Top 100 Living Poetry Quotes
#2. Be silent now. Say fewer and fewer praise poems. Let yourself become living poetry.
Rumi
#3. Let yourself become living poetry.
Rumi
#4. Politics, poverty, riches, etc - these are but backdrops for the grand cinema, the opera: the glory of your life. Sure, change the backdrops, make them better, but it is this inside-ness that matters most. Nothing else, at the last breath, matters, but your very own poetry. The glory of living.
Alex Ebert
#6. The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practice.
Virginia Woolf
#7. Poetry ought to be a by-product of living, and you can't have a by-product unless you've got a product first.
Wallace Stegner
#8. And so I've written everything down, too afraid of my demons and what they may say, the doubt that eats at me from the inside. Too afraid that I'll forget and it'll all be a madwoman's dream.
Nadege Richards
#9. Living together/ is one move closer/ to living apart
Kristi Maxwell
#10. Life. This morning the sun made me adore it. It had, behind the dripping pine trees, the oriental brightness, orange and crimson, of a living being, a rose and an apple, in the physical and ideal fusion of a true and daily paradise.
Juan Ramon Jimenez
#11. If I Must Go
If I must go to heaven's end
Climbing the ages like a stair,
Be near me and forever bend
With the same eyes above me there;
Time will fly past us like leaves flying,
We shall not heed, for we shall be
Beyond living, beyond dying,
Knowing and known unchangeably.
Sara Teasdale
#12. Then one can't make a living out of poetry? Certainly not. What fool expects to? Out of rhyming, yes.
Jack London
#13.
Who knows what death, anxiety of the living,
Who knows what loneliness, end of the loving
I could say to myself of the love (I had):
Let it not be immortal, since it is flame
But let it be infinite while it lasts.
Vinicius De Moraes
#14. I have a lot of work to do today;
I need to slaughter memory,
Turn my living soul to stone
Then teach myself to live again.
Anna Akhmatova
#15. Living here on Earth, we breathe the rhythms of a universe that extends infinitely above us. When resonant harmonies arise between this vast outer cosmos and the inner human cosmos, poetry is born.
Daisaku Ikeda
#16. There are so many days
when living stops and pulls up and sits
and waits like a train on the rails.
Charles Bukowski
#17. On a practical level, poetry isn't something anybody has really made a great living at. I might sell some books and, once in a while, someone might pay to hear me read.
Viggo Mortensen
#18. 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
#19. There's plenty of room for strangeness, mystery, originality, wildness, etc. in poems that also invite the reader into the human and alive center about which the poem circles.
Thomas Lux
#20. I felt torn
Between living and dying
Between sleeping and surviving.
Stacy Morris
#21. since the hardships of life is what has made me strong, instead of living with regrets--I'm thankful for what went wrong
Jason Frisby
#22. Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies.
And be it gash or gold it will not come
Again in this identical disguise.
Gwendolyn Brooks
#23. What is this slow blue dream of living,
and this fevered death by dreaming?
Aberjhani
#24. Had we but world enough and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down, and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love's day.
Andrew Marvell
#25. Existence is where the soul goes to learn how to interpret itself again.
Duncan McNaughton
#26. I didn't know who to
believe
but
one thing I do
know: when a man is
living
many claim relationships
that are hardly
so
and after he dies, well,
then it's everybody's
party.
Charles Bukowski
#27. Let me live my final days whole.
Let my memory remain that I might know love's face.
Life don't unwrap me to be fed to scavengers.
I want to escape into light - not exist in darkness.
Susie Clevenger
#28. People speak generally of a plain style and an elaborate style. I think this is wrong, because what is important ... is that poetry should be living ...
Jorge Luis Borges
#29. Late, by myself, in the boat of myself,
no light and no land anywhere,
cloudcover thick. I try to stay
just above the surface, yet I'm already under
and living within the ocean.
Rumi
#30. You fantasize about me reading my poems to you - it doesn't work that way - I write down everything later - living is not an after-thought ...
John Geddes
#31. Well I guess the plan was to write poetry and publish books and make a living from writing poetry. That was a pretty ambitious plan I guess.
Robert Adamson
#32. Poetry is paying attention to life when all the world seems asleep to its beauties and truths ...
John Geddes
#33. First of all, the art of living; then as my ideal profession, poetry and philosophy, and as my real profession, plastic arts; in the last resort, for lack of income, illustrations.
