Top 100 Poetry About Quotes
#1. There are two kinds of love. One kind you live with, the other you write poetry about.
Debasish Mridha
#2. Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration, but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation.
Wislawa Szymborska
#3. The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about - clouds - daffodils - waterfalls - what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in - these things are full of mystery, as mysterious to us as the heavens were to the Greeks.
Tom Stoppard
#4. Arms are around me, hands in my hair, lips moving across my cheek, over my neck, and I'm thinking about poetry, about Edgar Allan Poe and words that move like waves, people who move like waves together, and all the non-words we can make with our bodies.
Julie Cross
#5. Sufi poetry is, in a sense, self-help poetry about how to live a decent life, how to deal with your mortality.
Mohsin Hamid
#6. But bad manners or vulgar gestures can sometimes have a touch of poetry about them, just enough not to arouse one's indignation.
Tahar Ben Jelloun
#7. Topography is one of my chief themes in my poetry..about the country, the suburbs and the seaside ... then there come's love ... and increasingly; the fear of death.
John Betjeman
#8. He found himself wanting to write poetry about how her blue eyes were like starlight and her hair like night, because "night" and "starlight" rhymed, but he had a feeling the poem wouldn't turn out that well ...
Cassandra Clare
#9. I keep thinking about blood, I dream about it. Wake up thinking about it. Pretty soon I'll be writing morbid emo poetry about it.
Cassandra Clare
#10. I wanted to reimagine the role, in a way that was respectful of its traditional responsibilities but made them part of a wider pattern of poetry about national incidents, events, preoccupations; and to spend a great deal of time going to schools trying to demystify poetry.
Andrew Motion
#11. When you act, you've got to be like a poet or a musician. It's not about evidence before court. It's not a forensic subject. It's poetry; it's a completely different place.
Rhys Ifans
#12. everything i know about love
is that it hurts
and is almost always never returned
the way you want it to.
but i have hope
because i do not know everything.
AVA.
#13. By making us stop for a moment, poetry gives us an opportunity to think about ourselves as human beings on this planet and what we mean to each other.
Rita Dove
#14. Poetry is only secondarily about words. Primarily, it is about truth.
Dan Simmons
#15. They need to learn poetry. They don't need to learn about poetry. They don't need to be told how to interpret poetry. They don't need to be told how to understand poetry. They need to learn it.
Peter Davison
#16. American poetry is always about defining oneself individually,claiming one's right to be different and often to break taboos.
Diane Wakoski
#17. When you write about what you dream, you become a writer.
When you dream about what you write, you become haunted by a curse.
A. Saleh
#18. Read. Read every chance you get. Read to keep growing. Read history. Read poetry. Read for pure enjoyment. Read a book called Life on a Little Known Planet. It's about insects. It will make you feel better.
David McCullough
#19. I think poetry will survive and I don't think it will be the end of poetry. Our tremendous onslaught of mass media all the time that we're suffering and we don't really know how to think about, I think that puts certain things at risk.
Edward Hirsch
#20. She captured the spot of my world's centre and sent me in elliptic rings about it, causing the ground beneath me to vanish and the breath of my lungs to disperse. I was a rock locked in helpless orbit.
Richard Ronald Allan
#21. I got a bit obsessed with the whole English language and was writing journals and poetry. I've always been intrigued about psychology and philosophy and how people's minds work.
Lara Pulver
#22. Because you fight it out, and stumble, and write bad poetry, and pick yourself up again, and at the end, hopefully, someday youre sitting with your kid on her bedroom floor, talking about how you screwed everything up too.
Josie Bloss
#23. I never thought I'd be doing poetry books. I never really studied poetry. But the first one I did was after my mother died, and I realized that people sort of think and talk about her style and fashion, but in fact, what made her the person she was was really her love of reading and ideas.
Caroline Kennedy
#24. Fuck I hate fucks
Who think they're so fucking great
They know everything about fucking,
When they're just fucking fucks fucking!
And no one changes the fucking world
When they keep fucking to another fuck's fuck.
Initially NO
#25. the hope is small
but it is everything.
AVA.
