depend upon affection, reading, knowledge, skill—more of each than you have—inspiration work, growing older, patience, for patience joins time to eternity… Breathe with unconditional breath the unconditioned air. Shun electric wire. Communicate slowly. Live a three-dimensional life; stay away from screens. Stay away from anything that obscures the place it is in. There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places. Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came.
— Wendell Berry, Given
You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts;And when you can no longer dwell in the solitude of your heart you live in your lips, and sound is a diversion and a pastime.And in much of your talking, thinking is half murdered.
— Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
She walks in beauty, like the nightOf cloudless climes and starry skies;And all that’s best of dark and brightMeet in her aspect and her eyes:Thus mellow’d to that tender lightWhich heaven to gaudy day denies.One shade the more, one ray the less,Had half impaired the nameless graceWhich waves in every raven tress,Or softly lightens o’er her face;Where thoughts serenely sweet expressHow pure, how dear their dwelling-place.And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,The smiles that win, the tints that glow,But tell of days in goodness spent,A mind at peace with allA heart whose love is innocent!
— George Gordon Byron, Selected Poems of Lord Byron
APPLY WITHINYou once told meYou wanted to findYourself in the world -And I told you toFirst apply within,To discover the worldwithin you.You once told meYou wanted to saveThe world from all its wars -And I told you toFirst save yourselfFrom the world,And all the warsYou put yourselfThrough.APPLY WITHIN by Suzy Kassem
— Suzy Kassem
An oak tree and a rosebush grew,Young and green together,Talking the talk of growing things-Wind and water and weather.And while the rosebush sweetly bloomedThe oak tree grew so highThat now it spoke of newer things-Eagles, mountain peaks and sky."I guess you think you're pretty great,"The rose was heard to cry,Screaming as loud as it possibly couldTo the treetop in the sky."And now you have no time for flower talk,Now that you've grown so tall.""It's not so much that I've grown," said the tree,"It's just that you've stayed so small.
— Shel Silverstein
I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,I see my father strolling outunder the ochre sandstone arch, thered tiles glinting like bentplates of blood behind his head, Isee my mother with a few light books at her hipstanding at the pillar made of tiny bricks with thewrought-iron gate still open behind her, itssword-tips black in the May air,they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they areinnocent, they would never hurt anybody.I want to go up to them and say Stop,don't do it--she's the wrong woman,he's the wrong man, you are going to do thingsyou cannot imagine you would ever do,you are going to do bad things to children,you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of,you are going to want to die. I want to goup to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,her hungry pretty blank face turning to me,her pitiful beautiful untouched body,his arrogant handsome blind face turning to me,his pitiful beautiful untouched body,but I don't do it. I want to live. Itake them up like the male and femalepaper dolls and bang them togetherat the hips like chips of flint as if tostrike sparks from them, I sayDo what you are going to do, and I will tell about it
— Sharon Olds
...you look at me like an emergency
— Adrienne Rich, Diving Into the Wreck
She lends her pen,to thoughts of him,that flow from it,in her solitary.For she is his poet,And he is her poetry.
— Lang Leav, Love & Misadventure
Where are you hiding my love?Each day without you will never come again.Even today you missed a sunset on the ocean,A silver shadow on yellow rocks I saved for you,A squirrel that ran across the road,A duck diving for dinner.My God! There may be nothing left to show youSave wounds and wearinessAnd hopes grown dead,And wilted flowers I picked for you a lifetime ago,Or feeble steps that cannot run to hold you,Arms too tired to offer you to a roaring wind,A face too wrinkled to feel the ocean's spray.
— James Kavanaugh, There Are Men Too Gentle to Live Among Wolves
Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.