Paul Klee
#34. We live mindfully by harvesting evocative scenes to pay attention to including the mountains and oceans, flowers and trees, love and friendship, music and literature, art and poetry.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#35. I do not know how it is elsewhere, but here, in this country, poetry is a healing, life-giving thing, and people have not lost the gift of being able to drink of its inner strength. People can be killed for poetry here-a sign of unparalleled respect-because they are still capable of living by it.
Osip Mandelstam
#36. Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.
Robert Penn Warren
#37. Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air.
Carl Sandburg
#38. There is nothing like scrubbing toilets for a living to make you question the choices you have made in life.
Raegan Butcher
#39. A lifetime isn't long enough for the beauty of this world
and the responsibilities of your life.
Scatter your flowers over the graves, and walk away.
Be good-natured and untidy in your exuberance.
In the glare of your mind, be modest.
And beholden to what is tactile, and thrilling.
Mary Oliver
#40. They were living exciting, crazy, queer lives full of poetry and camaraderie and heart-seizing crushes. I mean, not that night, but generally. That night they were bored.
Michelle Tea
#41. The greatest happiness is a quiet kind. It's the tender understanding that we're living in a very strange place full of strange creatures. And there's quite a bit of wonder in that.
F.K. Preston
#42. If you are not living on the edge you are taking up too much space!
Beryl Broekman
#43. at man's height the mouth utters its cries, tosses forth its oracles, gives vent to its puns. To allow words to come to life, bare themselves, and show us by chance, for the space of a lightning bolt bony with dice, a few of our reasons for living and dying
Michel Leiris
#44. He was living, breathing poetry. Not love poetry, but the poetry which tears out your heart, rips it to shreds, pushes it back into your chest, and makes you question what the hell just obliterated your soul.
Tillie Cole
#45. If I'd have wanted civilization I'd have stayed in Tennessee and wrote poetry for a living,
Larry McMurtry
#46. We inhale life and exhale words. that's just what writers' do
Terry A. O'Neal
#47. Theater and poetry were what helped people stay alive and want to go on living.
Vanessa Redgrave
#48. Write to me your most perfect epitaph, or I shall compare a poet to a lecturer. Thou art more Spartan than a ballad monger who makes his living as a Wal-Mart greeter;
Scott Jonathan Nixon
#50. Poetry, being elegance itself, cannot hope to achieve visibility. It insists on living its own life.
Jean Cocteau
#51. You may have read the poetry, but you haven't lived it. And that's what makes the difference.
Suzanne Harper
#52. I can't understand Urdu, Bahasa or Russian, but when the Pakistani Faiz, the Indonesian Rendra and the Russian Rosdentvensky declaim, I can feel the living throb of rhythm and music, the warmth and passion of their poetry, as do the hundreds, not a mere roomful, of poetry lovers in the audience.
F. Sionil Jose
#53. We've given up making a living, its all this crazy love poetry now!
Rumi
#54. Not so much living, but a hovering without sense.
Ada Limon
#55. 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
#58. Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.
Carl Sandburg
#59. She went by the name of Belisa Crepusculario, not because she'd been born with it or baptized it, but because she herself had searched until she found the poetry of 'beauty' and 'twilight' and cloaked herself in it. She made her living selling words.
Isabel Allende
#60. The worm doth woo the mortal, death claims a living bride,
Night unto day is married, morn unto eventide,
Earth a merry damsel, and heaven a knight so true,
And Earth is quite coquettish, and beseemeth in vain to sue.
Emily Dickinson
#61. At times you have to fight really hard to remember it. Fight within your mind's dungeons and bring it out alive before it could have been killed and buried forever by the demons living deep down inside your mind's dungeons.
Avijeet Das
#62. 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
#63. Does poem also walk through the valleys seeking tongues from dandelions?
Ymatruz
#64. One would like to live poetically, that is, with gratitude and grace.
Marty Rubin
#65. Don't sign your name
between worlds,
surmount
the manifold of meanings,
trust the tearstain,
learn to live.
Paul Celan
#66. Some want to be writers when life permits it. There is no part-time in being a writer. It's an all-in way of living your life through words and feelings scratched out with a pen.
Jason E. Hodges
#67. It is always better
to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning.
For every one of us, living in this world
means waiting for our end. Let whoever can
win glory before death. When a warrior is gone,
that will be his best and only bulwark.
Seamus Heaney
#68. I keep dying and hoping you notice me. But you're too busy living.
F.K. Preston
#70. Translation is an interestingly different way to be involved both with poetry and with the language that I've found myself living in much of the time. I think the two feed each other.
Marilyn Hacker
#71. There Is A Lion In My Living Room
I feed it raw meat
so it does not hurt me.
