Top 98 Book Of Poetry Quotes
#1. Publishing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
Don Marquis
#2. I like it when someone gives me a new book of poetry by a poet I haven't read.
Nell Freudenberger
#4. If i write a book it will probably be a book about how not to use the internet or a book of poetry.
Misha Collins
#5. When a reader enters the pages of a book of poetry, he or she enters a world where dreams transform the past into knowledge made applicable to the present, and where visions shape the present into extraordinary possibilities for the future
Aberjhani
#6. I don't think anybody reads a book of poetry front to back. Editors and reviewers only. I don't think anybody else does.
Billy Collins
#7. Actually, I'm working on a book of poetry.
Marv Levy
#8. I've done a number of readings at poetry lounges in Vancouver and Los Angeles. I've compiled a book of poetry that's completed, and two others I'm working on.
Corin Nemec
#9. I really love poetry. I'm a big E.E. Cummings fan and a big Walt Whitman fan, and I have a big book of poetry.
Mae Whitman
#10. In the Book of Poetry there are three hundred poems, but the meaning of all of them may be put in a single sentence: Have no debasing thoughts.
Confucius
#11. There's a book of poetry
in the lines of my hands
that no one wants to read
Holly Schindler
#12. I'd park myself in the bookstore and read with one eye on everyone coming in. I remember reading a Robert Bly book of poetry.
Sally Mann
#13. I have a book of poetry I believe many should read but in each verse you'll discover it wasn't written for greed.
Stanley Victor Paskavich
#14. The dark night was the first book of poetry and the constellations were the poems.
Chet Raymo
#15. I want to write a book of poetry, as well as children's stories.
Bobby McFerrin
#16. I find a lot of poetry very disappointing, but I do have poets that I go back to. One book of poetry that I'd like to mention is 'The Exchange' by Sophie Cabot Black. Her poems are difficult without being too difficult.
Billy Collins
#17. The counsellor who never reads a novel or never opens a book of poetry is neglecting an important resource for empathic development.
Dave Mearns
#18. I got you a present."
"Did you?"
"It's a book of poetry
romancy stuff. I thought, 'How schmaltzy is that,' so it seemed like the thing. Then I screwed up and left it in my desk at work
J.D. Robb
#19. I've always had a love for poetry and when I got signed to a record label I thought, 'How odd that I'm doing a record before a book of poetry,'
Jewel
#20. I've got a book of poetry by the bed, one of these big collections that goes back to the Greeks and Romans.
Martin Cruz Smith
#21. Anyone who has no need of anybody but himself is either a beast or a God.
Aristotle
Bruce Wayne Sullivan
#22. People who read poetry, for example, like the feel, the heft and the smell of a book.
Simon Armitage
#23. Once, I compared poetry to mothers in my book called To Write as a Woman, because my mother is someone who captures me in her body and gave birth to me out of her desire but washed her hands of me after giving birth to me as a poet.
Kim Hyesoon
#25. Most of the poems I write take 5 minutes, but the words can give a lifetime of relief. Many people that have read my book say it helped them with their grief.
Stanley Victor Paskavich
#26. I chase the wind and get lost in the clouds. I'm sweep into darkness in my search for the light.
Sherman Kennon
#27. Poetry makes its own pertinence, and a single stanza outweighs a book of prose.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#28. From the prose poem "The Universe Thrums on regardless" in my book SPAN.
We are almost nothing in the night. Reduced to warm blobs and the sound of breathing. There is comfort in that.
Jay Woodman
#29. When I was in college, I used to write little ditties and short stories and poetry for my friends. Writing a book is another thing. It is so much different from my traditional day of dirty fingernails and greasy hair and hot pans.
Mario Batali
#30. Concrete poets continue to turn out beautiful things, but to me they're more visual than oral, and they almost really belong on the wall rather than in a book. I haven't the least idea of where poetry is going.
James Laughlin
#31. I'm about 75 pages into a book on poetry. I don't know if anybody wants to read it. It's on any broad variety of subjects. I walk down the street and think of a topic and jot it down and say, 'Okay, that's another one.' They go from the humorous to the serious to every topic imaginable.
Marv Levy
#32. There was no really good true war book during the entire four years of the war. The only true writing that came through during the war was in poetry. One reason for this is that poets are not arrested as quickly as prose writers.
Ernest Hemingway,
#33. Everyone thinks they're going to write one book of poems or one novel.
Marilyn Hacker
#34. I have devoted a whole book (Unweaving the Rainbow) to ultimate meaning, to the poetry of science, and to rebutting, specifically and at length, the charge of nihilistic negativity, so I shall restrain myself here.
Richard Dawkins
#35. If my life was pulled into the pages of a book, there would be coffee stains and wrinkles along the lines of that narrative. Because all I can wish is that the book of my life would be well read and well loved. Living within words and the sound of writing.
F.K. Preston
#36. A book is a physical object in a world of physical objects. It is a set of dead symbols. And then the right reader comes along, and the words - or rather the poetry behind the words, for the words themselves are mere symbols - spring to life, and we have a resurrection of the word.
