A Poetry Quotes

#1. I certainly can't speak for all cultures or all societies, but it's clear that in America, poetry serves a very marginal purpose. It's not part of the cultural mainstream.

Mark Strand

#2. I had hoped to be a poet, and for a long time I tried to write poetry. My first published pieces were poems.

Norman Lock

#3. Especially once those poetry events began, because, yeah, the stuff was still on the page, but the page was starting to spill into real space, spill into air, once you could hear it, once there was a typewriter, once there was a body of a typist, it was getting rid of the confines of the page.

Vito Acconci

#4. Thought must be hidden in the verse like nutritional virtue in a fruit.

Paul Valery

#5. You write so beautifully
the inside of your mind must be a terrible place

Unknown

#6. For me, movies and television are interesting because they are the dominant storytelling form of our time. My first love will always be fiction, and especially novels, but I'm a writer ... I write poetry and essays and criticism and I'd love to write a whole play, and sometimes I even write scripts.

Jess Walter

#7. I am not ridiculing verbal mechanisms, dreams, or repressions as origins of poetry; all three of them and more besides may have a great deal to do with it.

Allen Tate

#8. We are all instruments pulling the bows across our own lungs. Windmills, still startling in every storm. Have you ever seen a newborn blinking at the light? I wanna do that every day. I wanna know what the kite called itself when it got away, when it escaped into the night ...

Andrea Gibson

#9. Advice to Young Poets
Never pretend
to be a unicorn
by sticking a plunger on your head.

Martin Espada

#10. The head's a cloud anchor that the feet must follow. Travel light, he said, or don't travel at all.

Jim Harrison

#11. I see woefully obscure poetry as simply a kind of verbal rudeness.

Billy Collins

#12. Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.

Audre Lorde

#13. Most people can't tell now who wrote what. I like that blurring of identities within the band. because it becomes a unified thing that can't be related to other forms of historical poetry.

Thurston Moore

#14. Reading a stranger's words and finding yourself in them.

Jenim Dibie

#15. Nothing conceivable is so petty, so insipid, so crowded with paltry interests, in one word, so anti-poetic, as the life of a man in the United States.

Alexis De Tocqueville

#16. Ultimately you're trying to reach across and find some other person, some other human warmth. But it is, especially in written poetry, it is inscribed in a text and the text can't do that work by itself and you as a poet can only do your best.

Edward Hirsch

#17. May came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.

E. E. Cummings

#18. What men call love is a very small, restricted, feeble thing compared with this ineffable orgy, this divine prostitution of the soul giving itself entire, all its poetry and all its charity, to the unexpected as it comes along, to the stranger as he passes.

Charles Baudelaire

#19. When you act, you've got to be like a poet or a musician. It's not about evidence before court. It's not a forensic subject. It's poetry; it's a completely different place.

Rhys Ifans

#20. this life
has been
a landscape
of pain

and still,
flowers
bloom in it.

Sanober Khan

#21. By making us stop for a moment, poetry gives us an opportunity to think about ourselves as human beings on this planet and what we mean to each other.

Rita Dove

#22. Forced relations between two things that superficially appear foreign create a new, instantaneous state. Authentic poetry asks nothing more. A kinship completely nonexistent moments ago was created by the poet's authority, just as it might have been created in life by the authority of chance.

Odysseus Elytis

#23. I have a sickness doctors can't cure,
Inexorably pulling me to the well of my destruction,
Consented to be a sacrifice, killed for her love,
Eager, like the drunk gulping wine mixed with poison,
Shameless were those my nights,
Yet my soul loved them beyond all passion.

Ibn Hazm

#24. Poetry, music, forests, oceans, solitude
they were what developed enormous spiritual strength. I came to realize that spirit, as much or more than physical conditioning, had to be stored up before a race.

Herb Elliott

#25. He wanted to be a poet,' someone else put in while Maggie hugged Tim and patted his back. 'Said he'd only lacked the words to be one.

Nora Roberts

#26. 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

#27. Poetry is more than just art, it's like super glue to a broken heart. It can also be a light when your life seems a little dark.

