Top 100 Poem In Quotes
#1. When I'm assembling a book I concentrate as though I were writing a poem. A truly imagined arrangement will indicate gaps and generate new poems. I re-read the new poems in my folder in the hope that this might happen.
Michael Longley
#2. A well crafted life is like a good poem. What is left out tells others every bit as much about you as what is added in.
Eric Vance Walton
#3. DeLois lived up the block on 142nd Street and never had her hair done, and all the neighbourhood women sucked their teeth as she walked by. Her crispy hair twinkled in the summer sun as her big proud stomach moved her on down the block while I watched, not caring whether or not she was a poem.
Audre Lorde
#4. Any day of the week I would choose to be "out" with others and in touch with myself ... then to be "in" with others and out of touch with myself.
Portia Nelson
#5. Dancing to the sounds of trees and stones and slow minutes ticking in our hearts and bones.
Jay Woodman
#6. Nothing is lifeless
when the moon writes its screed
on the silvern sand silence
-From the poem:The Universe In Blossom
Munia Khan
#7. 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
#8. I hold that a long poem does not exist. I maintain that the phrase, "a long poem," is simply a flat contradiction in terms.
Edgar Allan Poe
#9. We are always ourselves, no matter where we go. That's what the poem is saying, I think. We have to recognize it, and make what we can here. This world, great as it is, is only just another biome we have to live in.
Kim Stanley Robinson
#10. When you put a poem on a Kindle, the lines are broken in order to fit on the screen. And so instead of being the poet's decision, it becomes the device's decision.
Billy Collins
#11. A poem is a hand, a hook, a prayer. It is a soul in action.
Edward Hirsch
#12. In this quiet place on a quiet street
where no one ever finds us
gently, lovingly, freedom gives back our pain.
from poem In a Quiet Place on a Quiet Street
Aberjhani
#13. It's a big statement if you use the word 'America' in the title of your poem.
Eileen Myles
#14. It's not that he doesn't appreciate beauty, he just appreciates it in his own way. I mean, if a poet sees a daffodil he stares at it and writes a long poem about it, but Twoflower wanders off to find a book on botany.
Terry Pratchett
#15. The poem, the song, the picture, is only water drawn from the well of the people, and it should be given back to them in a cup of beauty so that they may drink - and in drinking understand themselves.
Federico Garcia Lorca
#16. Poetry is a pure meritocracy. There's no room for ambiguity: either a poem moves you and opens up new vistas in life, or it doesn't. It's completely objective, and the best always rise to the top.
Jim Goetz
#17. TOMORROW'S WILL
Silent world, I find myself,
Glad no one hears my thoughts.
In dark cocoon, I hibernate,
Yet spirit spills every thought.
A second chance to try again.
The risks I know too well.
Two sunsets turning into six-
Awaits tomorrow's will.
Giorge Leedy
#18. That is the best instruction you could ever give a poet: whether you're examining a bad line in a poem or a bad motive for action, keep well your repining - meaning, don't ignore the honest muttering in your head.
Alice Oswald
#19. It used to be that one poet in each generation performed poems in public. In the twenties, it was Vachel Lindsay, who sometimes dropped to his knees in the middle of a poem. Then Robert Frost took over, and made his living largely on the road.
Donald Hall
#20. Every poem can be considered in two ways
as what the poet has to say, and as a thing which he makes.
C.S. Lewis
#21. A collection of plants is not a landscape, any more than a list of choice words is a poem. The merit is in the design, not the material it is expressed in, and the best designs, like the best poems, make ordinary material significant by its arrangement.
Nan Fairbrother
#22. our foundation is rocky
because we made a home
in each other's skin.
the damage is beginning
to show.
K.Y. Robinson
#23. Were you always such a stubborn, blind, obtuse girl?"
"Are you calling me stupid?"
"Yes, but in a more poetic way!"
"Well, here's a poem for you. Get lost!
Colleen Houck
#24. If you read every poem in every anthology of Greek poetry, you wouldn't read one poem in which a character of the woman who's loved is described or matters.
