Top 100 Poetry In Quotes
#1. In your sky, you are the brightest star.
Without you light, it's dark like tar.
So love yourself to enlighten others.
Debasish Mridha
#2. Poetry is the power of defining the indefinable in terms of the unforgettable.
Louis Untermeyer
#3. Ultimately you're trying to reach across and find some other person, some other human warmth. But it is, especially in written poetry, it is inscribed in a text and the text can't do that work by itself and you as a poet can only do your best.
Edward Hirsch
#4. this life
has been
a landscape
of pain
and still,
flowers
bloom in it.
Sanober Khan
#5. He wanted to be a poet,' someone else put in while Maggie hugged Tim and patted his back. 'Said he'd only lacked the words to be one.
Nora Roberts
#6. As hard as the diamonds in your smile,
the wind carries its hammers with no hands
and sustains a moan with no mouth,
seems to cradle solitude in its rough arms like firewood
to be burned in my house as it passes through
and asks, Where does she sparkle from?
B.J. Ward
#7. Dancing to the sounds of trees and stones and slow minutes ticking in our hearts and bones.
Jay Woodman
#8. Nothing is lifeless
when the moon writes its screed
on the silvern sand silence
-From the poem:The Universe In Blossom
Munia Khan
#9. Must beauty blossom, rooted in decay,
And night devour its flaming hues alway?
Clark Ashton Smith
#10. I walk alone, absorbed in my fantastic play,
Fencing with rhymes, which, parrying nimbly, back away;
Tripping on words, as on rough paving in the street,
Or bumping into verses I long had dreamed to meet.
Charles Baudelaire
#11. There is a voice in my head that is only silenced by the scratching of my pen
Jessica-Lynn Barbour
#12. Let them shoot us in the head,
My blood will grow roots
and will blossom.
Visar Zhiti
#13. 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
#14. I'll be writing as long as I can hold a pen in my curled, crimped arthritic hands and then I'll dictate it, if it comes to that. They'll have to pry my pen out of my cold, dead fingers - and even then, I'll fight 'em for it. Guaranteed.
Wanda Lea Brayton
#15. Sparrows and cats will live in my shoe,
Sooner than I will live with you.
Fish will come walking out of the sea,
Sooner than you will come back to me.
Peter S. Beagle
#16. When the Earth was just a child,
He searched for his mother Venus;
And for his father Mars,
But they were not home;
They were gone elsewhere,
Out there, in the great expanse;
Beyond the breathing universe.
Stephan Attia
#17. We saw a hole in the Chicago poetry scene that slam couldn't fill. I think a lot more can be done with the form than just competition.
Robbie Q. Telfer
#18. I don't think poetry will die, but I think that poetry does demand a certain kind of attention to language. It does demand a certain space in order to read it, and I think that space is somewhat threatened by the lack of attention that people have and the amount of time that they give to things.
Edward Hirsch
#19. 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
#20. Matt smirked. Well, it is interesting because lots of poems have mathematical imagery or structure. Concrete triangular poems and syllabic verse, for example. Did you know that we subconsciously track the sound properties in poetry?
Jessica Park
#21. A voice that had traversed the centuries, so heavy it broke what it touched, so heavy I feared it would ring in me with eternal resonance, a voice rusty with the sound of curses and the hoarse cries that issue from the delta in the last paroxysm of orgasm.
Anais Nin
#22. My dreams are tangled in images of stars and clouds and firelight - we go camping at night - it's my lucid dream of being with you ...
John Geddes
#23. The poets are almost always wrong about the facts. That's because they're not interested in the facts, only the truth.
William Faulkner
#24. I love to feel the temperature drop and the wind increase just before a thunderstorm. Then I climb in bed with the thunder.
Amanda Mosher
#25. 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
#26. Rejoice, Florence, seeing you are so great that over sea and land you flap your wings, and your name is widely known in Hell!
Dante Alighieri
#27. There is a moonlight note in the Moonlight Sonata; there is a thunder note in an angry sky.
Dejan Stojanovic
#28. There's a love of rhetorical skill in the Muslim world. Osama bin Laden doesn't just go on tape cassettes and say, 'America sucks.' He recites poetry; he finds things that 'America sucks' rhymes with.
P. J. O'Rourke
#29. 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
#30. Once in a while i am struck
all over again... by just how blue
the sky appears .. on wind-played
autumn mornings, blue enough
to bruise a heart.
Sanober Khan
#31. There is a line of poetry, a sentence in a fable, a word in an essay, by which my existence is justified; find that line, and immortality is assured.
Alberto Manguel
#32. Being a poet in the States is quite different from being one in China, because in the States poetry depends on the universities for its support. They finance the poets and help them get published. That isn't so in China. But overall it is the same. You can't change society with poetry.