Delano Johnson

#28. The Net
I made you many and many a song,
Yet never one told all you are
It was as though a net of words
Were flung to catch a star;
It was as though I curved my hand
And dipped sea-water eagerly,
Only to find it lost the blue
Dark splendor of the sea.

Sara Teasdale

#29. So goes the hard way- the (fall a)part way-the (break a) heart way.

Kami Garcia

#30. The nerds are my favourite sort of boys - any guy with a passion - whether it be physics or film or writing or poetry even, I think it's super sweet and it's very attractive for a female.

Teresa Palmer

#31. Following dark winter's strife, a warm air rises, teemed with life. Birth, rebirth, as the waiting die. Old love, new love sprouts wings to fly.

Phar West Nagle

#32. It's not that he lacked poetry. But his poetry was of the body, not the mind. He spoke it in the way he moved, the way he held a hammer, rowed a boat, built a fire. I, on the other hand, was like a brain in a box, a beating heart in a coal scuttle.

Meg Rosoff

#33. In my position, the right witchdoctor
Might have caught you in flight with his bare hands,
Tossed you, cooling, one hand to the other,
Godless, happy, quieted.
I managed
A wisp of your hair, your ring, your watch, your nightgown.

Ted Hughes

#34. People should like poetry the way a child likes snow, and they would if poets wrote it.

Wallace Stevens

#35. If you can explain a poem, it is not a poem. Poetry has to be inexplicable.

Luis Gonzalez

#36. I teach a lecture course on American poetry to as many as 150 students. For a lot of them, it's their only elective, so this is their one shot. They'll take the Russian Novel or American Poetry, so I want to give them the high points, the inescapable poets.

Robert Hass

#37. There are a lot of human experiences that challenge the limits of our language," she said. "That's one of the reasons that we have poetry.

Ava Dellaira

#38. I like it when someone gives me a new book of poetry by a poet I haven't read.

Nell Freudenberger

#39. It still is on the run,
time that is.
Sometimes it seems like everything's changing;
my whole world is rearranging.
Everything's different,
and yet everything's the same.
Time is just a crazy game.

Amanda Leigh

#40. Fire is calling my name. It is whispering words of encouragement, sweet things. It wants out, for me to fan the heat until it's a vortex that can't and won't be stopped.

Alexandra Bracken

#41. As hard as the diamonds in your smile,
the wind carries its hammers with no hands
and sustains a moan with no mouth,
seems to cradle solitude in its rough arms like firewood
to be burned in my house as it passes through
and asks, Where does she sparkle from?

B.J. Ward

#42. This is what I have.
The dull hangover of waiting,
the blush of my heart on the damp grass,
the flower-faced moon.
A gull broods on the shore
where a moment ago there were two.
Softly my right hand fondles my left hand
as though it were you.

Mary Oliver

#43. Someone told me to dumb my poetry down, but I told them I can't because I don't have a smart phone.

Delano Johnson

#44. He looked like a butler dressed by his four-year-old daughter - a mishmash of good intentions and ill design. And there I was, an unshaven, rumpled page of discarded poetry, extending a hand and smiling, no doubt wolfishly.

Walter Mosley

#45. The end of poetry is not to create a physical condition which shall give pleasure to the mind ... The end of poetry is not an after-effect, not a pleasurable memory of itself, but an immediate, constant and even unpleasant insistence upon itself.

Laura Riding

#46. Dying only means moving into a nicer house.
We have only gone into the next room.
We still are what we have always been.
We aren't far away. We are only on the other side of the pathway.

Kerry Okines

#47. I have experienced healing through other writers' poetry, but there's no way I can sit down to write in the hope a poem will have healing potential. If I do, I'll write a bad poem.

Marilyn Hacker

#48. After you have pumped your brains for thoughts and verses, there is a better poetry hinted in whistling a tune on your walk.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#49. For me, the poetry in a work is that which makes visible the invisible.

Nathalie Sarraute

#50. O serpent heart hid with a flowering face!
Did ever a dragon keep so fair a cave?
Beautiful tyrant, feind angelical, dove feather raven, wolvish-ravening lamb! Despised substance of devinest show, just opposite to what thou justly seemest - A dammed saint, an honourable villain!

