Top 100 Poetry Book Quotes
#1. My life was a blank paper, until you came to rhyme with words & make it a poetry book.
Akansh Malik
#2. For me, language and how I use it are very important. I held back on doing a poetry book, walking the fine line between trying to be helpful and just putting more junk out there.
Sakyong Mipham
#3. [On Jason Mashak's "I Was Trained to See Shadows", in his poetry book SALTY AS A LIP:] A nice bit of smooth, full-bodied, surreal story telling. I like it.
John Bennett
#4. Dare to Dream
Yes, if you can dare to dream.
Surely you can catch the sunlight's beam.
While all else seems to fail.
Truth shall forever prevail.
(Copyright excerpts from the poem and published poetry book 'From the Silence Within
Madhavi Sood
#5. I have been writing poetry since 1975. My first poetry book was published in 1986.
Taslima Nasrin
#6. She was a poetry book with the wrong dust jacket, shelved in the Reference section.
Joyce Rachelle
#7. With a poetry book I can send 100 copies out to reviewers and other people, and even do it in advance and get their response. It's difficult with iPad: how do you send it out for free, and how do you even disseminate it before it goes into their store?
Felix Dennis
#8. I like it when someone gives me a new book of poetry by a poet I haven't read.
Nell Freudenberger
#9. Publishing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
Don Marquis
#10. 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
#11. The dark night was the first book of poetry and the constellations were the poems.
Chet Raymo
#12. The most ignorant person, at a reasonable charge, and with a little bodily labour, might write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, laws, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study.
Jonathan Swift
#13. In mauve sea-orchids as in her striking earlier book Guardians of the Secret, Lila Zemborain brings into relationship the viscera of the body and the spill of the universe in tense compositions that blur distinctions between lyric and prose poetry, between science and eros.
Forrest Gander
#14. I want to write a book of poetry, as well as children's stories.
Bobby McFerrin
#15. My publishers will make any kind of a beautiful book I design and send in to them, but ... For poetry they have less use than a rooster would have for skates.
Gene Stratton-Porter
#16. It's a completely powerful and serious book, as good as anything in prose or poetry written by a 'beat' writer, and one of the most alive books written by any American for years. I don't see how it could be considered immoral.
Robert Lowell
#17. I pulled a book by Robinson Jeffers off the shelf one day. It was powerfully moving. Tears ran down my face. That's when I became a poet.
William Everson
#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. I would like my books to stand as a tool to unbind children from expectations of poetry because it should free the child to self-expression and exploration.
Masiela Lusha
#20. I give this book 5 Stars and highly recommend it to all fiction, nonfiction, and poetry writers, aspiring writers, bloggers or journalists.
Sunny
#21. Not that the writers weren't good. I believe in those books and those writers very much. It's just that in the climate it's really hard to keep the lights on and the doors open when you're selling poetry and literature that appeals to a fringe audience.
Henry Rollins
#22. there are some poems
that we leave behind
some that leave us behind
while some just live
silently
in the heart
crumble, sometimes
dwindle
disappear
die
and are reborn
when you smile again.
Sanober Khan
#23. I want books written out of a brain and heart and soul crowded and vital with Life, spelled with a big L. I want poetry bursting with passion. I don't care a hang for the 'verbal felicities.' They'll do for the fringe, but I want the garment to warm me first.
Gertrude Atherton
#24. I have these knives in my chest that can't become words.
Jenim Dibie
#25. One thing I discovered is that the book world is vast. It's easy to walk around the store - even the room with literature and poetry, where I work most often - and feel overwhelmed.
Kevin Sampsell
#26. Soul receives from soul that knowledge, therefore not by book nor from tongue. If knowledge of mysteries come after emptiness of mind, that is illumination of heart.
Rumi
#27. 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
#28. Oh, friend, forget not, when you fain would note
In me a beauty that was never mine,
How first you knew me in a book I wrote,
How first you loved me for a written line ...
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#29. Read a poem at a time, or two, or all, but give them time to sink into your heart. Read them again, read a portion, and stop and ponder. Visualize. Take it slow; let the poem show you what lies in your own heart. Let it fuel the words from within.
Salil Jha
#30. 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
#31. I never tried to be anything other than a dreamer. I never paid any attention to people who told me to go out and live. I belonged always to whatever was far from me and to whatever I could never be. Anything that was not mine, however base, always seemed to be full of poetry.
Fernando Pessoa
#32. Less doth yearning trouble him who knoweth many songs, or with his hands can touch the harp: his possession is his gift of glee which God gave him.
J.R.R. Tolkien
#33. I find a lot of poetry very disappointing, but I do have poets that I go back to. One book of poetry that I'd like to mention is 'The Exchange' by Sophie Cabot Black. Her poems are difficult without being too difficult.
Billy Collins
#34. I have more wisdom than any books ever written in history of times, any scripture ever written which you rhyme but this is not my purpose.
Santosh Kalwar
#35. In another large journal book, he wrote his notes out again, along with further notes on the notes, and then started to cross words out of the completed, annotated notes, carefully removing word after word until he had something that looked like a poem. This was how he imagined poetry to be made.
