Dead Poet Quotes

#1. A poet might die at twenty-one, a revolutionary or a rock star at twenty four. But after that you assume everything's going to be all right. you've made it past Dead Man's Curve and you're out of the tunnel, cruising straight for your destination down a six lane highway whether you want it or not.

Haruki Murakami

#2. Screamin' 'Carpe Diem!' until I'm a Dead Poet.

Jay-Z

#3. And mighty poets in their misery dead.

William Wordsworth

#4. Therefore the whole apparatus of piety, Hindu and Moslem alike - the temple and mosque, idol and holy water, scriptures and priests - were denounced by this inconveniently clear-sighted poet as mere substitutes for reality; dead things intervening between the soul and its love -

Rabindranath Tagore

#5. A poet could kill the dead.

Cameron Conaway

#6. I have a "carpe diem" mug and, truthfully, at six in the morning the words do not make me want to seize the day. They make me want to slap a dead poet. (Oct. 28th is officially Slap A Dead Poet Day in our Family now)

Joanne Sherman

#7. The poets and philosophers I once loved had it wrong. Death does not come to us all, nor does the passage of time dim our memories and reduce our bodies to dust. Because while I was considered dead, and a headstone had been engraved with my name, in truth my life was just beginning.

Kevin Williamson

#8. They say, poetry is dead. I say, was there ever a time they had a clue of what the state of poetry is?

Jason E. Hodges

#9. And a smaller, sad, little-dead-poet sphere with acne scars spins around us lighting the night ...

N.D. Wilson

#10. I'd better be a poet
Or lay down dead.

Jack Kerouac

#11. 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

#12. In the beginning, said a Persian poet Allah took a rose, a lily, a dove, a serpent, a little honey, a Dead Sea apple, and a handful of clay. When he looked at the amalgram it was a woman.

William Sharp

#13. The poet, by composing poems, uses a language that is neither dead nor living, that few people speak, and few people understand ... We are the servants of an unknown force that lives within us, manipulates us, and dictates this language to us.

Jean Cocteau

#14. Poet' had always sounded like a profession to me, or a talent. But the dead American [Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry] made it sound like a faith.

Ariel Gore

#15. Nine-tenths of English poetic literature is the result either of vulgar careerism or of a poet trying to keep his hand in. Most poets are dead by their late twenties.

Robert Graves

#16. Perhaps already I am dead, And these perhaps are phantoms vain; - These motley phantasies that pass At night through my disordered brain. Perhaps with ancient heathen shapes, Old faded gods, this brain is full; Who, for their most unholy rites, Have chosen a dead poet's skull ...

Heinrich Heine

#17. I'm just interested in finding out what the hell goes. I mean do you have to be a goddam bohemian type, or dead, for Chrissake, to be a real poet? What do you want - some bastard with wavy hair?

J.D. Salinger

#18. Walt Whitman and Emerson are the poets who have given the world more than anyone else. Perhaps Whitman is not so widely read in England, but England never appreciates a poet until he is dead.

Oscar Wilde

#19. Only a poet can translate for the dead.

Marty Rubin

#20. Like my old mentor would always say, Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice and I'll be dead.' Okay, she wasn't a good poet, but that lady could handle her whiskey.

John Zakour

#21. Many luckless people imagine that romance is dead: some, overcivilised, fondly suppose that there never was romance: a poet tells us that romance is unrecognised though really present: but scientists can meet him daily, walking at large and undisguised in the world.

Archibald Hill

#22. We live entirely in the past, nourished by dead thoughts, dead creeds, dead sciences. And it is the past which is engulfing us, not the future. The future always has and always will belong to - the poet.

Henry Miller

#23. Beneath the stars the lake lay dark and sombre," Stead wrote, "but on its shores gleamed and glowed in golden radiance the ivory city, beautiful as a poet's dream, silent as a city of the dead.

Erik Larson

#24. I have decided, it is fruitless. For I am no longer sure of anything concerning my existance. A philosopher is a dead poet and a dying theologian.

Roger Zelazny

#25. Whether the poet is living or dead, they're part of our imaginative community.

Joan Larkin

#26. There has been a time on earth when poets had been young and dead and famous - and were men. But now the poet as the tragic child of grandeur and destiny had changed. The child of genius was a woman, now, and the man was gone.

Tom Wolfe

#27. Nobody alive or dead deserves to be called a poetess.

Helen Bevington

#28. Going down in history is a dead end pursuit

Benny Bellamacina

#29. A dead poet is better than one that's alive

Aaron Ozee

#30. Hang yourself, poet, in your own words.
Otherwise, you are dead.

Langston Hughes