William Shakespeare

#51. Then, the door opens and there he is; silhouetted in the hall light. Long hair, long legs, and a heartbeat in tune with my own.

Hunter S. Jones

#52. A group of us started a community center in Santa Monica. We've tried different programs, and three have worked really well. A poetry group. Once a week we visit Venice High and talk to girls at risk.

Lisa Bonet

#53. You mean you're comparing our lives to a sonnet? A strict form, but freedom within it? Yes. Mrs. Whatsit said. You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. What you say is completely up to you.

Madeleine L'Engle

#54. When writing poetry, it is not that produces a bright idea, but the bright idea that kindles the fire of.

Cesare Pavese

#55. 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

#56. I think no matter how snarky you try to be, poetry will always find a way to make a spiritual goal out of what you're doing.

Mike Young

#57. I'm a poet who practices Zen. And it's not, I'm somebody who practices Zen who writes poetry. There's no separation for me.

Sam Hamill

#58. In this quiet place on a quiet street
where no one ever finds us
gently, lovingly, freedom gives back our pain.
from poem In a Quiet Place on a Quiet Street

Aberjhani

#59. One thing I feel is this: that a great deal of poetry is the product of adolescence-or of an emotionally adolescent frame of mind: and that as this state of mind changes, poetry is likely to dry up.

James Agee

#60. France is not poetic; she even feels, in fact, a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse, those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic.

Charles Baudelaire

#61. I'm running out of things to say.
I've stopped stealing pages out of poetry books, but last week I pocketed a thesaurus and looked for synonyms for you and could only find rain
and more rain
and a thunderstorm that sounded like glass, like crystal, an orchestra.

Shinji Moon

#62. I
Like
The Way
That when you
Tilt
Poems
On their side
They
Look like
Miniature
Cities
From
A long way
Away.
Skyscrapers
Made out
Of
Words.

Matt Haig

#63. (1)BEING A POET
is like opening a car door
& exposing yourself.
(2)BEING A GOOD POET
is like opening the door
& exposing the passenger
as well.

Chocolate Waters

#64. I cannot understand why poetry is not taught at schools as a way of seeing, a quick, untiring path to essentials.

May Sarton

#65. If the poetry world celebrate its female stars at the true level of their productivity and influence, poetry would wind up being a largely female world, and the men would leave.

Eileen Myles

#66. Publishing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.

Don Marquis

#67. Winter is already a lost shape, forgotten
in the ground. Instead, here is Spring
with all the grace of a woman
smoothing out her apron.

Cecilia Llompart

#68. Autumn Dusk
I saw above a sea of hills
A solitary planet shine,
And there was no one, near or far,
to keep the world from being mine.

Sara Teasdale

#69. You are the Worst Kind of Animal. A Butcher by Day and a Pussy Cat by Night.

Monroe Ariel

#70. Read. Read every chance you get. Read to keep growing. Read history. Read poetry. Read for pure enjoyment. Read a book called Life on a Little Known Planet. It's about insects. It will make you feel better.

David McCullough

#71. I have always been a fire, and everyone I loved walked away as ashes, until I met a phoenix who was born to love flames.

Jenim Dibie

#72. Poetry is a pure meritocracy. There's no room for ambiguity: either a poem moves you and opens up new vistas in life, or it doesn't. It's completely objective, and the best always rise to the top.

Jim Goetz

#73. Besides, a long poem is a test of invention, which I take to be the Polar star of Poetry, as Fancy is the sails - and Imagination the rudder.

John Keats

#74. Poetry and prose are of equal importance to me as a reader, and there doesn't seem to be much difference in my own writing.

Kevin Powers

#75. When I usually outshine the light, I look for evanescence. The ending to my resplendence is much more divine, when it's singing a sweet lullaby of captured shine.

Lionel Suggs

#76. TOMORROW'S WILL

Silent world, I find myself,
Glad no one hears my thoughts.
In dark cocoon, I hibernate,
Yet spirit spills every thought.