Iain M. Banks
#36. You may translate books of science exactly ... The beauties of poetry cannot be preserved in any language except that in which it was originally written.
Samuel Johnson
#37. The counsellor who never reads a novel or never opens a book of poetry is neglecting an important resource for empathic development.
Dave Mearns
#38. Janice Gould is one of our best poets. The music of her poetry will delight you, and her gentle courageous accounts of tribal, family, and personal history make this book unforgettable. Doubters and Dreamers is a master-piece.
Leslie Marmon Silko
#39. My fears are the obvious ones: that marketplace-minded publishers - all four of them - will shy further away from literary fiction, international authors, poetry, and the other marginal but hugely important regions of the book world.
David Edelstein
#41. A short poem from my book:
Perspective
Of course
there is a hell
she said
and it has
an observation deck;
so I may
stand and wave
to all those kind
souls below
who warned me
I would go there.
Michelle Hartman
#42. I didn't write anything at all except book reports until I was in seventh grade, and then I wrote mostly poetry for myself.
Cynthia Voigt
#43. Before she knew it, she was just another set of eyes in a dusty attic, waiting for the stairs to creak.
Kelly Moran
#44. The rhyme pad was a spell book - it summoned asphalt elementals, elder gods, and weeping ancestors, all of whom had your back.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#45. As I read you I fell in love with the holes between your words and I loved you most on the days you could not love yourself.
Jenim Dibie
#46. I got you a present."
"Did you?"
"It's a book of poetry
romancy stuff. I thought, 'How schmaltzy is that,' so it seemed like the thing. Then I screwed up and left it in my desk at work
J.D. Robb
#47. My first book was poetry, but I didn't write it first. I wrote it third. So my first two books were prose.
Tao Lin
#48. Just because I've extricated myself from religion doesn't mean I'm not interested in the scriptures. I look at the Bible as itself. It's a holy book, it has incredible literature in it and beautiful poetry.
Patti Smith
#49. I think my brain is full of collisions and that's how I like to read and process information. I'm always comparing things and I think I do that subconsciously when I'm reading books of poetry.
Victoria Chang
#50. The thing I've learned writing my book is that everyone has the potential to be a poet, and all of our lives are epic.
Jonathan Heatt
#51. It is time to float on the waters of the night.
Time to wrap my arms around this book
and press it to my chest, life preserver
in a sea of unremarkable men and women,
anonymous faces on the street,
a hundred thousand unalphabetized things,
a million forgotten hours.
Billy Collins
#52. 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
#53. I once tried hawking my own book around the pubs in the hope that, like the Salvation Army, I too could sell to the cerebrally relaxed. It was a disaster. I had beer thrown over me for being a) a nuisance, b) not as good as Wordsworth and c) a nancy for writing poetry in the first place.
Peter Finch
#54. No one wants to read poetry. You have to make it impossible for them to put the poem down
impossible for them to stop reading it, word after word. You have to keep them from closing the book.
Muriel Rukeyser
#55. The Waves is an extraordinary achievement ... It is trembling on the edge. A little less - and it would lose its poetry. A little more - and it would be over into the abyss, and be dull and arty. It is her greatest book.
E. M. Forster
#56. A precious, mouldering pleasure 't is
To meet an antique book,
In just the dress his century wore;
A privilege, I think.
Emily Dickinson
#57. I've always had a love for poetry and when I got signed to a record label I thought, 'How odd that I'm doing a record before a book of poetry,'
Jewel
#58. Perhaps it's my destiny to remain a book-keeper for ever and for poetry and literature to remain simply butterflies that alight on my head and merely underline my own ridiculousness by their very beauty.
Fernando Pessoa
#59. Shut up the door: who loves me must not look / Upon the withered world, but haste to bring / His lighted candle, and his story-book, / And live with me the poetry of spring.
Alice Cary
#60. I've got a book of poetry by the bed, one of these big collections that goes back to the Greeks and Romans.
Martin Cruz Smith
#61. When Rachel Carson accepted the National Book Award, she said, 'if there is poetry in my book about the sea it is not because I deliberately put it there but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out poetry.
Jim Lynch
#62. As Popa penetrates deeper into his life, with book after book, it begins to look like a Universe passing through a Universe. It is one of the most exciting things in modern poetry, to watch this journey being made.
Ted Hughes
#63. I've always had a fondness for language ... English. Not that I use it correctly but I like words. I like books and I like poetry.. I like the written word ... and the sung word.
Joel Plaskett
#64. I'd park myself in the bookstore and read with one eye on everyone coming in. I remember reading a Robert Bly book of poetry.
Sally Mann
#65. From the shadow of domes in the city of domes,
A snowflake, a blizzard of one, weightless, entered your room
And made its way to the arm of the chair where you, looking up
From your book, saw it the moment it landed. That's all
There was to it.
Mark Strand
#67. he
opened me up
like a book
& poured the
poetry
back into
me.