Kathy Acker
#25. A good poem has rhyming but no ending, it continues to rhyme in our heart.
Debasish Mridha
#26. It is not easy to describe lucidly in short notes to a poem the various approaches to a fortified castle,
Vladimir Nabokov
#27. It is a novel constructed like a poem, where each character is only exceptional because if the hyperbolic manner in which he represents generality.
Victor Hugo
#28. No blame. No regrets. Gratitude and happiness in every direction.
J.T. Gillett
#29. To read a poem with no thought in mind but to paraphrase it into a single, simple and usually high-minded prose statement is the destruction of poetry.
John Ciardi
#30. In the forestlichen writhes and assembles itself into signs to light my path through the deep dark north shadow; and I emerge at last onto a hillside strewn with logogrammatic stones, and scramble away from spruce tops." in the poem "Beyond the Beacon" from Terra Affirmative.
Jay Woodman
#31. Shade for a man
And shelter for animals,
Planted in your name,
May you be the same for those around you,
Every year the same.
Nancy J Cavanaugh
#32. The heart of the matter seems to me to be the direct interaction between one's making a poem in English and a poem in the language that one understands and values. I don't see how you can do it otherwise.
Robert Fitzgerald
#33. I have a personal little routine that I do in my dressing room just to kind of get myself mentally prepared to go on stage, and part of that is a poem that I read to myself.
Orlando Bloom
#34. The writing of an assay-type poem or a poem investigating perspective isn't an exercise of rational or strategic mind. Poems for me are acts of small or large desperation. They grapple with surfaces too steep to walk in any other way, yet which have to be traveled.
Jane Hirshfield
#35. He is haunted by a demon, a demon against which he feels powerless, because in its first manifestation it has no face, no name, nothing; and the words, the poem he makes, are a kind of exorcism of this demon.
T. S. Eliot
#36. 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
#37. A poem is a box, a thing, to put other things in. For safe keeping.
Marianne Boruch
#38. A poem in the heart is worth
more than a million dollars
in the bank account.
Sanober Khan
#39. A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.
Wallace Stevens
#40. I am my own reflection
But when I look at me
I can see your affliction
Munia Khan
#42. I know you are reading this poem
in a room where too much has happened for you to bear
where the bedclothes lie in stagnant coils on the bed
and the open valise speaks of flight
but you cannot leave yet.
Adrienne Rich
#43. I usually write for the individual reader -though I would like to have many such readers. There are some poets who write for people assembled in big rooms, so they can live through something collectively. I prefer my reader to take my poem and have a one-on-one relationship with it.
Wislawa Szymborska
#44. The Uses of Sorrow
(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)
Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness.
It
Mary Oliver
#45. A poem in my opinion, is opposed to a work of science by having for its immediate object, pleasure, not truth.
Edgar Allan Poe
#46. A poem is an invitation to a voyage. As in life, we travel to see fresh sights.
Charles Simic
#47. Write poetry as if you were in love. If you are always in love you will not always write the same poem, but if you are never in love, you may.
- from My Olivetti Speaks
Kenneth Koch
#48. The poem, for me, is simply the first sound realized in the modality of being.
Charles Olson
#49. In ancient Jewish tradition, as far back as we can tell, the Song of Songs was not interpreted as a love poem or as an allegory of the individual soul; it was interpreted as an allegory of God's spousal love for the people of Israel.
Brant Pitre
#50. We hold that the most wonderful and splendid proof of genius is a great poem produced in a civilized age.
Thomas Babington Macaulay
#51. Then you are a poet?' she asked, fingering the flyer in her pocket.
'No not at all,' he waved his hand. 'I am merely a character in a poem.
Karen Tei Yamashita
#52. To write about the monstrous sense of alienation the poet feels in this culture of polarized hatreds is a way of staying sane. With the poem, I reach out to an audience equally at odds with official policy, and I celebrate our mutual humanness in an inhuman world.
Maxine Kumin
#53. In short stories there's more permission to be elliptical. You can have image-logic, or it's almost like a poem in that you can come to a lot of meanings within a short space.
