Top 100 Poetry Is Like Quotes
#1. Publishing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
Don Marquis
#2. Poetry is like air. It's one of the necessary things. Everyone benefits from poetry. And as you know, poetry is international. There are only two things that are truly international, poetry and wine.
Nikki Giovanni
#3. A life without books is a thirsty life, and one without poetry is ... like a life without pictures.
Stephen King
#4. Poetry is like fish: if it's fresh, it's good; if it's stale, it's bad; and if you're not certain, try it on the cat.
Osbert Sitwell
#5. Good poetry is like effective prayer, it feeds the human spirit, it nourishes, it puts us in touch with forces far greater than ourselves
Lorna Goodison
#6. Remember, writing poetry is like making love: one will never know whether one's own pleasure is shared.
Cesare Pavese
#7. My poems are like a dagger Sprouting flowers from the hilt; My poetry is like a fountain Sprinkling streams of coral water.
Jose Marti
#8. Poetry is like an unexpected noise in the night: the creak of a door, a footstep on the porch, the soft scuffle of a moth against the screen, which rouses every sense to an instant alert. So comes poetry to the drowsy mind, which startles a moment, wonders, and returns to sleep.
Christopher Morley
#9. Poetry is like standing on the edge of a lake on a moonlit night and the light of the moon is always pointing straight at you.
Billy Collins
#10. Poetry is like painting: one piece takes your fancy if you stand close to it, another if you keep at some distance.
Horace
#11. I write poetry to figure things out. Any time I'm trying to wrap my head around something, poetry is like a puzzle-solving strategy for me.
Sarah Kay
#12. Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing.
W.S. Merwin
#13. Poetry in the dark of the night you are my torch.
Poetry makes you believe in the freedom in your own home.
Poetry causes the increase of the human race.
Poetry ennobles the spirit of man.
Poetry is like a noble fragrance that caresses your soul.
Poetry is the royal essence of beauty.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
#14. The tragic element in poetry is like Saturn in alchemy, - the Malevolent, the Destroyer of Nature ; but without it no true Aurum Potabile, or Elixir of Life, can be made.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#16. Poetry is like a beef bouillon cube; it's hardly ever needed (or perhaps never needed at all); it sits in its precious wrapper, well out of view, until everyone has forgotten it's there.
Joe Wenderoth
#17. Writing poetry is like an opiate. When you get hooked on a blank page in the notebook, that attracts you like fireflies in the night, and you just have to translate your thoughts into words.
I'm addicted to words.
Stjepan Varesevac Cobets
#18. Poetry is like a puzzle-solving strategy for me. I like to poem my way through tricky questions and ideas. That's about the only consistent thread through my poem-creation process.
Sarah Kay
#19. Writing poetry is like always being in love. What masochism! What luxury!
Jennifer Stone
#20. On our earth, before writing was invented, before the printing press was invented, poetry flourished. That is why we know that poetry is like bread; it should be shared by all, by scholars and by peasants, by all our vast, incredible, extraordinary family of humanity.
Pablo Neruda
#21. I don't think the nature of my poetry is satirical or even ironic, I think it's essentially lyrical but again I don't know if it's my position to say what my poetry is like.
Kenneth Koch
#22. Every time your work is read, you die several deaths for every word, and poetry is like being flayed alive.
Mary Stewart
#23. I think that at a certain age, say fifteen or sixteen, poetry is like masturbation. But later in life good poets burn their early poetry, and bad poets publish it. Thankfully I gave up rather quickly.
Umberto Eco
#24. Poetry is like ... first all you have is ...
A line weaving through your mind
Like the tail of a child's kite
Unfettered by reason or rhyme.
Vaddey Ratner
#25. Meredith,' interposed Celia, 'makes one of his women, Emilia in England, say that poetry is like talking on tiptoe; like animals in cages, always going to one end and back again.
Harold Frederic
#26. Poetry is like passion--it should not be merely pretty; it should overwhelm and bruise.
Kate Quinn
#27. What is poetry? Do not enquire. The secret dies by prying. How does the heart beat? I fainted when I saw it on the screen, opening and closing like a flower ... Poetry is like this, it is life moving, terrible, vivid. Look the other way when you write, or you might faint.
Elizabeth Smart
#28. Poetry is like walking along a little, tiny, narrow ridge up on a precipice. You never know the next step, whether there's going to be a plunge. I think poetry is dangerous. There's nothing mild and predictable about poetry.
Josephine Jacobsen
#29. The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.
Robert Penn Warren
#30. Poetry is more than just art, it's like super glue to a broken heart. It can also be a light when your life seems a little dark.
Delano Johnson
#31. It still is on the run,
time that is.
Sometimes it seems like everything's changing;
my whole world is rearranging.
Everything's different,
and yet everything's the same.
Time is just a crazy game.
Amanda Leigh
#32. (1)BEING A POET
is like opening a car door
& exposing yourself.
(2)BEING A GOOD POET
is like opening the door
& exposing the passenger
as well.