A second chance to try again.
The risks I know too well.
Two sunsets turning into six-
Awaits tomorrow's will.

Giorge Leedy

#77. A man awakes every morning
and instead of reading the newspaper
reads Act V of Othello.
He sips his coffee and is content
that this is the news he needs
as his wife looks on helplessly.

B.J. Ward

#78. It is so hard to stay afloat in a world
that just wants to drown you.

Schuyler Peck

#79. The neurologist had dismissed her case after a single visit, handing out an easy nostrum by telling her father that if she continued to write poetry, she would be all right.

Flora Rheta Schreiber

#80. There's one of my new poems actually - is a good example of where my poetry has ended up. My earlier river poetry was more like a cross between Shelley and Dylan Thomas.

Robert Adamson

#81. I'm happy to be a writer - of prose, poetry, every kind of writing. Every person in the world who isn't a recluse, hermit or mute uses words. I know of no other art form that we always use.

Maya Angelou

#82. A man can be old and a fool
many are
a man can be young and wise
few are

Charles Bukowski

#83. This is hell,
but I planned it. I sawed it,
I nailed it, and I
will live in it until it kills me.
I can nail my left palm
to the left-hand crosspiece but
I can't do everything myself.
I need a hand to nail the right,
a help, a love, a you, a wife.

Alan Dugan

#84. There is no doubt that the loftiest written wisdom is either rhymed or in some way musically measured,
is, in form as well as substance, poetry; and a volume which should contain the condensed wisdom of mankind need not have one rhythmless line.

Henry David Thoreau

#85. There is a voice in my head that is only silenced by the scratching of my pen

Jessica-Lynn Barbour

#86. Needle in a haystack's easy - just bring a magnet."
Eliot stared witheringly at Hardison. "You take the poetry out of everything."
"Says the man who'd just punch the haystack.

Keith R.A. DeCandido

#87. Poetry was a barrier against raw
emotions. It distilled them into bearable
music, allowed one to accommodate them
a little at a time.

Alexander Moncrieffe

Julie Anne Long

#88. our foundation is rocky
because we made a home
in each other's skin.
the damage is beginning
to show.

K.Y. Robinson

#89. When I said.
A rose is a rose is a rose.
And then later made that into a ring I made poetry and what
did I do I caressed completely caressed and addressed
a noun.

Gertrude Stein

#90. My wild heart craves shadows. Like a bat unfurling its wings, I open myself to darkness; I open myself to truth.

Nichole McElhaney

#91. And the bush hath friends to meet him, and their kindly voices greet him
In the murmur of the breezes and the river on its bars,
And he sees the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended,
And at night the wond'rous glory of the everlasting stars.

A.B. Paterson

#92. If you read every poem in every anthology of Greek poetry, you wouldn't read one poem in which a character of the woman who's loved is described or matters.

Kathy Acker

#93. She captured the spot of my world's centre and sent me in elliptic rings about it, causing the ground beneath me to vanish and the breath of my lungs to disperse. I was a rock locked in helpless orbit.

Richard Ronald Allan

#94. Against barbarity, poetry can resist only by confirming its attachment to human fragility like a blade of grass growing on a wall while armies march by.

Mahmoud Darwish

#95. Poetry is an awareness of the world, a particular way of relating to reality.

Andrei Tarkovsky

#96. This road is a winding one.
We left the west flooded
with new loneliness.

Donika Kelly

#97. I'm going to become a beat poet and a lesbian!

Benjamin R. Smith

#98. I'll be writing as long as I can hold a pen in my curled, crimped arthritic hands and then I'll dictate it, if it comes to that. They'll have to pry my pen out of my cold, dead fingers - and even then, I'll fight 'em for it. Guaranteed.

Wanda Lea Brayton

#99. Art,Poetry and Dreams are Ingredients of a gentle youth,it has a flow like the ebbing ocean waves,to and fro.

Nithin Purple

#100. I got a bit obsessed with the whole English language and was writing journals and poetry. I've always been intrigued about psychology and philosophy and how people's minds work.

Lara Pulver