Karen Russell
#54. The form of a poem is invisible. A poem is not an "object." This is hard to accept in a mechanical age.
Wendell Berry
#55. You do not see the painting in the attic
The maggots on skin that tear.
The beauty is a trick.
Narcissus - promise naught but air...' ~ Dorian Gray
Stella Coulson
#56. A poem often begins in the midst of wonderful wandering thoughts that are eager to open wings to fly in the beautiful blue sky of imagination.
Debasish Mridha
#57. Every poem I write falls short in some important way. But I go on trying to write the one that won't.
Dorianne Laux
#58. Ode to the Chamber
... linger here amidst the chamber
in which we embrace our love
talk to me of sonnets
and call me turtledove ...
Muse
#59. The success of the poem is determined not by how much the poet felt in writing it, but by how much the reader feels in reading it.
John Ciardi
#60. His lips move silently, and I know what he says: the words of a poem that only two people in the world know.
Ally Condie
#61. He reads every book in his home but it is not enough. The country boy craves stories. He devours every poem and fable in his school and library. Still he hungers. For stories.
Jennifer Lanthier
#62. When love is sweet, the sweetness means its light
And light may keep the truth, when love is pure.
But love is bitter, when it turns to fight.
Lovers in a fight are quite immature.'
From the poem 'A Note on Existentialist Love
Marieta Maglas
#63. The divine spark leaps from the finger of God to the finger of Adam, whether it takes ultimate shape in a law of physics or a law of the land, a poem or a policy, a sonata or a mechanical computer.
Alfred Whitney Griswold
#64. In the words of a Zen poem, At dusk the cock announces dawn; At midnight, the bright sun.
Fritjof Capra
#65. How can I wear the harness of toil
And sweat at the daily round,
While in my soul forever
The drums of Pictdom sound?
Robert E. Howard
#66. Ireland is not at all a simple place, and in many ways it is spare and sad. It has no wealth, no power, no stability, no influence, no fashion, no size. Its only real arts are song and drama and poem. But Limerick alone has two thousand ruined castles and surely that many practicing poets.
Shana Alexander
#67. When we are feeling at a loss in a poem, metaphor comes to the rescue. Metaphor is instructive, tactical, and interactive; it succeeds when its audience sees it as both strange and true. We need metaphor to make the error that allows us to reach beyond ourselves.
Ann Townsend
#68. Beneath her curls, I forget the world,
With a mere gaze she raises my hopes of gold.
Love is as much in her heart as in mine,
But she doesn't say it, her punishment so divine.
Faraaz Kazi
#69. I'm sorry,' I said. 'I'm sorry for everything. For the past and the future.' An apology, said while in dull pain, made me feel as close to human as it was possible to feel. I could almost have written a poem.
Matt Haig
#70. If a poem is concentrated, a closed fist, then a novel is relaxed and expansive, an open hand: it has roads, detours, destinations; a heart line, a head line; morals and money come into it. Where the fist excludes and stuns, the open hand can touch and encompass a great deal in its travels.
Sylvia Plath
#71. Martin's Monsanto poem holds devastating power. I heard the first public reading at the Resurgence Festival of well-being in London. It brought truth with clarity, not least with a kind of conviction and passion that is all too rare
Tony Juniper
#72. I will meet you on the nape of your neck one day, on the surface of intention, word becoming act.
We will breathe into each other the high mountain tales, where the snows come from, where the waters begin.
-In the yellow time of pollen
Luke Davies
#73. I am privileged to have your illuminating presence in my life that adds etherealness to my existence!
Avijeet Das
#74. Dreams like a podcast,
Downloading truth in my ears.
They tell me cool stuff."
"Apollo?" I guess, because I figured nobody else could make a haiku that bad.
He put his finger to his lips. "I'm incognito. Call me Fred."
"A god named Fred?
Rick Riordan
#75. When I was 3, I recited a poem at a festival in Passaic, New Jersey. The applause was tremendous, and it hit me that I could affect people positively by performing.
