Top 100 Poem In Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. A poem in the heart is worth
more than a million dollars
in the bank account.
Sanober Khan
#6. A poem in my opinion, is opposed to a work of science by having for its immediate object, pleasure, not truth.
Edgar Allan Poe
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.
Paul Muldoon
#10. A poem in form still has to have voice, gesture, a sense of discovery, a metaphoric connection, as any poetry does.
Robert Morgan
#11. Kethry had once described summoning as being like balancing on a rooftree while screaming an epic poem in a foreign language at the top of your lungs.
Mercedes Lackey
#12. Poem in other words may or may not result from inspiration but must (in reader and author alike) produce it
Franz Wright
#13. The children walk away from me, flick flickety off at a tangent between thin blotched beech trunks, then turn like yo-yos at the end of their strings and come back to me" from the poem "In a BishopsWood Clearing
Jay Woodman
#15. If you quote a poem in a sermon today, some people think you are being mushy, but if you quoted one back in the day, people would have felt you were getting to the core of an idea, to the real, whole truth of it.
Donald Miller
#16. I began a poem in lines of one syllable. It's rather difficult, but the merit of all things lies in their difficulty. The subject matter is gallant. I'll read you the first canto; it's four hundred verses long and takes one minute.
Alexandre Dumas
#17. The usual bad poem in somebody's Collected Works is a learned, mannered, valued habit, a habit a little more careful than, and little emptier than, brushing one's teeth.
Randall Jarrell
#18. We took Beowulf, the epic poem in Old English, and put it right together with John Gardner's contemporary retelling. If you bring it into today, we really feel that it has something very fresh to say now.
Julie Taymor
#19. I deliberately wrote a poem in my last book where I was suggesting that there are other passions as great as or more important than the passion of sex.
Thom Gunn
#20. He wanted to tell the baby that Paris was like a poem in stone.
Simon Van Booy
#21. A elegantly executed proof is a poem in all but the form in which it is written.
Morris Kline
#22. He really believes that to write a poem in praise of my mother (her eyes, her hair, her lips) and come by to read it aloud will soften her, make him welcome in his own house.
Ian McEwan
#23. When you get a poem [in a public place], it happens to you so suddenly that you don't have time to deploy your anti-poetry deflector shields that were installed in high school.
Billy Collins
#24. I've only written one decent poem in my life called "Lizard up My Leg": A lizard up my leg gave me a fright Not because he did, but 'cause he might. Okay, not a great poem, but it's honest and also it's short so I can remember it.
Danny Rubin
#25. Each poem in becoming generates the laws by which it is generated: extensions of the laws to other poems never completely take.
A.R. Ammons
#26. Siken occasionally locates a poem in loss as enacted, not implicit, event. These are among his most beautiful poems, their capitulations heartbreaking in the context of prolonged animal struggle against acknowledgement.
Louise Gluck
#27. A good poem is not completely a poem until it has received a critical response that grows out of the poem in an almost biological way.
Michael Longley
#28. Reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil.
Anne Michaels
#30. In the manner of one recognizing a line from a familiar poem in a strange book.
Neil Gaiman
#31. The poem in the head is always perfect. Resistance begins when you try to convert it into language.
Stanley Kunitz
#32. I approach writing a poem in a much different state than when I am writing prose. It's almost as if I were working in a different language when I'm writing poetry. The words - what they are and what they can become - the possibilities of the words are vastly expanded for me when I'm writing a poem.
Pattiann Rogers
#33. I believe everyone has this fuckin' poem in his heart.
Bill Hicks
#34. The first poem in The Beauty holds a woman in Portugal in a wheelchair singing, with great power, a fado. I have never seen this or heard of it, the image simply arrived. But surely such a thing has happened. And it matters to me that it has, or could.
Jane Hirshfield
#35. That night when you kissed me, I left a poem in your mouth, and you can hear some of the lines every time you breathe out.
Andrea Gibson
#36. For the last four years of her life, Mother was in a nursing home called Chateins in St. Louis ... [S]ix months before she died I sent a Mother's Day card. There was a horrible, mushy poem in it. I remember feeling vaguely guilty.
William S. Burroughs
#37. My dance is a sacred poem in which each movement is a word and whose every word is underlined by music. The temple in which I dance can be vague or faithfully reproduced, for I am the temple.
Mata Hari
#38. Fine, but you should at least have to write an epic poem in my honor. Here, I'll help you. "Ode to Keefe Sencen, that brave lovable nut. He may not have teal eyes, but he has a really cute,"
"KEEFE"!
Shannon Messenger
#39. But in a lot of ways my poems are very conventional, and it's no big deal for me to write a poem in either free verse or strict form; modern poets can, and do, do both.
Andrew Motion
#40. Grappling with some small understanding of this place, this time, we're in" my poem "In a BishopsWood Clearing
Jay Woodman
#41. I hardly know what I'm going to write - an article, a story, a poem in free verse - or in some regular form. I only know that when I have the first sentence. And when the first sentence makes a kind of pattern, then I find out the kind of rhythm I'm looking for.
Jorge Luis Borges
#42. America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#43. My mind leads me to speak now of forms changed into new bodies: O gods above, inspire this undertaking (which you've changed as well) and guide my poem in its epic sweep from the world's beginning to the present day. The
Ovid
#44. Perhaps first and foremost is the challenge of taking what I find as a reader and making it into a poem that, primarily, has to be a plausible poem in English.
Marilyn Hacker
#45. Before Plato could describe love, the loved one had to be invented. We would never love anybody if we could see past our invention. Bosie is my creation, my poem. In the mirror of invention, love discovered itself.