-my personal pen and paper
Amanda Lovelace
#68. As far as poetry, I don't know if I've ever written any. I've read a lot. I just write and it comes out in different forms and shapes. I don't know if I'm any good at it I just really go for it and I'm very prolific book wise only because I own the company. No one tells me 'no' around here.
Henry Rollins
#69. Another way of saying "put it in the Book" would be that each poem we write pops up in the city of poetry, where anyone can visit it. Just as we visit the poems written before us. Go to Dickinson's house, or Li Po's or whomever we think has something to say to us that might help or be beautiful.
Gregory Orr
#70. I have a book of poetry I believe many should read but in each verse you'll discover it wasn't written for greed.
Stanley Victor Paskavich
#71. Fishing books , lit by emotion recollected in tranquility, are like poetry.. We do not think of them as books but as men. They are our companions and not only riverside. Summer and winter they are with us and what a pleasant company they are.
Arthur Ransome
#72. When you are old and grey and full of sleep
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep
W.B.Yeats
#73. There's a book of poetry
in the lines of my hands
that no one wants to read
Holly Schindler
#74. A book,
a book full
of human touches,
of shirts,
a book
without loneliness, with men
and tools,
a book
is victory.
Pablo Neruda
#75. To see the Summer Sky
Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie
True Poems flee -
Emily Dickinson
#76. Being able to say something lyrically, to say something that will do more than just be words, is really hard. It's easy to do when you're writing a chapter of a book or writing poetry, but it's really hard to do when you're confined to a melody line.
Nikki Sixx
#77. Here's how I used to think
you made a book:
a poet comes along,
mouth half open, inspired,
then suddenly the idiot bursts into song -
fancy that!
Vladimir Mayakovsky
#78. I do many kinds of work, and if you forbid me from binding books, from gardening, from writing poetry, from practicing walking meditation, from teaching children, I will be very unhappy. To me, work is pleasant. Pleasant or unpleaseant depends on our way of looking.
Nhat Hanh
#79. If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.
Emily Dickinson
#80. Nobody reads poetry anymore
So who the hell are you
I see bent over this book?
Aleksandar Ristovic
#81. They come here wanting to be loved, and the boys on the stage receive them from the poem - STAY in the Book - RidingTheEscalator
Jay Woodman
#82. Read. Read. Read. Read. Read great books. Read poetry, history, biography. Read the novels that have stood the test of time. And read closely.
David McCullough
#83. Morning, noon & bloody night,
Seven sodding days a week,
I slave at filthy WORK, that might
Be done by any book-drunk freak.
This goes on until I kick the bucket.
FUCK IT FUCK IT FUCK IT FUCK IT
Philip Larkin
#84. I've had it with these cheap sons of bitches who claim they love poetry but never buy a book.
Kenneth Rexroth
#85. Poetry, romance, beauty, and love have no book value, but life has no value without them.
Debasish Mridha
#87. Stranger inside me, when you are born, I will give you
a closed book and ask you never to read it, never rest,
never forgive a man who wants to save you.
Traci Brimhall
#88. 'The Dante Club' was one of America's most important book clubs, as their Wednesday night meetings ultimately led to our country's first exposure to Dante's poetry on a wide scale.
Matthew Pearl
#89. In the Book of Poetry there are three hundred poems, but the meaning of all of them may be put in a single sentence: Have no debasing thoughts.
Confucius
#90. The [book of the bible] Song Of Songs is an amazing erotic love poem that the church has tried very hard not to notice. It is really beautiful, and musical in its poetry.
Alan Green
#91. I never really liked "cool" books. I plowed through as much Borges and Joyce as possible, read the first half of V. and spent whole Bar Mitzvah checks on Beat poetry.
Simon Rich
#92. Mega biblion, mega kakon (Big book, big evil)
Callimachus
#93. Theatre is poetry that rises from the book and becomes human enough to talk and shout, weep and despair
Federico Garcia Lorca
#94. I do not just want you at your best.
I almost do not care
where your Happiness lives,
but please,
let me visit your pain?
Take me to the place
where your sadness goes,
and show me the tragedy
that no one knows.
Meraaqi
#95. My first book was an adult novel, 'Down Among the Gods,' published by Virago, and I've written poems as well, a slim volume of poetry.
Kate Thompson
#96. You see.. I have this book. Within the pages of this book are things that I should've told you. I call this book "Hesitation".
Andrew King
#97. I hope, too, that my book will illuminate my belief that love of art - be it poetry, storytelling, painting, sculpture, or music - enables people to transcend any barrier man has yet devised.
Mary Ann Shaffer
#98. I was reading the poems of Rochester. Rochester made himself out to be bisexual, but I think that was only to shock. Most of his poetry is sexual, even pornographic.
Thom Gunn
#99. I really love poetry. I'm a big E.E. Cummings fan and a big Walt Whitman fan, and I have a big book of poetry.
Mae Whitman
#100. In reading, in literature and poetry, I found an artistic freedom that I didn't see at Woolworth's. I would read everything from Shakespeare to science fiction ... sometimes a book a day.
Frederick Lenz
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