— Carl Sandburg
Kerouac: You're ruining American poetry, O'Hara.O'Hara: That's more than you ever did for it, Kerouac
— Frank O'Hara
BELOVED, gaze in thine own heart, The holy tree is growing there; From joy the holy branches start, And all the trembling flowers they bear. The changing colours of its fruit Have dowered the stars with merry light; The surety of its hidden root Has planted quiet in the night; The shaking of its leafy head Has given the waves their melody, And made my lips and music wed, Murmuring a wizard song for thee. There the Loves a circle go, The flaming circle of our days, Gyring, spiring to and fro In those great ignorant leafy ways; Remembering all that shaken hair And how the wingèd sandals dart, Thine eyes grow full of tender care: Beloved, gaze in thine own heart. Gaze no more in the bitter glass The demons, with their subtle guile, Lift up before us when they pass, Or only gaze a little while; For there a fatal image grows That the stormy night receives, Roots half hidden under snows, Broken boughs and blackened leaves. For all things turn to barrenness In the dim glass the demons hold, The glass of outer weariness, Made when God slept in times of old. There, through the broken branches, go The ravens of unresting thought; Flying, crying, to and fro, Cruel claw and hungry throat, Or else they stand and sniff the wind, And shake their ragged wings; alas! Thy tender eyes grow all unkind: Gaze no more in the bitter glass.- The Two Trees
— W.B. Yeats
All I know is a door into the dark
— Seamus Heaney
God moves in mysterious waysHis wonders to performs
— William Cowper, The Poetical Works Of William Cowper
Wake! For the Sun, who scatter'd into flightThe Stars before him from the Field of Night,Drives Night along with them from Heav'n,and strikesThe Sultan's Turret with a Shaft of Light
— Omar Khayyám, The Ruba'iyat of Omar Khayyam
...But...to sing,to dream, to smile, to walk, to be alone, be free,with a voice that stirs and an eye that still can see!To cock your hat to one side, when you pleaseat a yes, a no, to fight, or- make poetry!To work without a thought of fame or fortune,on that journey, that you dream of, to the moon!Never to write a line that's not your own...
— Edmond Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac
In the bleak midwinter Frosty wind made moan, Earth stood hard as iron, Water like a stone; Snow had fallen, Snow on snow, Snow on snow, In the bleak midwinter, Long ago. 
— Christina Rossetti, The Poetical Works of Christina Georgina Rossetti
I've got mixed feelings about poetry cause done well poetry is fantastic. But not many people are capable of doing it well. I think you should have some kind of license to perform poetry. A poetic license perhaps.
— Craig Ferguson
Look, the treesare turningtheir own bodiesinto pillarsof light,are giving off the richfragrance of cinnamonand fulfillment,the long tapersof cattailsare bursting and floating away overthe blue shouldersof the ponds,and every pond,no matter what itsname is, isnameless now.Every yeareverythingI have ever learnedin my lifetimeleads back to this: the firesand the black river of losswhose other sideis salvation,whose meaningnone of us will ever know.To live in this worldyou must be ableto do three things:to love what is mortal;to hold itagainst your bones knowingyour own life depends on it;and, when the time comes to let it go,to let it go.
— Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Vol. 1
there are some poemsthat we leave behindsome that leave us behindwhile some just livesilentlyin the heartcrumble, sometimesdwindledisappeardieand are rebornwhen you smile again.
— Sanober  Khan, Turquoise Silence
And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door; And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming, And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor:And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor Shall be lifted — nevermore!
— Edgar Allan Poe, Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Poems
Poetry can unleash a terrible fear. I suppose it is the fear of possibilities, too many possibilities, each with its own endless set of variations. It's like looking too closely and too long into a mirror; soon your features distort, then erupt. You look too closely into your poems, or listen too closely to them as they arrive in whispers, and the features inside you - call it heart, call it mind, call it soul - accelerate out of control. They distort and they erupt, and it is one strange pain. You realize, then, that you can't attempt breaking down too many barriers in too short a time, because there are as many horrors waiting to get in at you as there are parts of yourself pushing to break out, and with the same, or more, fevered determination.