Bei Dao
#33. In the beginning we were creating our music, ourselves, every night ... starting with a few outlines, maybe a few words for a song. Sometimes we worked out in Venice, looking at the surf. We were together a lot and it was good times for all of us. Acid, sun, friends, the ocean, and poetry and music.
Jim Morrison
#34. Every poet ... finds himself born in the midst of prose. He has to struggle from the littleness and obstruction of an actual world into the freedom and infinitude of an ideal.
Thomas Carlyle
#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. If emptiness is endless, then everything rests in emptiness.
Dejan Stojanovic
#37. Miss MacIntosh, My Darling stands out in my mind as the most significant innovative novel since Ulysses and The Waves. Marguerite Young has added epic grandeur to the philosophical novel. Every page gleams with the poetry of existence.
Nona Balakian
#38. Free verse is like free love; it is a contradiction in terms.
G.K. Chesterton
#39. I have my books
And my poetry to protect me;
I am shielded in my armor,
Hiding in my room, safe within my womb.
I touch no one and no one touches me.
I am a rock,
I am an island.
Paul Simon
#40. To feel strong, to walk amongst humans with a tremendous feeling of confidence and superiority is not at all wrong. The sense of superiority in bodily strength is borne out by the long history of mankind paying homage in folklore, song and poetry to strong men
Fredrick Hatfield
#41. Poets and writers who are in love with the superlative all want to do more than they can.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#42. If poetry alters the way in which the reader views the world, then it has had its desired effect.
John Barton
#43. Isn't it time that, in love, we freed ourselves
from the loved one and, trembling, endured:
as the arrow endures the string, collecting itself
to be more than itself as it shoots?
Rainer Maria Rilke
#44. Poetry is the most concentrated form of literature; it is the most emotionalized and powerful way in which thought can be presented ...
Amy Lowell
#45. 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
#46. And inasmuch as the bridge is a symbol of all such poetry as I am interested in writing it is my present fancy that a year from now I'll be more contented working in an office than ever before.
Hart Crane
#47. To be nobody but
yourself in a world
which is doing its best day and night to make you like
everybody else means to fight the hardest battle
which any human being can fight and never stop fighting.
E. E. Cummings
#48. Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
Dylan Thomas
#49. Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
W.B.Yeats
#50. I believe in reverencing anything in the life of man which has the testimony of the ages as being unexcelled, whether it be literature, paintings, poetry, tombs -- even a golf hole.
C.B. MacDonald
#51. On a practical level, poetry isn't something anybody has really made a great living at. I might sell some books and, once in a while, someone might pay to hear me read.
Viggo Mortensen
#53. 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
#54. When the two become the one
And the inside outside, the outside in
So that the male be not male nor the female female
Then will you see me.
Wesley Stace
#55. For Trisha
The truth's in myth not fact,
a story fragment or an act
that lasts and stands for all:
how bees made honey in a skull.
Gregory Orr
#56. She is unable to dream, think or love. In a woman, poetry never comes naturally, but always as the result of education. Only the woman of the world is a woman; the rest are simply females.
Edmond De Goncourt
#57. Someone handed me Mexico City Blues in St. Paul [Minnesota] in 1959 and it blew my mind. It was the first poetry that spoke my own language.
Bob Dylan
#58. In college, I was a huge fan of 'Les Miserables.' I seem to remember that people who were into French literature preferred Hugo's poetry.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#59. Loving you is kissing the night, exposing the scars, words in flames, for every drop and for every life.
Gwen Calvo
#60. You're shadowed by your own dream, especially as you get older, of trying to create something that will last in poetry. And so, you're working on its behalf.
Edward Hirsch
#61. Robert Frost liked to distinguish between grievances (complaints) and griefs (sorrows). He even suggested that grievances, which are propagandistic, should be restricted to prose, leaving poetry free to go its way in tears.
Edward Hirsch
#62. Scatter as a prayer
escaping my lips...
as orchids
blooming in clouds.
Sanober Khan
#63. THERE is something in the autumn that is native to my blood -
Touch of manner, hint of mood;
And my heart is like a rhyme,
With the yellow and the purple and the crimson keeping time.
Bliss Carman
#64. There are three good things in this world. One is to read poetry, another is to write poetry, and the best of all is to live poetry.
Rupert Brooke
#65. For an American, there's no automatic place where people love the art of poetry. There's not a social class that considers poetry its property the way in some countries there's a snob value to the art.
Robert Pinsky
#66. 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
#67. It seems to me / the the great bards of the 20th century are in Publicity / those Keatses and Shelleys singing the Colgate smile / Cosmic Coca-Cola, the pause the refreshes, / the make of car that will take us to the land of happiness.
Ernesto Cardenal
#68. You better ignore this.