Jorge Luis Borges
#38. I was reading the poems of Rochester. Rochester made himself out to be bisexual, but I think that was only to shock. Most of his poetry is sexual, even pornographic.
Thom Gunn
#39. To write poems, I think it's important to do research, and research mostly is going to come from books, so all of your reading is potentially helpful to your poetry.
Nikki Giovanni
#40. I hope, too, that my book will illuminate my belief that love of art - be it poetry, storytelling, painting, sculpture, or music - enables people to transcend any barrier man has yet devised.
Mary Ann Shaffer
#41. The difficulty with poetry is that it doesn't have the life that Shakespeare or Jane Austen have beyond the page. You can't make a costume drama out of it. There's no place for it to go except trapped inside its little book.
Simon Schama
#42. Is there a better method of departure by night
than this quiet bon voyage with an open book,
the sole companion who has come to see you off,
to wave you into the dark waters beyond language?
Billy Collins
#43. Cat's waiting is a kind of love.
Jie Zhang
#44. Poor land, poor land, what do you mean
to the heart that moves in me?
Poor love, poor love, poor wife of mine,
why do you weep so bitterly?
(from Retribution book 2, I)
Alexander Blok
#45. T.S. Eliot's influence was enormous on my generation. Much more than Ezra Pound. I actually had to put T.S. Eliot books out of the house because my poetry was so influenced. Everything I wrote sounded like Eliot.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
#46. I don't like to have a calm, orderly, quiet place to work. I often compose while driving, compose in my head. It is true that I wrote my little book, 'The Sounds of Poetry, A Brief Guide,' almost entirely in airplanes and airport departure lounges.
Robert Pinsky
#47. Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse - and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness -
And Wilderness is Paradise enow.
Omar Khayyam
#48. A Writer in Love.
I was just a word weaver
What did I know of love?
Only that
Some days when the words weren't enough,
I knew
I was in love.
Saiber
#49. I did know Ted Hughes and I partly wrote the book to explain to myself and others the complexities of a marriage that was for six years wonderfully productive of poetry and then ended in tragedy.
Anne Stevenson
#50. Life is the courier of the universal brilliance. Elysse
Elysse Poetis
#51. A book of verses underneath the bough
A flask of wine, a loaf of bread and thou
Beside me singing in the wilderness
And wilderness is paradise now.
Omar Khayyam
#52. Think of what starlight
And lamplight would lack
Diamonds and fireflies
If they couldn't lean against Black ...
Mary O'Neill
#53. Whatever poetry that was in me was coming out in the form of constructing art books!
Stephen Vincent Benet
#54. All of those who ask for, request or demand a title of this book will be asked to return it immediately.
Theodore Ficklestein
#55. A book is sent out into the world, and there is no way of fully anticipating the responses it will elicit. Consider the responses called forth by the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare - let alone contemporary poetry or a modern novel.
Chaim Potok
#56. I sent my words out onto the wind
to paths unseen and parts unknown
in hopes people will enjoy
this book of poetic words I've sown
Charles Johnson
#57. I'm Reginald Clark, I'm afraid of the dark
So please do not close this book on me.
Shel Silverstein
#58. The fact is that poetry is not the books in the library ... Poetry is the encounter of the reader with the book, the discovery of the book.
Jorge Luis Borges
#59. She was a poetry book with the wrong dust jacket, shelved in the Reference section.
Joyce Rachelle
#60. Less doth yearning trouble him who knoweth many songs, or with his hands can touch the harp: his possession is his gift of glee which God gave him.
J.R.R. Tolkien
#61. I think my brain is full of collisions and that's how I like to read and process information. I'm always comparing things and I think I do that subconsciously when I'm reading books of poetry.
Victoria Chang
#62. The rhyme pad was a spell book - it summoned asphalt elementals, elder gods, and weeping ancestors, all of whom had your back.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#63. Before she knew it, she was just another set of eyes in a dusty attic, waiting for the stairs to creak.
Kelly Moran
#64. A short poem from my book:
Perspective
Of course
there is a hell
she said
and it has
an observation deck;
so I may
stand and wave
to all those kind
souls below
who warned me
I would go there.
Michelle Hartman
#65. My fears are the obvious ones: that marketplace-minded publishers - all four of them - will shy further away from literary fiction, international authors, poetry, and the other marginal but hugely important regions of the book world.
David Edelstein
#66. Janice Gould is one of our best poets. The music of her poetry will delight you, and her gentle courageous accounts of tribal, family, and personal history make this book unforgettable. Doubters and Dreamers is a master-piece.
Leslie Marmon Silko
#67. You may translate books of science exactly ... The beauties of poetry cannot be preserved in any language except that in which it was originally written.
Samuel Johnson
#68. In another large journal book, he wrote his notes out again, along with further notes on the notes, and then started to cross words out of the completed, annotated notes, carefully removing word after word until he had something that looked like a poem. This was how he imagined poetry to be made.
Iain M. Banks
#69. I have more wisdom than any books ever written in history of times, any scripture ever written which you rhyme but this is not my purpose.
Santosh Kalwar
#70. The thing I've learned writing my book is that everyone has the potential to be a poet, and all of our lives are epic.