#26. The poets are almost always wrong about the facts. That's because they're not interested in the facts, only the truth.
William Faulkner
#27. It's not about putting forth the questions, it's about accepting the answers we ask for.
Shane Koyczan
#28. What are the sources of poetry? Love and death and the paradox of love and death. All poetry from the beginning is about Eros and Thanatos. Those are the only subjects. And how Eros and Thanatos interweave.
Erica Jong
#29. For me music is central, so when one's talking about poetry, for the most part Plato's talking primarily about words, where I talk about notes, I talk about tone, I talk about timbre, I talk about rhythms.
Cornel West
#30. Poetry taught me a great deal about language and images, but when it came to plotting, I was stumped. It's been very much a learn-by-doing thing for me.
Jennifer McMahon
#31. Someday the Sun will explode, and what about our journalism and poetry then? Well, so what? To hell with our exploding Sun. We have to do what we can do in the time we can act.
Bruce Sterling
#32. Part of what we love about poetry is the fact that it seems ancient, that it has an authority of ancient language and ancient form, and that it's timeless, that it reaches back.
Robert Morgan
#33. The masters of information have forgotten about poetry, where words may have a meaning quite different from what the lexicon says, where the metaphoric spark is always one jump ahead of the decoding function, where another, unforeseen reading is always possible.
J.M. Coetzee
#34. The common prejudice that love is as common as "romance" may be due to the fact that we all learned about it first through poetry. But the poets fool us; they are the only ones to whom love is not only a crucial, but an indispensable experience, which entitles them to mistake it for a universal one.
Hannah Arendt
#35. I love painting and music, of course. I don't know nearly as much about them as I know about poetry. I've certainly been influenced by fiction. I was overwhelmed by War and Peace when I read it, and I didn't read it until I was in my late 20s.
Kenneth Koch
#36. [The popular impression about some chemists is that] the aquafortis and the chlorine of the laboratories have as effectually bleached the poetry out of them, as they destroy the colours of tissues exposed to their action.
George Wilson
#37. Take your materials from what is around you - if you see a dandelion, write about that; if it's misty, write about the mist. The materials for poetry are all about you in profusion.
Masaoka Shiki
#38. Happiness is not about hiding the past, it's accepting today and making it last, You should not fear who you have become, have pride in yourself for all you have done. Stand tall and be proud to be who you are, Release your fears and brighten your star.
Kylie Abecca
#39. Meet some people who care about poetry the way you do. You'll have that readership. Keep going until you know you're doing work that's worthy. And then see what happens. That's my advice.
Philip Levine
#40. Sometimes poetry, it is incomprehensible. But we need incomprehensible stuff! It is very healthy to talk about incomprehensible things! It is very healthy! We need it!
Roberto Benigni
#41. If I was a poet, I had become one because poetry, more intensely than any other practice, could not evade its anachronism and marginality and so constituted a kind of acknowledgment of my own preposterousness, admitting my bad faith in good faith, so to speak.
Ben Lerner
#42. When people start talking about enjambment and line endings, I always shut them up. This is not something to talk about, this is a private matter, it's up to the poet.
James Tate
#43. When I was younger, I was so crazy about poetry that I didn't notice who was noticing. It seemed to me so tremendous and large.
Robert Hass
#44. I try to show what it is about language and music that enthralls, because I think those are the two elements of poetry.
Rita Dove
#45. When we know everything about this earth, the romance and poetry will all have been wiped away from it. There is nothing so artistic as a haze.
Arthur Conan Doyle
#46. Love leads us to write poetry because love improves our hearing; like prayer, poetry is every bit as much about listening as it is about speaking. To 'get' the poem is to hear the eloquence of the silence that it calls forth through its manifestation of love.
David Patterson
#47. You told me once
about how they used
to build whole city states
out of poems
how everything you see here
is made out of
the bones of dreams
how having a stiff
drink with lorca meant
you had to write
everything down right away
lately the words just
won't come
John Dorsey
#48. I began writing poetry when I was about 10. Bad poetry, but you start with bad poetry.
Jonas Mekas
#49. Ive realized that even more that what is beautiful about the accordion is to play with a single finger sometimes, with a very pure, very pointed sound that gives a lot of poetry and emotion.