It is a strange thing
to nourish what could kill you
in the hopes it does not kill you.
Clementine Von Radics
#72. The world is full of poetry. The air is living with its spirit; and the waves dance to the music of its melodies, and sparkle in its brightness.
James Gates Percival
#73. It always felt as though there were a shaken beehive living in my chest. I could never rest.
Stacy Morris
#74. I've never
stopped wanting to cross
the equator, or touch an elk's
horns, or sing Tosca or screw
James Dean in a field of wheat.
To hell with wisdom. They're all wrong:
I'll never be through with my life.
Rita Dove
#75. 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
#76. Harmonious words render ordinary ideas acceptable; less ordinary, pleasant; novel and ingenious ones, delightful. As pictures and statues, and living beauty, too, show better by music-light, so is poetry irradiated, vivified, glorified', and raised into immortal life by harmony.
Walter Savage Landor
#77. all my life
i have looked for poems
to elope with.
Sanober Khan
#78. I've never aspired to be more than a dreamer. I paid no attention to those who spoke to me of living. I've always belonged to what isn't where I am and to what I could never be. Whatever isn't mine, no matter how base, has always had poetry for me.
Fernando Pessoa
#80. Life is other, always there,
further off, beyond you and
beyond me, always on the horizon,
life which unlives us and makes us strangers,
that invents our face and wears it away
Octavio Paz
#81. Life's full of loss, who knows the cost, living in the memory of the love that never was.
Linda Ronstadt
#82. The dead cannot sleep long when the moon is round
The dead toss and turn deep in the muddy ground
The dead never rest well in the living house
The dead hear the secrets the owl tells the mouse
Shannon Hale
#83. I don't think anybody in my family meant there to be any pressure for me to write. But our parents were incredibly verbal and wrote for a living. The house was full of books, and we all grew up steeped in language. I mean, our mother recited poetry at the dinner table.
Hallie Ephron
#84. ..Breaking yet budding,
dying yet living - standing
amongst ruins and rage,
reaching for possibilities
playing hard to get.
Meraaqi
#85. Whatever your life's pursuit
art, poetry, sculpture, music, whatever your occupation may be
you can be as spiritual as clergy, always living a life of praise.
Hazrat Inayat Khan
#86. The spirit of poetry, like all other living powers, must of necessity circumscribe itself by rules, were it only to unite power with beauty.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#87. So Lightning says to Mud,
"What would happen if I struck your blood?"
And Mud says, "Brother,
It would hurt,
And make me the mother
Of every living thing.
But, Fire Boy, you ain't lifting my grass skirt
Until you burn me a ring.
Sherman Alexie
#88. I think poetry without metaphor is like husband and wife living in separate bedrooms.
Munia Khan
#89. 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
#90. Maybe poetry's not so important, but ... it makes life worth living.
Arda Collins
#91. He feared his maturity as it grew upon him with its ripe thought, its skill, its finished art; yet which lacked the poetry of boyhood to make living a full end of life.
T.E. Lawrence
#92. Oh I must pass nothing by
Without loving it much,
The raindrop try with my lips,
The grass with my touch;
For how can I be sure
I shall see again
The world on the first of May
Shining after the rain?
Sara Teasdale
#93. Language is rich, and malleable. It is a living, vibrant material, and every part of a poem works in conjunction with every other part - the content, the place, the diction, the rhythm, the tone-as well as the very sliding, floating, thumping, rapping sounds of it.
Mary Oliver
#94. I think the culture can absorb so many people writing poetry and trying to earn their living in poetry.
Edward Hirsch
#95. To-day I shall be strong,
No more shall yield to wrong,
Shall squander life no more;
Days lost, I know not how,
I shall retrieve them now;
Now I shall keep the vow
I never kept before.
A.E. Housman
#96. Once every five hundred years or so, a summary statement about poetry comes along that we can't imagine ourselves living without.
A.R. Ammons
#97. Ye are better than all the ballads
That ever were sung or said;
For ye are living poems,
And all the rest are dead.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#98. For poetry exists to break through to below the level of reason where the angels and monsters that the amenities keep in the cellar may come out to dance, to rove and roar, growling and singing, to bring life back to the enclosed rooms where too often we are only 'living and partly living.
May Sarton
#99. You may follow the footsteps
The whole day will pass
With you going around in circles
Yet not reaching anywhere at last!
Avijeet Das
#100. I think that the dark side of MFA programs is that they're generating more poets than the culture can absorb and there are more people writing poetry than possibly read it or can certainly earn a living around it.
Edward Hirsch
