Top 78 Memory Poetry Quotes
#1. Following the invention of writing, the special form of heightened language, characteristic of the oral tradition and a collective society, gave way to private writing. Records and messages displaced the collective memory. Poetry was written and detached from the collective festival.
Harold Innis
#2. Conservatism makes no poetry, breathes no prayer, has no invention; it is all memory. Reform has no gratitude, no prudence, no husbandry.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#3. Wide sea, that one continuous murmur breeds
Along the pebbled shore of memory!
Many old rotten-timber'd boats there be
Upon thy vaporous bosom, magnified
To goodly vessels; many a sail of pride,
And golden keel'd, is left unlaunch'd and dry.
John Keats
#4. Memories are either the greatest poetry, when they are memories of a vital happiness, or a burning pain, when they touch dried wounds.
p. 479
Ivan Goncharov
#5. Poetry is a vocal art for me - but not necessarily a performative one. It might be reading to oneself or recalling some lines by memory.
Robert Pinsky
#6. when I finally begin to drift
into sleep
your memory is the...first
and the moonlight
the last, to kiss my face.
Sanober Khan
#7. Life's full of loss, who knows the cost, living in the memory of the love that never was.
Linda Ronstadt
#8. And, even yet, I dare not let it languish,
Dare not indulge in memory's rapturous pain;
Once drinking deep of that divinest anguish,
How could I seek the empty world again?
Emily Bronte
#9. The wheat field has ... poetry; it is like a memory of something one has once seen. We can only make our pictures speak.
Vincent Van Gogh
#10. There are so many things that poetry is about, one of which is memory.
Peter Davison
#11. Next o'er his books his eyes began to roll,
In pleasing memory of all he stole.
Alexander Pope
#12. Hope and Memory have one daughter and her name is Art, and she has built her dwelling far from the desperate field where men hang out their garments upon forked boughs to be banners of battle. O beloved daughter of Hope and Memory, be with me for a while.
W.B.Yeats
#13. The fun and fame do not last, while the memory of a real helper is kept green long after poetry is forgotten and music silent.
Louisa May Alcott
#15. But tears are an indulgence. Memory sings.
May Sarton
#16. True poetry is a function of awakening. It awakens us, but it must retain the memory of previous dreams.
Gaston Bachelard
#17. The voice is raised, and that is where poetry begins. And even today, in the prolonged aftermath of modernism, in places where 'open form' or free verse is the orthodoxy, you will find a memory of that raising of the voice in the term 'heightened speech.'
James Fenton
#18. You can find poetry in your everyday life, your memory, in what people say on the bus, in the news, or just what's in your heart.
Carol Ann Duffy
#19. A gaze to stop still, wonder at the shimmering depths.
A memory near the amygdala stored, an unforgettable tune,
Such an image did it impress, your sweet nostalgic scents.
Selina A. Mahmood
#20. Poetry distracts me from going deeper over ... the edge. it is rough and shiny like black diamonds.it dazzles,it enhances,your everything. Each moment,every memory, you touch.
Emily H. Sturgill
#21. I'll enjoy today while it's here, using the time wisely. Each day is a gift that soon becomes a memory.
Lina Rehal
#22. From key signature to coda, from downbeat to the sound of life's final fermata, our pasts set the tone for all that was, that is, and that ever would
be.
Jamie A. Hughes
#23. The storms inside uncoil
into sky held calm by far seeing eyes
Memories dressed in the translucent
trickery of the mind,
so as to wear life upon themselves,
give up their tired dance and run
into free frequency
Tamara Rendell
#25. My memory often seems like a city of exiled poets afire with the astonishment of language, each believing in the integrity of his own witness, each with a separate version of culture and history, and the divine essential fire that is poetry itself.
Pat Conroy
#26. Part memory part distance remaining
mine in the ways that I learn to miss you
W.S. Merwin
#27. I didn't know the demons
that walked across your memory.
They came from the dust
when you were at peace
in your grave.
Susie Clevenger
#28. Each loved one went silently down;
bubbles bursting leaving behind
images they held
to stick on the glass of memory.
Dr. Prathap Kamath Elegy
#29. Reciting poetry isn't acting, it's memory work. Actor's are deceivers. People who pretend to be something else for a living aren't right in the head.
Hetty King
#30. Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.
A.E. Housman
#31. and you taste / of the memory of god abandoned.
Mikl Paul
#32. I believe poetry has very little to do with memory.
Nick Flynn
#33. Memory and poetry go together, absolutely. It is a matter of preserving and of remembering things.
Lisel Mueller
#34. most of the times
it's the hardest
to say
what I love more
you
or
your memory.
Sanober Khan
#35. You can make a difference in another person's life and not realize it, just by giving them One Moment of your time, One Memory to recall, One Motion that tells them they are not alone! OM!
Deb Simpson
#37. There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.
Philip Levine
#38. You'd think hindsight would do us some good
But all it does sometimes
Is add glass to the kaleidoscope
J.D. Estrada
#39. Your memory is a warm stone hidden in my hand I'm always turning over ...