Richard Galliano
#50. My 'must-have' was poetry. From the first, life meant that to me. And, fortunately, poetry is not purchasable material, but an atmosphere in which every life may expand. I found it everywhere about me ...
Lucy Larcom
#51. She drifted, feather-like, in tenuous radiance ...
Her gown, it seemed a thing made out of mist,
As though the dewy air
Had gathered in a cloud about her form
To clothe a shape so fair
That nothing coarser could adorn it than
A layer of atmosphere.
Theodora Goss
#52. We fall into the old stuff of textuality, and almost everything becomes safe because nobody wants to talk about what is not safe in poetry. We fall back on the psychologic, the ethnic, the quota, and serve the perpetuation of the machine.
Fady Joudah
#53. Here is the simple truth about people: Love the ones you want to keep.
Pleasefindthis
#54. She dreamed that night of chickweed, which was a strange thing to dream about. Chickweed is a low, weedy little plant, not very distinguished. No one writes poetry comparing their lovers to chickweed (or if they do, the poems are rarely well received).
T. Kingfisher
#55. Poetry is a tree with very deep roots and while there may be excitement about this or that new little branch, you're not going to make anything original by just doing whatever's being rewarded at the moment.
Joan Larkin
#56. I learned to impersonate the kind of person that talks about poetry. It comes from teaching, I think.
Robert Morgan
#57. Poetry asks people to have values, form opinions, care about some other part of experience besides making money and being successful on the job.
Toi Derricotte
#58. I write poems about relationships, love relationships, and I'm not able to do that all the time. I could go two years without writing poems, and then write a dozen. Having a novel to work on, with the intricate puzzle of character and plot to work out, is satisfying for the time there is no poetry.
May Sarton
#59. All voices are important, and yet it seems that people of color have a lot to say, particularly if you look through the poetry of young people - a lot of questions and a lot of concerns about immigration and security issues, you name it - big questions.
Juan Felipe Herrera
#60. 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
#62. She has something to say about what life is like-which is all we ask of poetry.
Louis Untermeyer
#63. What will they say about my poetry who never touched my blood? Que diran de mi poesia los que no tocaron mi sangre?
Pablo Neruda
#64. From I Knew a Woman
I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,
When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them;
Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one:
The shapes a bright container can contain!
Theodore Roethke
#65. You have to understand a bit about the poetry of the blues to know where the references are coming from.
Van Morrison
#66. Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus; and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs, and peep about
To find ourselves dishonourable graves.
William Shakespeare
#67. Our desire to say more grows bigger and what to say about it, except that saying is not always about saying, growing is not always about growing.
Dejan Stojanovic
#68. I did literature at university, so I had a real relationship with poetry, but they don't make many films about the world of a poet.
Alice Eve
#69. Poetry might be more about the eternal verities, the essence of the human soul, and - although it's reductive to say so - fiction has perhaps been more about the differences between the unconstrained world of the imagination and the realities you run into, day-to-day, when you're riding your donkey.
Chad Harbach
#70. Ah! well a-day! what evil looks
Had I from old and young!
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#71. To many writers and thinkers, though not to all, another text is, or can be, the most naked and charged of life-forces ... The concept of allusion or analogue is totally inadequate. To Dante these other texts are the organic context of identity. They are as directly about life as life is about them.
George Steiner
#72. Oh, it's a beautiful day, it's an elegant, graceful day, and I'm sailing down the Strip in glamorous Las Vegas, on my motor scooter, in company with a certified illegal prostitute who loves poetry and remembers it. Sonofabitch, I'm a real writer! I used to worry about it, but no more. Life is good.
Peter S. Beagle
#73. Sunday is a likely day to write a poem. Because poetry is a piece of language flying around: you'll find notebooks, something on your phone. It's about finding them and getting them off that crumpled piece of paper and onto my computer.
Eileen Myles
#74. She tells me about dreams. She says my dreams are helium and balloons, and I've made the mistake of letting go a few to many times, but I still got this one. Tied around my finger like a wedding ring because even though I don't believe in marriages, I'm gonna bring this one home.