Chocolate Waters
#33. Love's language is imprecise,
fits more like mittens than gloves.
Jeannine Atkins
#34. Though philosophers like to define poetry as irrational fancy, for us it is practical, humorous, reasonable way of being ourselves.
Robert Graves
#35. When I think of Robert Frost's poems, like "The Road Not Taken", I feel the support of someone who is on my side, who understands what life's choices are like, someone who says, "I've been there, and it's okay to go on".
Fred Rogers
#36. There's one of my new poems actually - is a good example of where my poetry has ended up. My earlier river poetry was more like a cross between Shelley and Dylan Thomas.
Robert Adamson
#37. Free will is like fallen
leaves agreeing to be
where they are.
Salamanca
#38. I suspect I do not like kisses in general--perhaps my blood is stirred by poetry alone--but I have no grounds for comparison.
Olga Grushin
#39. Like a speeding train
I am passing by...
I don't know
where I'm heading
with whom or why
all I know is that
I will never, ever
pass from here again
all I know is I'm skidding forward
on this track of life.
Sanober Khan
#40. I believe the world is beautiful, and poetry, like bread, is for everyone.
Roque Dalton
#41. You grow. You are large.
You are a 19th century poem.
All of America is inside you,
a catalogue of lives and land
and burrowing things.
-From "Catalogue
Donika Kelly
#42. My mind is heaven
My eyes are the sun and the moon
My awareness shines like the morning star.
Ilchi Lee
#43. I hope that the feeling of making poetry is not confined to the people who write it down. There is no luxury like it, and I hope we all share it ... I am sure that the great glory of poetry in one's heart does not wait on achievement.
Stella Benson
#44. Poetry operates by hints and dark suggestions. It is full of secrets and hidden formulae, like a witch's brew.
Anthony Hecht
#45. I like putting common expressions next to uncommon expressions. I'm sure in Poetry 101 there is a name for it, but it seems like you usually go one way or the other in rock music.
Dan Bejar
#46. Love in the Arab world is like a prisoner, and I want to set (it) free. I want to free the Arab soul, sense and body with my poetry. The relationships between men and women in our society are not healthy.
Nizar Qabbani
#47. He remembers which sister
I like least and asks
how she is doing.
(lines 9-11 of the poem 'Divorce')
Carrie Etter
#48. I write poetry anyway and have for years and years. For me, putting fiction and poetry together is like the best of both worlds.
Ellen Hopkins
#49. Engineering, like poetry, is an attempt to approach perfection. And engineers, like poets, are seldom completely satisfied with their creations. They notice, even if no one else does, the world that is not quite le mot juste, or the hairline crack that blemishes the structure.
Henry Petroski
#50. It seems an odd idea to my students that poetry, like all art, leads us away from itself, back to the world in which we live. It furnishes the vision. It shows with intense clarity what is already there.
Helen Bevington
#51. Free verse is like free love; it is a contradiction in terms.
G.K. Chesterton
#52. Maybe tranquility is the dirt under my nails. I know it's there but I never feel like digging it out.
Casey Renee Kiser
#53. Poetry is composing, you are writing words to move the world like music.
Atticus
#54. No, what I should really like to do right now, in the full blaze of lights, before this illustrious assembly, is to shower every one of you with gifts, with flowers, with offerings of poetry - to be young once more, to ride on the crest of the wave.
Knut Hamsun
#55. I think what will happen is that fiction will become more like poetry. As in, the only people who read it will write it.
Gary Shteyngart
#56. 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
#57. Ultimately, culture, secular and otherwise, is a collection of survival strategies. The things that look like decoration - poetry, novels, music, dancing - if you strip away all the layers, are mechanisms for coping, surviving, understanding.
Ben Fountain
#58. 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
#59. let my heart always be
like it is...this very moment
ready to explode...with love
a violent rainstorm...
with no stream
no ocean vast enough
to flow into.
Sanober Khan
#60. My wife is a big fan of George Oppen and I got into him. I could have a career like his. It's not an alpha male situation, George Oppen. It's quiet. It's poetry.He just lived a life of an intellectual poet.
Stephen Malkmus
#61. Like a wildflower, poetry does not need explanation. It only needs to touch our emotions.
Debasish Mridha
#62. Poetry is the human soul entire
Squeezed like a lemon or a lime,
Drop by drop into atomic words".
Langston Hughes
#63. The Bible is not a textbook. Nor is it a manual to be studied, mastered, and mechanically applied. Instead, I believe we should listen to the Word of God and reflect upon it like poetry till it infiltrates the soul.
Eugene H. Peterson
#64. A knowledgeable person without a curious mind is like poetry without essence.
Debasish Mridha
#65. Poetry relishes ripe fruit - but ripe is one thing and overripe quite another. That's something poetry doesn't like, so it couldn't care less if I were to fall overripe to the ground.
Kiki Dimoula
#66. I was around in 1970, and now I am around in 2015 ... there is no poetry and very little romance in anything anymore, so it is really like the last phase of 'American Pie.'
Don McLean
#67. She has something to say about what life is like-which is all we ask of poetry.