— Jim Carroll, Forced Entries- The Downtown Diaries: 1971-1973
I fancied my luck to be witnessing yet another full moon. True, I’d seen hundreds of full moons in my life, but they were not limitless. When one starts thinking of the full moon as a common sight that will come again to one’s eyes ad-infinitum, the value of life is diminished and life goes by uncherished. ‘This may be my last moon,’ I sighed, feeling a sudden sweep of sorrow; and went back to reading more of The Odyssey.
— Roman Payne
LightLightThe visible reminder of Invisible Light.
— T.S. Eliot
I really don't know what "I love you" means.I think it means "Don't leave me here alone.
— Neil Gaiman
[I'm]a freak user of words, not a poet.
— Dylan Thomas
To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely-ordered variety on the chords of emotion--a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge.
— George Eliot, Middlemarch
Take away love and our earth is a tomb.
— Robert Browning
By a route obscure and lonelyHaunted by ill angels only,Where an eidolon, named NIGHT,On a black throne reigns upright,I have reached these lands but newlyFrom an ultimate dim Thule --From a wild, weird clime that lieth, sublime,Out of SPACE, out of TIME.
— Edgar Allan Poe
ΕπιθυμίεςΣαν σώματα ωραία νεκρών που δεν εγέρασανκαι τάκλεισαν, με δάκρυα, σε μαυσωλείο λαμπρό,με ρόδα στο κεφάλι και στα πόδια γιασεμιά --έτσ' η επιθυμίες μοιάζουν που επέρασανχωρίς να εκπληρωθούν· χωρίς ν' αξιωθεί καμιάτης ηδονής μια νύχτα, ή ένα πρωϊ της φεγγερό."Desires"Like beautiful bodies of the dead who had not grown oldand they shut them, with tears, in a brilliant mausoleum,with roses at the head and jasmine at the feet --this is what desires resemble that have passedwithout fulfillment; without any of them having achieveda night of sensual delight, or a morning of brightness.
— Constantinos P. Cavafis, Before Time Could Change Them: The Complete Poems
I am ashamed of my century, but I have to smile.
— Frank O'Hara, The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara
If I am more alive because love burns and chars me,as a fire, given wood or wind, feels new elation,it's that he who lays me low is my salvation,and invigorates the more, the more he scars me.
— Michelangelo Buonarroti
I once broke up with a boy because he wrote me an awful poem.
— Karen Joy Fowler, The Jane Austen Book Club
Hinged to forgetfulness like a door,she slowly closed out of sight,and she was the woman I loved,but too many times she slept likea mechanical deer in my caresses,and I ached in the metal silenceof her dreams.
— Richard Brautigan, Rommel Drives on Deep Into Egypt
Cheap little rhymesA cheap little tuneAre sometimes as dangerousAs a sliver of the moon.
— Langston Hughes
I am—yet what I am none cares or knows; My friends forsake me like a memory lost: I am the self-consumer of my woes— They rise and vanish in oblivious host, Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes And yet I am, and live—like vapours tossed
— John Clare, "I Am": The Selected Poetry of John Clare
A certain person wondered whya big strong girl like mewouldn't keep a jobwhich paid a normal salary.I took my time to lead herand to read her every page.Even minimal peoplecan't survive on minimal wage.A certain person wondered whyI wait all week for you.I didn't have the wordsto describe just what you do.I said you had the motionof the ocean in your walk,and when you solve my riddlesyou don't even have to talk.
— Maya Angelou, I Shall Not Be Moved
It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road.
— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
You shall create beauty not to excite the sensesbut to give sustenance to the soul. 
— Gabriela Mistral
I believe in the flesh and the appetites; Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle. Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touch’d from;The scent of these arm-pits, aroma finer than prayer; This head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds.
— Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
You must burn. Burn higher. Burn for everything you have ever wanted. For everything you have ever lost, for every crack in your heart and every fraction of every irreplaceable moment. Burn high for love. For fear. For life. Burn as fast and as long as you can. You must burn, burn higher. Because nothing in this world will kill you faster than a dying fire.