Shane Koyczan
#75. Just as we don't spend a lot of time worrying about how all those poets out there are going to monetize their poetry, the same is true for most bloggers.
Seth Godin
#76. Of everything
I have ever endured,
Y
O
U
are
My Favourite Tragedy.
Meraaqi
#77. When we were eleven, say, we really weren't interested in each other's poems at all ... But we didn't know a thing about poetry. We didn't care about it.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#78. Painting is so poetic, while sculpture is more logical and scientific and makes you worry about gravity.
Damien Hirst
#79. Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what was seen during a moment.
Carl Sandburg
#80. I have been incapable of moving, even a finger or an eye, for at least a year now. I feel relatively certain about this timeframe because I have been watching the crepe myrtle outside the window of the room I am in...
Jason Leclerc
#81. Most great books have been about striving in some sense. In a sense, money is the great topic of the novel. You couldn't necessarily say that about poetry.
Chad Harbach
#82. All the modern verse plays, they're terrible; they're mostly about the poetry. It's more important that the play is first.
Denis Johnson
#83. As Borges has taught us, all the books in the library are contemporary. Great poems are like granaries: they are always ready to enlarge their store.
William H Gass
#84. So sing, you birds
for the fever is about to rise
and the empty stalemate is over
let the colors bleed back into you
and let the dead be buried for another year.
from let the colors bleed
K.R. Albers
#85. In Poetry class, Professor Sappho teaches us how to compose love ballads. She's a swell teacher and all but I'm not sure I understand her. She's always going on and on about her weekend trips with the other goddesses to the island of Lesbos.
Tai
#86. I wonder if I ever thought of an ideal reader ... I guess when I was in my 20s and in New York and maybe even in my early 30s, I would write for my wife Janice ... mainly for my poet friends and my wife, who was very smart about poetry.
Kenneth Koch
#87. You've got to love libraries. You've got to love books. You've got to love poetry. You've got to love everything about literature. Then, you can pick the one thing you love most and write about it.
Ray Bradbury
#88. 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
#89. I think there is a song out there to describe just about any situation.
Criss Jami
#90. It's been an adventure just getting out to Saturn, .. Saturn is such an alluring photographic target. It's a joy, really, to be able to take our images and composite them in an artful way, which is one of my cardinal working goals. It's about poetry and beauty and science all mixed together.
Carolyn Porco
#91. The obscure, unexplainable aspect of the writing process is about how some rhymes appear in your head. It often feels more like tuning in to some kind of channel than composing words in your mind.
Sahara Sanders
#92. People cannot stand the saddest truth I know about the very nature of reading and writing imaginative literature, which is that poetry does not teach us how to talk to other people: it teaches us how to talk to ourselves.
Harold Bloom
#93. Once I knew what I was doing
I was there and with it;
I had the total knowing.
I Googled God and orgasmed
At the amount of Gods and
Monsters out there posted about.
Initially NO
#94. I've been writing since I was sixteen. At first, I wrote mostly short stories and poetry. The first thing I ever had published was a poem about a football game. It was printed in my local newspaper.
Jerry Spinelli
#95. When true love broke my heart in half,
I took the whiskey from the shelf,
And told my neighbors when to laugh.
I keep a dog, and bark myself.
Theodore Roethke
#96. I feel the only thing you can do about life is to preserve it, by art if you're an artist, by children if you're not.
Philip Larkin
#97. Reading blogs would be like sentencing yourself to stand in a virtual online corner, trapped by some crashing bore who only wanted to talk about trains, or his poetry, or something.
Cecilia Peartree
#98. Poetry is really about your mental state or intellectual, and where you are, and you're trying to evoke that, explain it to yourself, whatever, you're trying to dig into it, analyse yourself.
Jonathan Galassi
#99. I started writing poetry when I was six. I had this teacher who didn't believe the poems I'd bring in were mine because they were dark and sad. But I wrote about what I experienced in my childhood.
Mariah Carey
#100. She went to bed thinking more about another person than about herself. This goes to prove that even minor poetry may have its practical uses.
Dorothy L. Sayers
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