Tom Stoppard
#46. Someday, I'm gonna write a poem in a letter; Someday, I'm gonna get that faculty together.
David Bowie
#47. The poem in which the reader does not feel himself or herself a participant is a lecture, listened to from an uncomfortable chair, in a stuffy room, inside a building.
Mary Oliver
#48. She sat on the end of Blue's bed, looking as soft as a poem in the dim light.
Maggie Stiefvater
#49. I keep the drafts of each poem in color-coded folders. I pick up the folders according to how I feel about that color that day.
Rita Dove
#50. Love is a song, written in your heart.
The moon is a poem in a starry night.
Debasish Mridha
#51. The poem, in a sense, is no more or less than a little machine for remembering itself ... Poetry is therefore primarily a commemorative act.
Don Paterson
#52. Most poets are young simply because they have not been caught up. Show me an old poet, and I'll show you, more often than not, either a madman or a master ... it's when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order simply to make a poem that you fail. That is why I do not rework poems.
Charles Bukowski
#53. I do read a poem almost every morning. Unless I'm really, really late, I have to get my poem in.
Sue Monk Kidd
#54. It is still true that it is easier to compose a poem in the form of a manual for adjusting a VCR than it is to write a piece using just tuning as a symphony.
Brian Ferneyhough
#55. I am no poet, but if you think for yourselves, as I proceed, the facts will form a poem in your minds.
Michael Faraday
#56. I usually begin a poem in longhand. I like to sit where I have a nice view, ideally, although I worked on haiku this weekend at an airport. I'm not one to romanticize inspiration. I try to get to the work.
Pat Mora
#57. There is no heroic poem in the world but is at bottom a biography, the life of a man.
Thomas Carlyle
#58. I try to write very fast. I don't revise very much. I write the poem in one sitting. Just let it rip. It's usually over in twenty to forty minutes. I'll go back and tinker with a word or two, change a line for some metrical reason weeks later, but I try to get the whole thing just done.
Billy Collins
#59. One must write poetry in such as way that if one threw the poem in a window, the pane would break.
Daniil Kharms
#60. The poem in Where Good Swimmers Drown are love poems. But love poems that defy the divisions between emotion and intellect, private and public, life and art, writer and reader. To read Elbe's poems is to discover not only what it means to be in love, but what it means to be alive.
Jesse Lee Kercheval
#61. I published my first poem in 'The Paris Review' in 1980.
Siri Hustvedt
#62. Whenever I get lost in a novel I just throw a poem in. What it does is flare up, and it's so illuminated that I'm able to see where to go. I write between these illuminations.
Kate Braverman
#63. The most stirring battle-poem in English is about a brigade of cavalry which charged in the wrong direction.
George Orwell
#64. All the translations of a poem in all possible languages may add nuance to nuance and, by a kind of mutual retouching, by correcting one another, may give an increasingly faithful picture of the poem they translate, yet they will never give the inner meaning of the original.
Henri Bergson
#65. The essay I had to read was called, "An Essay on Criticism" by Alexander Pope.
The first challenge was that the essay was, in fact, a very long poem in "heroic couplets". If something is called an essay, it should be an essay.
Maureen Johnson
#66. Language, a great poem in and of itself, is all around us. We live in the lap of enormous wonder, but how rarely do most of us look up and smile in gratitude and pleasure?
Mark Edmundson
#67. In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before, he was still only a potential poet; the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever.
W. H. Auden
#68. Some mysterious revenge of nature has seen to it that no poem in praise of drink or tobacco (or snuff, if any) can succeed.
Kingsley Amis
#69. In Science we have been reading only the notes to a poem; in Christianity we find the poem itself.
C.S. Lewis
#70. 'Love' is so short of perfect rhymes that convention allows half-rhymes like 'move.' The alternative is a plague of doves, or a kind of poem in which the poet addresses his adored both as 'love' and as 'guv' - a perfectly decent solution once, but only once, in a while.
James Fenton
#71. I will find you another long-forgotten Queen Mab poem in no time. Depend on it. I refuse to let Cody or anyone else know more about English Literature than me. So calm yourself, Elfish, and let an expert take over.
Martin Millar
#72. At the very beginning when I begin writing a poem I try not to think of the audience or anyone at all except for trying to get at the very center of what is driving that poem. In a way it's like analyzing myself.
Rita Dove
#73. It's when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order to simply make a poem, that you fail.
Charles Bukowski
#74. I am a poem in progress
with no clear beginning or ending
just a middle
untended, unintended,
unfinished, hanging there
like the breath before a question
Jen Lynn Anderson
#75. It is well sometimes to half understand a poem in the same manner that we half understand the world.
G.K. Chesterton
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. Dancing to the sounds of trees and stones and slow minutes ticking in our hearts and bones.
Jay Woodman
#81. Nothing is lifeless
when the moon writes its screed
on the silvern sand silence
-From the poem:The Universe In Blossom
Munia Khan
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. A poem is a hand, a hook, a prayer. It is a soul in action.
Edward Hirsch
#87. It's a big statement if you use the word 'America' in the title of your poem.
Eileen Myles
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. our foundation is rocky
because we made a home
in each other's skin.
the damage is beginning
to show.
K.Y. Robinson
#97. 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
#98. A good poem has rhyming but no ending, it continues to rhyme in our heart.
Debasish Mridha
#99. It is not easy to describe lucidly in short notes to a poem the various approaches to a fortified castle,
Vladimir Nabokov
#100. 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