— Mia Hollow
The war to preserve the privilege of mythmaking
— Marvin Bell, Mars Being Red
Love shall be our token
—  love be yours and love be mine.
MISERABLERelease the toxic and infectious-Spreaders of misery,Souls destroying souls-And poisonous liars.Awaken from the hallucinations-And take back your heart.Reclaim your self-esteem-And leave the toxic be.
— Giorge Leedy, Uninhibited From Lust To Love
Poetry is the language of intensity. Because we are going to die, an expression of intensity is justified.
— C.D. Wright, Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil
Rocket shipsare excitingbut so are roseson a birthday.
— Leonard Nimoy, Come Be With Me: A Collection of Poems
Pater noster Our Father who art in heaven Stay there  And we'll stay here on earth  Which is sometimes so pretty  With its mysteries of New York  And its mysteries of Paris  At least as good as that of the Trinity  With its little canal at Ourcq  Its great wall of China  Its river at Morlaix  Its candy canes  With its Pacific Ocean  And its two basins in the Tuileries  With its good children and bad people  With all the wonders of the world  Which are here  Simply on the earth  Offered to everyone  Strewn about  Wondering at the wonder of themselves  And daring not avow it  As a naked pretty girl dares not show herself  With the world's outrageous misfortunes  Which are legion  With legionaries  With torturers  With the masters of this world  The masters with their priests their traitors and their troops  With the seasons  With the years  With the pretty girls and with the old bastards  With the straw of misery rotting in the steel of cannons.
— Jacques Prévert
I sense the world might be more dreamlike, metaphorical, and poetic than we currently believe--but just as irrational as sympathetic magic when looked at in a typically scientific way. I wouldn't be surprised if poetry--poetry in the broadest sense, in the sense of a world filled with metaphor, rhyme, and recurring patterns, shapes, and designs--is how the world works. The world isn't logical, it's a song.
— David Byrne, Bicycle Diaries
O, it's die we must, but it's live we can, And the marvel of earth and sun Is all for the joy of woman and man And the longing that makes them one.
— William Ernest Henley, Hawthorn and Lavender: With Other Verses
6 months, 2 weeks, 4 days,and I still don’t know which month it was thenor what day it is now.Blurred out linesfrom hangovers to coffeeAnother vagabond lost to love.4am alone and on my way.These are my finest moments.I scrub my skinto rid me from youand I still don’t know why I cried.It was just something in the way you took my heart and rearranged my insides and I couldn’t recognise the emptiness you left me with when you were done. Maybe you thought my insides would fit better this way, look better this way, to you and us and all the rest.But then you must have changed your mindor made a wrongbecause why did youleave?6 months, 2 weeks, 4 days,and I still don’t know which month it was thenor what day it is now.I replace cafés with crowded bars and empty roads with broken bottlesand this town is healing me slowly but still not slow or fast enough because there’s no right way to do this.There is no right way to do this.There is no right way to do this.
— Charlotte Eriksson
You have played, (I think) And broke the toys you were fondest of, And are a little tired now; Tired of things that break, and— Just tired. So am I.
— E.E. Cummings
A mighty flame follows a tiny spark.
— Dante Alighieri
I will love you forever" swears the poet. I find this easy to swear too. "I will love you at 4:15 pm next Tuesday" - Is that still as easy?
— W.H. Auden
Beauties in vain their pretty eyes may roll; Charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul.
— Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock
When from our better selves we have too longBeen parted by the hurrying world, and droop,Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired,How gracious, how benign, is Solitude
— William Wordsworth
Out of love,No regrets--Though the goodnessBe wasted forever.Out of love,No regrets--Though the returnBe never.
— Langston Hughes, Selected Poems
A book of verses underneath the boughA flask of wine, a loaf of bread and thouBeside me singing in the wildernessAnd wilderness is paradise now.
