Top 100 A Poetry Quotes
#1. 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
#2. I entered a poem in a poetry contest around 1987, and the poem won and I received $1,000 for it. That made me realize that maybe what I was writing was worth reading to people. After that, for some reason, I turned to novels and I've written mainly novels ever since.
Sharon Creech
#3. True love ennobles and dignifies the material labors of life; and homely services rendered for love's sake have in them a poetry that is immortal.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
#4. I would say that American poetry has always been a poetry of personal testimony.
Mark Strand
#5. Freud ... showed us that poetry is indigenous to the very constitution of the mind ; he saw the mind as being, in the greater part of its tendency, exactly a poetry-making faculty.
Lionel Trilling
#7. You can woo a girl with a poem, but you can't hold onto her with a poem. Not even with a poetry movement.
Roberto Bolano
#8. Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#9. A poetry professor had once defined romance to me as "bringing two people together when every force in the universe is working to keep them apart.
Jeff Hobbs
#10. Cotton was a force of nature. There's a poetry to it, hoeing and growing cotton.
B.B. King
#11. If I do a poetry reading I want people to walk out and say they feel better for having been there - not because you've done a comedy performance but because you're talking about your father dying or having young children, things that touch your soul.
Roger McGough
#12. My life was a blank paper, until you came to rhyme with words & make it a poetry book.
Akansh Malik
#13. Friendship is a poetry of life that is written in two hearts.
Debasish Mridha
#14. Your life is a poetry, it just needs some interpretation.
Debasish Mridha
#15. For me, language and how I use it are very important. I held back on doing a poetry book, walking the fine line between trying to be helpful and just putting more junk out there.
Sakyong Mipham
#16. [M]editation is not just being silent - that is only one part of it ... [I]t has to be creative. And when a poetry comes out of your inner silences, or a painting, it has a flavor which is not of this world.
Rajneesh
#17. I never send a story off until I have read it aloud to at least two or three people. Because when I read - and I don't need their criticism, what I need is my own - when I read it aloud, there is a flow, there is a poetry to it.
Harlan Ellison
#19. I'm basically a poetry scholar, and I'm happier here in my studio with my row of Chinese dictionaries than I am, frankly, at Lincoln Center.
Sam Hamill
#20. Poetry is a popular genre in Afghanistan. If you turned on the radio, there would be a poetry program that would be as popular as The Real Housewives.
Eliza Griswold
#21. Think it's a poetry that comes out of the stuff of the poet's personal life, but he's trying to render this experience in more general and inclusive, or what used to be called universal,
David Shields
#22. Do not write a poetry of rarity, or of rarification, but of *never again*.
Do not even write this poetry but find it, come across it, and step over it. The helpless ant that in the end can lift more than ten times its weight: that is a poetry.
Kevin Young
#23. You will find meaning in life
only if you create it.It is a poetry to be composed.
It is a song to be sung.It is a dance to be danced ...
Osho
#25. For all the years I'd spent talking about pictures, the truth was that I had no idea how to draw or what it felt like to do it. I would mistrust a poetry critic who couldn't produce a rhyming couplet. Could one write about art without knowing how to draw?
Adam Gopnik
#26. Poetry, from describing external events objectively, is becoming subjectified into a poetry of personal conscious expression.
Julian Jaynes
#28. Lord, decked with jewels, sitting at the head of a table. It is a poetry of assonance
Peter Ackroyd
#29. Everyone's life is a poetry rhymed with sweet and bitter words, rhythmed with moments.
Robert Ahaness
#30. My verses are my diary. My poetry is a poetry of proper names.
Marina Tsvetaeva
#31. I was actually a poetry major in college before I punted and decided to become a theater major. I wrote the poem that we put on the sauerkraut boxes in the style of Elling.
Denis O'Hare
#32. I want to write a play. I'd like to do an original musical. I should probably put together a poetry collection.
Neil Gaiman
#35. Surrealism is not a poetry but a poetics, and even more, and more decisively, a world vision.
Octavio Paz
#36. She was a poetry book with the wrong dust jacket, shelved in the Reference section.
Joyce Rachelle
#37. I'm a professional and I'll do anything - a poetry reading, television, cinema, anything that allows me to act.
Peter O'Toole
#38. People think of poetry as a school subject ... Poetry is very frustrating to students because they don't have a taste for ambiguity, for one thing. That gives them a poetry hangover.
Billy Collins
#39. Music has a poetry of its own, and that poetry is called melody.
Joshua Logan
#40. Attending a poetry reading is like being in a hospital," he said as we left the next station. "Full of neuroses.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#41. I aspire to a poetry of great formal integrity, deep passion and high intellect, and I have many models for how to do that.
Edward Hirsch
#42. There is a poetry in making preserves; the housewife has caught duration in the snare of sugar, she has enclosed life in jars.
Simone De Beauvoir
#43. Love is the magic ink, which transform everyday life into a poetry.
Debasish Mridha
#44. Every sword that was dripping the blood became a pen. Every word that was written in it became a poetry.
Akshay Vasu
#45. But sometimes a kiss is not a kiss is not a kiss. Sometimes it's a poetry.
Julie Buxbaum
#47. With a poetry book I can send 100 copies out to reviewers and other people, and even do it in advance and get their response. It's difficult with iPad: how do you send it out for free, and how do you even disseminate it before it goes into their store?
Felix Dennis
#48. No, thank you," he flashed that grin of his. "I've been wondering what the lair of a poetry-inclined psychologist looks like.
Gina Marinello-Sweeney
#49. If you show a poetry professor your shiny new multiple choice teaching technology, he will invite you to exit his office.
Andrew Ng
#50. Every flower has a poetry of love in her heart, every tree has a story of struggle in his mind.
Debasish Mridha
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. Thought must be hidden in the verse like nutritional virtue in a fruit.
Paul Valery
#55. You write so beautifully
the inside of your mind must be a terrible place
Unknown
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. Advice to Young Poets
Never pretend
to be a unicorn
by sticking a plunger on your head.
Martin Espada
#60. The head's a cloud anchor that the feet must follow. Travel light, he said, or don't travel at all.
Jim Harrison
#61. I see woefully obscure poetry as simply a kind of verbal rudeness.
Billy Collins
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. Reading a stranger's words and finding yourself in them.
Jenim Dibie
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. May came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.
E. E. Cummings
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. this life
has been
a landscape
of pain
and still,
flowers
bloom in it.
Sanober Khan
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. So goes the hard way- the (fall a)part way-the (break a) heart way.
Kami Garcia
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. People should like poetry the way a child likes snow, and they would if poets wrote it.
Wallace Stevens
#85. If you can explain a poem, it is not a poem. Poetry has to be inexplicable.
Luis Gonzalez
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. I like it when someone gives me a new book of poetry by a poet I haven't read.
Nell Freudenberger
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. For me, the poetry in a work is that which makes visible the invisible.
Nathalie Sarraute
#100. 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
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