Nina Arianda
#76. When I was in Marine training I memorised 'The Waste Land,' which was a significant experience in terms of really breaking apart language and thinking about how the different voices in that poem function.
Phil Klay
#77. It is not good form to take a Trick out unless one is so firmly established as to be able to afford being associated with someone who might at any given moment write a poem in public.
Fran Lebowitz
#78. I cannot recall the words of my first poem but I remember a promise I made my pen never to leave it lying in somebody else's blood.
Audre Lorde
#79. Every poem holds the unspeakable inside it. The unsayable ... The thing that you can't really say because it's too complicated. It's too complex for us. Every poem has that silence deep in the center of it.
Marie Howe
#80. The amazing feeling that triggers the fountain of words that flow in my belly.
Euginia Herlihy
#81. Writing can sometimes be exploitative. I like to take a few steps of remove in order to respect the privacy of the subject. If readers make the link, they have engaged with the poem.
John Barton
#82. No one begs you to be a poet or write a 1000-page poem. You have to be fueled by a drive, a conviction - a need, a necessity, a vision that is so pressing that it has no other outlet but through you. That doesn't mean that you are unconscious or in trance, but there can be moments like that.
Anne Waldman
#83. Like sunlight under their skins, they want to be loved from the poem STAY in RidingTheEscalator
Jay Woodman
#84. He could see her planting violets on his grave, a solitary figure in a grey cloak. What a ghastly tragedy. A lump came to his throat. He became quite emotional thinking of his own death. He would have to write a poem about this.
from a Difference in Temperament
Daphne Du Maurier
#85. This quality becomes important at a time when almost everyone is a poet. And as I said, we live in an age where almost everybody is a poet, but scarcely anyone can write a poem.
Clive James
#86. Don't cry my son
Don't cry, because life is a redeemed fight
Life is a fight that will demean the weak person
And will always exalt the strong ones
Goncalves Dias
#87. In my world, history comes down to language and art. No one cares much about what battles were fought, who won them and who lost them - unless there is a painting, a play, a song or a poem that speaks of the event.
Theodore Bikel
#88. love ridden
i searched for you
in corridors,
open doors
and in endless seas
of similes
and metaphors
but we never were
on the same page.
K.Y. Robinson
#89. 'Safe Harbor' is a state of mind ... it's the place - in reality or metaphor - to which one goes in times of trouble or worry. It can be a friendship, marriage, church, garden, beach, poem, prayer, or song.
Luanne Rice
#90. In a poem the excitement has to maintain itself. I am governed by the pull of the sentence as the pull of a fabric is governed by gravity.
Marianne Moore
#91. In the novel or the journal you get the journey. In a poem you get the arrival.
May Sarton
#92. Where there are many beauties in a poem I shall not cavil at a few faults proceeding either from negligence or from the imperfection of our nature.
Horace
#93. A poem is the perfect place to celebrate imperfection and exult in the ways you fall short of being the person you want to be.
Taylor Mali
#94. Translation makes me look at how a poem is put together in a different way, without the personal investment of the poem I'm writing myself, but equally closely technically.
Marilyn Hacker
#95. I long for
a little life,
an everyday life,
a splash of sunlight
through a window
a smile from a stranger -
a heart to hold in mine.
Menna Van Praag
#96. It is important that we have the inner richness to be able to look up at the stars or the moon and compose a poem once in a while. When we open wide our minds and fix our gaze on the universe, we fix our gaze on our own life.
Daisaku Ikeda
#97. You have a story in there, Lucy," she said, touching my head. "Or a character, a place, a poem, a moment in time. When you find it, you will write it. Word after word after word after word," she whispered.
Patricia MacLachlan
#98. One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.
Paul Muldoon
#99. We need each other yet, we bleed each other of the very life we are all drowning in with one another...
The1Essence
#100. Words are what sticks to the real. We use them to push the real, to drag the real into the poem. They are what we hold on with, nothing else. They are as valuable in themselves as rope with nothing to be tied to.
Jack Spicer