— Omar Khayyám, Edward Fitzgerald's The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
I have stretched ropes from steeple to steeple
—  Garlands from window to window
Being human means throwing your whole life on the scales of destiny when need be, all the while rejoicing in every sunny day and every beautiful cloud.
— Rosa Luxemburg
I choose to love this time for oncewith all my intelligence-from "Splittings
— Adrienne Rich, The Dream of a Common Language
Alone, alone, all, all alone, Alone on a wide wide sea! And never a saint took pity on My soul in agony.
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
part memory part distance remainingmine in the ways that I learn to miss you
— W.S. Merwin, The Shadow of Sirius
Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted
— Percy Bysshe Shelley
Nobody reads poetry, we are told at every inopportune moment. I read poetry. I am somebody. I am the people, too. It can be allowed that an industrious quantity of contemporary American poetry is consciously written for a hermetic constituency; the bulk is written for the bourgeoisie, leaving a lean cut for labor. Only the hermetically aimed has a snowball's chance in hell of reaching its intended ears. One proceeds from this realization. A staggering figure of vibrant, intelligent people can and do live without poetry, especially without the poetry of their time. This figure includes the unemployed, the rank and file, the union brass, banker, scientist, lawyer, doctor, architect, pilot, and priest. It also includes most academics, most of the faculty of the humanities, most allegedly literary editors and most allegedly literary critics. They do so--go forward in their lives, toward their great reward, in an engulfing absence of poetry--without being perceived or perceiving themselves as hobbled or deficient in any significant way. It is nearly true, though I am often reminded of a Transtromer broadside I saw in a crummy office building in San Francisco:We got dressed and showed the houseYou live well the visitor saidThe slum must be inside you.If I wanted to understand a culture, my own for instance, and if I thought such an understanding were the basis for a lifelong inquiry, I would turn to poetry first. For it is my confirmed bias that the poets remain the most 'stunned by existence,' the most determined to redeem the world in words..
— C.D. Wright, Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil
I feel there is an angel in me' she'd say
Writing, then, was a substitute for myself: if you don't love me, love my writing & love me for my writing. It is also much more: a way of ordering and reordering the chaos of experience.
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
Used to be hewas my heart's desire.His forthright gaze,his expert hands:I'd lie on the couch with my eyesclosed just thinking about it.Never about the factthat everything changes,that even this,my best passion,would not be immune.No, I would bask on in aneternal daydream of the handsfinding me, the gaze like a windingstair coaxing me down. . . .Until I caught a glimpseof something in the mirror:silly girl in her lingerie,dancing with the furniture--a hot little bundle, flush withcliches. Into that pairof too-bright eyes I lookedand saw myself. And something else: would never look that way.
— Deborah Garrison, A Working Girl Can't Win
Unasked, Unsought, Love gives itself but is not bought
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Complete Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
I'd rather be thin than famousbut I'm fatpaste that in your broadway show
— Jack Kerouac, Mexico City Blues
Writing poetry and reading books causes brain damage.
— Pat Conroy, Beach Music
One need not be a Chamber — to be Haunted — One need not be a House — The Brain has Corridors — surpassing Material Place —
— Emily Dickinson, Selected Poems
If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it's to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.
— Jim Morrison
Times change, as do our wills, What we are - is ever changing; All the world is made of change, And forever attaining new qualities.
— Luís de Camões, Sonetos de Camões
So the freshness lives onin a lemon,in the sweet-smelling house of the rind,the proportions, arcane and acerb.
— Pablo Neruda, Odes to Common Things
The profoundest of all sensualitiesis the sense of truthand the next deepest sensual experienceis the sense of justice. 
— D.H. Lawrence
All those other girls are cake...I'm Crème brûlée...Tiramisu, if you will. Just a few notches above.
— Brandi L. Bates
Dreams, books, are each a world; and books, we know,Are a substantial world, both pure and good:Round these, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood,Our pastime and our happiness will grow.