You better staple your eyes shut
and put pot-lids over your ears
and pinch your nose with vice grips
and cement your mouth shut
with real cement and while
you're at it or in it or whatever
cut off your hands for good measure
B.J. Ward
#69. But many people just love to be in the midst of that poetry, to keep experiencing what's perplexing, what's beautiful, what's true.
John Timpane
#70. You cross the field in the snow leaving tracks in perfect whiteness ... disturbing my placid universe ... marking the landscape within me ...
John Geddes
#71. The summer in you
calms the winter in me.
Saiber
#72. My hope, my heaven, my trust must be,
My gentle guide, in following thee.
Walter Scott
#73. Our earliest poets were shamans. Today, as in the earliest times, true shamans are poets of consciousness who know the power of song and story to teach and to heal.
Robert Moss
#74. Phaedra's body pulled at the light, testing the softer side of midnight. Hyacinth usually slipped out of bed in the middle of the night, careful to fit her rustle inside Phaedra's dreams.
Naomi Jackson
#75. I gave up on new poetry myself 30 years ago when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens in a hostile world.
Russell Baker
#76. Old things climb out through my mouth and set themselves free in the air. On the high moor there are patterns and in my small mind there are patterns. [...] All the centuries drop away, and I am in the presence of something that does not know time.
Paul Kingsnorth
#77. There is a certain flimsiness of poetry which seems expedient in a song.
William Shenstone
#78. 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
#79. Nature is a vast tablet, inscribed with signs, each of which has its own significancy, and becomes poetry in the mind when read; and geology is simply the key by which myriads of these signs, hitherto indecipherable, can be unlocked and perused, and thus a new province added to the poetical domain.
Hugh Miller
#80. I have these knives in my chest that can't become words.
Jenim Dibie
#81. In life, the number of beginnings is exactly equal to the number of endings ... In poetry, the number of beginnings so far exceeds the number of endings that we cannot even conceive of it.
Mary Ruefle
#82. Inside it he inscribed a few lines of poetry, portraying us as the gypsy and the fool, one creating silence; one listening closely to the silence. In the clanging twirl of our lives, these roles would reverse many times
Patti Smith
#83. Cry out in the wilderness with a voice that's not heard. Speak boldly in Christ though you won't say a word.
R'chelle Cyrus
#84. What if you slept?
What if you slept
And what if
In your sleep
You dreamed
And what if
In your dream
You went to heaven
And there plucked a strange and beautiful flower
And what if
When you awoke
You had that flower in you hand
Ah, what then?
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#85. Sometimes the beauty is easy. Sometimes you don't have to try at all. Sometimes you can hear the wind blow in a handshake. Sometimes there's poetry written right on the bathroom wall.
Ani DiFranco
#86. Poetry is of so subtle a spirit, that in the pouring out of one language into another it will evaporate.
John Denham
#87. The Abandoned Valley
Can you understand being alone so long
you would go out in the middle of the night
and put a bucket into the well
so you could feel something down there
tug at the other end of the rope?
Jack Gilbert
#88. In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.
Mark Strand
#90. Poetry criticism at its worst today is mean in spirit and spiteful in intent, as if determined to inflict the wound that will spur the artist to new heights if it does not cripple him or her.
David Lehman
#91. Poetry is just so emo." he said. "Oh, the pain. The pain. It always rains. In my soul.
John Green
#92. Poetry is not a genre in harmony with the modern world; its innermost nature is hostile or indifferent to the dogmas of modern times, progress and the cult of the future.
Octavio Paz
#93. IT'S NOT THE HONEY WHISKEY IN A FRIDAY NIGHT - IT'S THE MANIC SHOW OF POETRY TWEETS THAT TURNS ME ON.
Amy King
#94. Drawing is a way of coming upon the connection between things, just like metaphor in poetry reconnects what has become separated.
John Berger
#95. Late, by myself, in the boat of myself,
no light and no land anywhere,
cloudcover thick. I try to stay
just above the surface, yet I'm already under
and living within the ocean.
Rumi
#97. Pure poetry in motion. A swift-moving, heartfelt tale of love and loss, two stories intersecting-an d connecting-by magic. Michelle Baker is a born poet, and a born writer. The Canoe is just the start of what I hope to be a long idyllic journey through the love and soul of the human heart.
Trent Zelazny
#98. 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
#99. You may ... make a little recreation of poetry, in the midst of your painful studies. Nevertheless, I cannot but advise you. Withhold thy throat from thirst. Be not so set upon poetry, as to be always poring on the passionate and measured pages ... let not the Circean cup intoxicate you.
Cotton Mather
#100. Sometimes I struggle. Sometimes I falter. Sometimes I live in gray. But always I remember the yarrow you've grown in the spaces of my rib cage. I now love with roses from my heart, with lilacs from my mouth.
Elijah Noble El