Louis Untermeyer
#68. 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
#69. Who can know anybody?' said the bookshop owner. 'Every person is like thousands of books. New, reprinting, in stock, out of stock, fiction, non-fiction, poetry, rubbish. The lot. Different every day. One's lucky to be able to put his hand on the one that's wanted, let alone know it.
Russell Hoban
#70. From it's inception Beat poetry was hailed as "something NEW" and "like all good spontaneous jazz, newness is acceptable and expected - by hip people who listen." But the newness of jazz has in it the echoes of J. S. Bach.
Allen Ginsberg
#71. We like to admit to only that which already glows, although it is nobler to support brightness before it glows, not afterwards.
Dejan Stojanovic
#72. Music is like poetry, It can stop you thinking. But it can also open you up.
Deborah Meyler
#73. Criticism is like politics: if you don't make your own you are by default accepting the status quo and are finally yourself responsible for whatever the status quo does to you.
Annie Finch
#74. Poetry, like all imaginative creations, divines the human enterprise. This is poetry's social value.
Major Jackson
#75. The short story seems like the best of all possible worlds. I do feel it is closer to writing poetry than to writing a novel, with its requirements of concentration and economy.
James Lasdun
#76. Drawing is a way of coming upon the connection between things, just like metaphor in poetry reconnects what has become separated.
John Berger
#77. Rap is poetry to music, like beatniks without beards and bongos.
David Lee Roth
#78. I say every dog looks like no other
but that isn't true. Not entirely.
Difference is slippery.
Mary Jo Bang
#79. I started a PhD in English at the University of Chicago because I loved poetry-which I now realize is like saying I studied vivisection because I loved dogs.
Michael Donaghy
#80. The piano is kind of like a dance floor for our thoughts you know? A very woody foundation so that we can really focus on the poetry.
Bianca C
#81. 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
#82. True poetry, like the religious prompting itself, springs from the emotional side of a man's complex nature, and is ever in harmony with his highest intuitions and aspirations.
Epes Sargent
#83. I fought for you, I fought for us
I fought for the memories and the laughter that came upon us,
Now here we are, we have become unknown people to each other,
Worlds apart in an instant, for what once was is now gone
So tell me what your secret is to letting go like you did.
Tanzy Sayadi
#84. I'm falling apart, one part after another. Falling down on the world like snow. Half of me is already on the ground, watching from below.
Ashly Lorenzana
#85. 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
#86. Palestinian society is filled with poetry, but not experimental poetry. The Palestinian poetry that people know is not the modernist experimentations, it's certain kinds of poetry that lends itself to recitation and song and things like that.
Elliott Colla
#87. This is the place I finally learned what it meant
to dance alone to the song you put in my chest.
Thanks for the symphony.
I can still hear it when I think of you,
and it is so much like remembering.
Caitlyn Siehl
#88. Poetry is motion graceful
as a fawn
gentle as a teardrop
strong like the eye
finding peace in a crowded room
Nikki Giovanni
#89. Freud thought that a psychosis was a waking dream, and that poets were daydreamers too, but I wonder if the reverse is not as often true, and that madness is a fiction lived in like a rented house
William H Gass
#90. Poetry is the only art people haven't learned to consume like soup.
W. H. Auden
#91. Saki says that youth is like hors d'oeuvres: you are so busy thinking of the next courses you don't notice it. When you've had them, you wish you'd had more hors d'oeuvres.
Philip Larkin
#92. There is nothing like scrubbing toilets for a living to make you question the choices you have made in life.
Raegan Butcher
#93. A poem is all that's left of my lost loneliness ...
It is like a window that looks into a swimming pool ...
Or an a empty gun indentation in velvet ...
And a baby gazelle given as a gift ...
Chelsey Minnis
#94. I think that great poetry is the most interesting and complex use of the poet's language at that point in history, and so it's even more exciting when you read a poet like Yeats, almost 100 years old now, and you think that perhaps no one can really top that.
Diane Wakoski
#95. There are things which some people never attempt during their whole lives, but one of these is not poetry. Poetry attacks all human beings sooner or later, and, like the measles, is mild or violent according to the age of the sufferer.
Mark Twain
#96. But that's life. We wander around like blind mice searching for whatever it is we're looking for. From mice to miserable men, from the poetry of childhood's hour to the darkness of death's goddamn dominion, we never stop searching. Why can't we just be?
Gregory Hughes
#97. A poem is like a radio that can broadcast continuously for thousands of years.
Allen Ginsberg
#98. Know then that every heartbless
given is collected by Jah like mickle and muckle,
or like a basketful of cocoa, and comes back to you
like a dividend.
Kei Miller
#99. And our love still is, it is because it goes, like a kiss, from mouth to mouth, repeating itself in silence.
Gwen Calvo
#100. Her touch is like doing simple math
When she sleeps in the bed, subtracting clothes
There is a red ink, like a sparkling red wine, adding colors
Dividing body, remembering gods, without multiplying
Santosh Kalwar