— William Wordsworth
Sometimes, looking at the many books I have at home, I feel I shall die before I come to the end of them, yet I cannot resist the temptation of buying new books. Whenever I walk into a bookstore and find a book on one of my hobbies — for example, Old English or Old Norse poetry — I say to myself, “What a pity I can’t buy that book, for I already have a copy at home.
— Jorge Luis Borges, This Craft of Verse
So come to the pond, or the river of your imagination, or the harbor of your longing,and put your lips to the world.And live your life.
— Mary Oliver, Red Bird
O stand, stand at the window As the tears scald and start;You shall love your crooked neighbour With your crooked heart.
— W.H. Auden, As I Walked Out One Evening: Songs, Ballads, Lullabies, Limericks & Other Light Verse
the only thing required to be a woman is to identifyas one.- period, end of story.
— Amanda Lovelace, The Princess Saves Herself in this One
come back so i can say yes this time do it again now that i know what to call what you didthis time i'll be ready i like it rough now and i'm done with romance i never met another man who loved me so much at first sight he had to hurt me to do it
— Daphne Gottlieb, Why Things Burn
Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and falls again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet.
— Virginia Woolf, The Waves
Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies.And be it gash or gold it will not comeAgain in this identical disguise.
— Gwendolyn Brooks, Annie Allen
My HeartI'm not going to cry all the timenor shall I laugh all the time,I don't prefer one "strain" to another.I'd have the immediacy of a bad movie,not just a sleeper, but also the big,overproduced first-run kind. I want to be at least as alive as the vulgar. And if some aficionado of my mess says "That's not like Frank!," all to the good! I don't wear brown and grey suits all the time, do I? No. I wear workshirts to the opera,often. I want my feet to be bare,I want my face to be shaven, and my heart--you can't plan on the heart, butthe better part of it, my poetry, is open.
— Frank O'Hara
If you only write when you’re inspired you may be a fairly decent poet, but you’ll never be a novelist because you’re going to have to make your word count today and those words aren’t going to wait for you whether you’re inspired or not.You have to write when you’re not inspired. And you have to write the scenes that don’t inspire you. And the weird thing is that six months later, a year later, you’ll look back at them and you can’t remember which scenes you wrote when you were inspired and which scenes you just wrote because they had to be written next.The process of writing can be magical. …Mostly it’s a process of putting one word after another.
— Neil Gaiman
Anyone who says, “Here’s my address,write me a poem,” deserves something in reply.So I’ll tell a secret instead:poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes,they are sleeping. They are the shadowsdrifting across our ceilings the moment before we wake up. What we have to dois live in a way that lets us find them.
— Naomi Shihab Nye, Red Suitcase
Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:The sun-comprehending glass,And beyond it, the deep blue air, that showsNothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
— Philip Larkin, High Windows
That's not a run in your stocking, it's a hand on your leg.
— Frank O'Hara
Ask him why there are hypocrites in the world.''Because it is hard to bear the happiness of others.''When are we happy?''When we desire nothing and realize that possession is only momentary, and so are forever playing.''What is regret?''To realize that one has spent one's life worrying about the future.''What is sorrow?''To long for the past.''What is the highest pleasure?''To hear a good story.
— Vikram Chandra, Red Earth and Pouring Rain
When soul meets soul on lovers' lips.
— Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound
The Children's HourBetween the dark and the daylight,When the night is beginning to lower,Comes a pause in the day's occupations,That is known as the Children's Hour.I hear in the chamber above meThe patter of little feet,The sound of a door that is opened,And voices soft and sweet.From my study I see in the lamplight,Descending the broad hall stair,Grave Alice, and laughing Allegra,And Edith with golden hair.A whisper, and then a silence:Yet I know by their merry eyesThey are plotting and planning togetherTo take me by surprise.A sudden rush from the stairway,A sudden raid from the hall!By three doors left unguardedThey enter my castle wall!They climb up into my turretO'er the arms and back of my chair;If I try to escape, they surround me;They seem to be everywhere.They almost devour me with kisses,Their arms about me entwine,Till I think of the Bishop of BingenIn his Mouse-Tower on the Rhine!Do you think, o blue-eyed banditti,Because you have scaled the wall,Such an old mustache as I amIs not a match for you all!I have you fast in my fortress,And will not let you depart,But put you down into the dungeonIn the round-tower of my heart.And there will I keep you forever,Yes, forever and a day,Till the walls shall crumble to ruin,And moulder in dust away!
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Complete Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!As tho’ to breathe were life!
— Alfred Tennyson, Ulysses
Those ancients who in poetry presented the golden age, who sang its happy state,perhaps, in their Parnassus, dreamt this place. Here, mankind's root was innocent; and herewere every fruit and never-ending spring; these streams--the nectar of which poets sing.
— Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
In my darkest night,when the moon was coveredand I roamed through wreckage,a nimbus-clouded voicedirected me:“Live in the layers,not on the litter.”Though I lack the artto decipher it,no doubt the next chapterin my book of transformationsis already written.I am not done with my changes.
— Stanley Kunitz, The Collected Poems
Nothing like poetry when you lie awake at night. It keeps the old brain limber. It washes away the mud and sand that keeps on blocking up the bends.Like waves to make the pebbles dance on my old floors. And turn them into rubies and jacinths; or at any rate, good imitations.
— Joyce Cary, The Horse's Mouth
One should write only those books from whose absence one suffers. In short: the ones you want on your own desk.
— Marina Tsvetaeva, Earthly Signs: Moscow Diaries, 1917–1922
Everything is all right,When you’re here,When you’re right next to me,When my hand is in yours,Don’t leave me,Don’t leave me empty handed.
— Elizabeth Brooks
I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume,For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
— Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
Hearts rebuilt from hope resurrect dreams killed by hate.
— Aberjhani, The River of Winged Dreams
If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.
— John Keats
At two o'clock in the morning, if you open your window and listen,You will hear the feet of the Wind that is going to call the sun.And the trees in the Shadow rustle and the trees in the moonlight glisten,And though it is deep, dark night, you feel that the night is done.
— Rudyard Kipling
For the moon never beams without bringing me dreamsOf the beautiful Annabel Lee
— And the stars never rise but i feel the bright eyesOf the beautiful Annabel Lee.
Ya no la quiero, es cierto, pero tal vez la quiero.Es tan corto el amor, y es tan largo el olvido.
— Pablo Neruda, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
Books are carefully folded forests/void of autumn/bound from the sun
— Saul Williams
sekali berarti sesudah itu mati
— Chairil Anwar
Twas the night before Thanksgiving. All the food's in the oven. And I'm in the bedroom performin' self lovin'.
— Craig Ferguson
When you write about what you dream, you become a writer.When you dream about what you write, you become haunted by a curse.
— A. Saleh, Poetry Eyes
Our two souls therefore, which are one,  Though I must go, endure not yet  A breach, but an expansion,  Like gold to aery thinness beat. If they be two, they are two so  As stiff twin compasses are two ;  Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show  To move, but doth, if th' other do. And though it in the centre sit,  Yet, when the other far doth roam,  It leans, and hearkens after it,  And grows erect, as that comes home. Such wilt thou be to me, who must,  Like th' other foot, obliquely run ;  Thy firmness makes my circle just,  And makes me end where I begun.
— John Donne
A fallen blossomreturning to the bough, I thought --But no, a butterfly.
— Arakida Moritake, Traditional Japanese Poetry: An Anthology
A grain of poetry suffices to season a century.
— José Martí, Versos Sencillos: Simple Verses
Escóndeme en tus brazospor esta noche sola,mientras la lluvia rompecontra el mar y la tierrasu boca innumerable.