Jonathan Heatt
#71. I never tried to be anything other than a dreamer. I never paid any attention to people who told me to go out and live. I belonged always to whatever was far from me and to whatever I could never be. Anything that was not mine, however base, always seemed to be full of poetry.
Fernando Pessoa
#72. Most great books have been about striving in some sense. In a sense, money is the great topic of the novel. You couldn't necessarily say that about poetry.
Chad Harbach
#73. Soul receives from soul that knowledge, therefore not by book nor from tongue. If knowledge of mysteries come after emptiness of mind, that is illumination of heart.
Rumi
#74. I want books written out of a brain and heart and soul crowded and vital with Life, spelled with a big L. I want poetry bursting with passion. I don't care a hang for the 'verbal felicities.' They'll do for the fringe, but I want the garment to warm me first.
Gertrude Atherton
#75. I would like my books to stand as a tool to unbind children from expectations of poetry because it should free the child to self-expression and exploration.
Masiela Lusha
#76. I want to read every book that's written
hear every song that was sung
I want to gaze at every cloud
and hold the zing of each fruit on my tongue.
Sanober Khan
#77. It's a completely powerful and serious book, as good as anything in prose or poetry written by a 'beat' writer, and one of the most alive books written by any American for years. I don't see how it could be considered immoral.
Robert Lowell
#78. My publishers will make any kind of a beautiful book I design and send in to them, but ... For poetry they have less use than a rooster would have for skates.
Gene Stratton-Porter
#79. In mauve sea-orchids as in her striking earlier book Guardians of the Secret, Lila Zemborain brings into relationship the viscera of the body and the spill of the universe in tense compositions that blur distinctions between lyric and prose poetry, between science and eros.
Forrest Gander
#80. A book,
a book full
of human touches,
of shirts,
a book
without loneliness, with men
and tools,
a book
is victory.
Pablo Neruda
#81. You see.. I have this book. Within the pages of this book are things that I should've told you. I call this book "Hesitation".
Andrew King
#82. My first book was an adult novel, 'Down Among the Gods,' published by Virago, and I've written poems as well, a slim volume of poetry.
Kate Thompson
#83. I never really liked "cool" books. I plowed through as much Borges and Joyce as possible, read the first half of V. and spent whole Bar Mitzvah checks on Beat poetry.
Simon Rich
#84. The [book of the bible] Song Of Songs is an amazing erotic love poem that the church has tried very hard not to notice. It is really beautiful, and musical in its poetry.
Alan Green
#85. 'The Dante Club' was one of America's most important book clubs, as their Wednesday night meetings ultimately led to our country's first exposure to Dante's poetry on a wide scale.
Matthew Pearl
#86. I've had it with these cheap sons of bitches who claim they love poetry but never buy a book.
Kenneth Rexroth
#87. Read. Read. Read. Read. Read great books. Read poetry, history, biography. Read the novels that have stood the test of time. And read closely.
David McCullough
#88. I do many kinds of work, and if you forbid me from binding books, from gardening, from writing poetry, from practicing walking meditation, from teaching children, I will be very unhappy. To me, work is pleasant. Pleasant or unpleaseant depends on our way of looking.
Nhat Hanh
#89. Being able to say something lyrically, to say something that will do more than just be words, is really hard. It's easy to do when you're writing a chapter of a book or writing poetry, but it's really hard to do when you're confined to a melody line.
Nikki Sixx
#90. [On Jason Mashak's "I Was Trained to See Shadows", in his poetry book SALTY AS A LIP:] A nice bit of smooth, full-bodied, surreal story telling. I like it.
John Bennett
#91. When you are old and grey and full of sleep
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep
W.B.Yeats
#92. Fishing books , lit by emotion recollected in tranquility, are like poetry.. We do not think of them as books but as men. They are our companions and not only riverside. Summer and winter they are with us and what a pleasant company they are.
Arthur Ransome
#93. Another way of saying "put it in the Book" would be that each poem we write pops up in the city of poetry, where anyone can visit it. Just as we visit the poems written before us. Go to Dickinson's house, or Li Po's or whomever we think has something to say to us that might help or be beautiful.
Gregory Orr
#94. From the shadow of domes in the city of domes,
A snowflake, a blizzard of one, weightless, entered your room
And made its way to the arm of the chair where you, looking up
From your book, saw it the moment it landed. That's all
There was to it.
Mark Strand
#95. As Popa penetrates deeper into his life, with book after book, it begins to look like a Universe passing through a Universe. It is one of the most exciting things in modern poetry, to watch this journey being made.
Ted Hughes
#96. Shut up the door: who loves me must not look / Upon the withered world, but haste to bring / His lighted candle, and his story-book, / And live with me the poetry of spring.
Alice Cary
#97. He took my hand, and pulled me into his living room where a book was open on his sofa. It was poetry, of course, because he was perfect.
Cora Carmack
#98. It is time to float on the waters of the night.
Time to wrap my arms around this book
and press it to my chest, life preserver
in a sea of unremarkable men and women,
anonymous faces on the street,
a hundred thousand unalphabetized things,
a million forgotten hours.
Billy Collins
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