John Geddes
#40. Memory exercised in a particular way is a natural gift of poetic genius. The poet above all else, is a person who never forgets certain sense impressions which he has experienced and which he can relive again as though with all their original freshness.
Stephen Spender
#41. I miss you because memory
is a kind editor.
The past is a long scroll and
in it is the story of us,
told with gentle metaphor, and
words that bring
you back and back, even as you
lie there, lying.
Corey Mesler
#42. We are our memory,
we are that chimerical museum of shifting shapes,
that pile of broken mirrors.
Jorge Luis Borges
#44. Poetry had great powers over me from my childhood, and today the poems live in my memory which I read at the age of 7 or 8 years and which drove me to desperate attempts at imitation.
Bayard Taylor
#45. There are few greater treasures to be acquired in youth than great poetry-and prose-stored in the memory. At the time one may resent the labor of storing. But they sleep in the memory and awake in later years, illuminated by life and illuminating it.
Richard Livingstone
#46. My mother wrote poetry when I was young - I have an early memory of the sound of her typewriter - and my father told me inventive bedtime stories.
Eula Biss
#47. There's not a good poet I know who has not at the beck and call of his memory a vast quantity of poetry that composes his mental library.
Anthony Hecht
#48. I now know how your anger
came from skeletons
that rattled in your heart
and you couldn't escape them.
Susie Clevenger
#50. 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
#51. It's a showy habit I've got," I say. "To be always quoting poetry and stuff. Some of us use our brains, and some of us use our memories.
Barbara Trapido
#52. I give a damn if any fan recalls my legacy, I'm trying to live life in the sight of GOD's memory.
Mos Def
#53. In Italy, almost at every step, history and poetry add to the graces of nature, sweeten the memory of the past, and seem to preserve it in eternal youth.
Madame De Stael
#54. And all the hurts and scars / Of everyday were healed, and I would sleep / Safe with the good-night memory of stars.
Jane Merchant
#56. 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
#57. I find it incredibly amazing how at every sunset, the sky is a different shade. No cloud is ever in the same place. Each day is a new masterpiece. A new wonder. A new memory.
Sanober Khan
#58. The inlet
our friend looks as he did
when we first knew him,
and until I wake I believe
I will die of grief, for I know
that this boy grew into a man
who was a faithful friend
who died.
Wendell Berry
#59. 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
#60. I strike the ground with the soles of my feet and life rises up my legs, spreads up my skeleton, takes possession of me, drives away distress and sweetens my memory. The world trembles.
Isabel Allende
#61. April is the cruelest month, breeding
lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
memory and desire, stirring
dull roots with spring rain.
T. S. Eliot
#62. Romance like a ghost escapes touching; it is always where you are not, not where you are. The interview or conversation was prose at the time, but it is poetry in the memory.
George William Curtis
#64. Memory, when it juts, retreats, recovers, shows us how to hold the darkness, how to breathe.
Drew Myron
#65. A lot we have in our head,
But things of heart are not yet dead,
They have done none, but just fled,
Out of us, Forgotten, just been bled..
Numey
#66. I want to live doubly - first with you and then afterwards in memory ...
John Geddes
#67. I'm sure that you didn't think I would notice,
but we memorize the strangest things in a person
when we're in love with them.
Danabelle Gutierrez
#68. And thus thy memory is to me
Like some enchanted far-off isle
In some tumultuous sea
Some ocean throbbing far and free
With storms - but where meanwhile
Serenest skies continually
Just o'er that one bright island smile.
Edgar Allan Poe
#69. Memories come to mind like excavated statues
that have misplaced their heads.
Wislawa Szymborska
#70. Then there was someone else I met,
whose face and voice I can't forget,
and the memory of her
is like a jail I'm trapped inside,
or maybe she is something I just use
to hold my real life at a distance.
Tony Hoagland
#71. I hid my love when young till I
Couldn't bear the buzzing of a fly;
I hid my life to my despite
Till I could not bear to look at light:
I dare not gaze upon her face
But left her memory in each place;
Where'er I saw a wild flower lie
I kissed and bade my love good-bye.
John Clare
#72. No mark survives this place: you too will yield
to unmemory.
Mathew Henderson
#73. Lucifer unbound his absolution
His purpose took unstoppable form
A wyrm whose brilliance blinded
Tenacity burned as radiant as the Almighty
Lucifer remembered this so vividly
A fond memory of when God stood thunderstruck
D.J. LeMarr
#75. Since there is no real silence,
Silence will contain all the sounds,
All the words, all the languages,
All knowledge, all memory.
Dejan Stojanovic
#76. Now and then, I remember you in times
Unbelievable. And in places not made for memory
But for the transient, the passing that does not remain.
Yehuda Amichai
#77. This empty shell holds nothing but the echoes of what was.
Jenim Dibie
#78. the flicker of a memory
is all we can cling to
for our cherished ghosts
From "Cat Paws on a Windscreen
J.S. Watts
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