— Pablo Neruda
I have been happy, though in a dream.I have been happy-and I love the theme:Dreams! in their vivid colouring of lifeAs in that fleeting, shadowy, misty strife
— Edgar Allan Poe
Great poetry needs no interpreter other than a responsive heart.
— Helen Keller, The Story of My Life: With Her Letters (1887 1901) and a Supplementary Account of Her Education Including Passages from the Reports and Letters of Her Teacher Anne Mansfield Sullivan by John Albert Macy
And medecine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love: these are what we stay alive for.
— Tom Schulman, Dead Poets Society
No man can reveal to you aught but that which already lies half asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.
— Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
I found the poems in the fields,And only wrote them down.
— John Clare, The Later Poems, 1837-1864: Volumes I and II
A tough life needs a tough language—and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is.
— Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
I'm like the weather, never really can predict when this rain cloud's gonna burst; when it's the high or it's the low, when you might need a light jacket.Sometimes I'm the slush that sticks to the bottom of your work pants, but I can easily be the melting snowflakes clinging to your long lashes.I know that some people like:sunny and seventy-five,sunny and seventy-five,sunny and seventy-five,but you take me as I am and neverforget to pack an umbrella.
— Naomi Shihab Nye, Time You Let Me In: 25 Poets under 25
Anyone who has no need of anybody but himself is either a beast or a God."Aristotle
— Bruce Wayne Sullivan
...if you do not even understand what words say,how can you expect to pass judgementon what words conceal?
— H.D., Trilogy: The Walls Do Not Fall / Tribute to the Angels / The Flowering of the Rod
I saw my face todayAnd it looked older,Without the warmth of wisdomOr the softnessBorn of pain and waiting.The dreams were gone from my eyes,Hope lost in hollownessOn my cheeks,A finger of deathPulling at my jaws.So I did my push-upsAnd wondered if I'd ever find you,To see my faceWith friendlier eyes than mine.
— James Kavanaugh, There Are Men Too Gentle to Live Among Wolves
A man who knows how little he knows is well, a man who knows how much he knows is sick. If, when you see the symptoms, you can tell, Your cure is quick.A sound man knows that sickness makes him sick and before he catches it his cure is quick.
— Lao Tzu, The Chinese Translations
No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.
— T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood
My love runs by like a day in June, And he makes no friends of sorrows. He'll tread his galloping rigadoon In the pathway of the morrows. He'll live his days where the sunbeams start, Nor could storm or wind uproot him. My own dear love, he is all my heart, -- And I wish somebody'd shoot him.
— Dorothy Parker, The Portable Dorothy Parker
Don't you know no one can escapethe power of creatures reaching outwith breath alone?
— Marina Tsvetaeva
In fact she herself once blamed meKyprogeneiabecause I prayed this word:I want.
— Sappho, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho
Relate comic things in pompous fashion. Irregularity, in other words the unexpected, the surprising, the astonishing, are essential to and characteristic of beauty. Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony. The blend of the grotesque and the tragic are attractive to the mind, as is discord to blasé ears. Imagine a canvas for a lyrical, magical farce, for a pantomime, and translate it into a serious novel. Drown the whole thing in an abnormal, dreamy atmosphere, in the atmosphere of great days … the region of pure poetry.
— Charles Baudelaire, Intimate Journals
You are ice and fire The touch of you burns my hands like snow
— Amy Lowell
For books are more than books, they are the lifeThe very heart and core of ages past,The reason why men lived and worked and died,The essence and quintessence of their lives.
— Amy Lowell
And, even yet, I dare not let it languish,Dare not indulge in memory’s rapturous pain;Once drinking deep of that divinest anguish,How could I seek the empty world again?
— Emily Brontë, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell
The grass as bristly and stout as chives and me wondering when the ground will break and me wondering how anything fragile survives
— Anne Sexton
I see your picture and in that picture I didn't see you.
— Santosh Kalwar, Obscurity