Top 79 Poetry Is My Life Quotes
#1. But poetry is my life. Poetry is what matters to me.
Peter Davison
#2. For better or worse, poetry is my life.
Donald Hall
#3. Poetry is my life, my postmark, my hands, my kitchen, my face.
Anne Sexton
#4. Imperfection is my ticket, perfection is my pursuit
Paul Travis
#5. Poetry was one of the things that interested me most as I was growing up. I used to write it in my head all the time. I still think the very greatest pleasure in life is to write a poem.
Claire Tomalin
#6. Life is perhaps that enclosed moment
when my gaze destroys itself in the pupil of your eyes
and it is in the feeling
which I will put into the Moon's impression
and the Night's perception.
Forough Farrokhzad
#7. Within my palm there is a world, a world as delicate as a bubble!
Preeth Nambiar
#8. Snub end of a dismal year,
deep in the dwarf orchard,
The sky with its undercoat of blackwash and point stars,
I stand in the dark and answer to
My life, this shirt I want to take off,
which is on fire ...
Charles Wright
#9. You ask my love completest,
As strong next year as now,
The devil take you, sweetest,
Ere I make aught such vow.
Life is a masque that changes,
A fig for constancy!
No love at all were better,
Than love which is not free.
Ernest Dowson
#10. Sand lines my soul which is filled with the breath of the ocean.
A.D. Posey
#11. In my life are many windows
and many graves.
Sometimes they exchange
roles:
then a window is closed forever,
then by way of a gravestone
I can see
very far.
(Hebrew-to-English translation by Rabbi Steven Sager)
Yehuda Amichai
#12. If my life was pulled into the pages of a book, there would be coffee stains and wrinkles along the lines of that narrative. Because all I can wish is that the book of my life would be well read and well loved. Living within words and the sound of writing.
F.K. Preston
#13. My relationship stays strong because I serenade her with my actions and I write poetry in her heart with my deeds. My endless love is expressed with more than just my words; my love is lived as a verb.
Steve Maraboli
#14. Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled
to cast aside the weight of facts
and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.
Mary Oliver
#15. My life is a tree, yoke fellow of the earth, pledged by roots too deep for remembrance. To stand hard against the storm. To fill my place. (But high in the branches of my green tree there is a wild bird singing. Wing-free are the wings of my bird; she hath built no mortal nest)
Karle Wilson Baker
#16. My life is filled with buckets of tears; thousands of people shouting in my ears; the humming and chirping of hundreds of Himalayan birds, which are irresistible to hear.
Santosh Kalwar
#17. Often I find that poems predict what I'm going to do later in my own writing, and often I find that poems predict my life. So I think poetry is the most intense expression of feeling that we have.
Erica Jong
#18. To thee, to thee, my fire! Thou hast been burning in my heart all these futile years. If my life were a piece of gold it would come out of its trial brighter, but it is a trodden turf of grass, and nothing remains of it but this handful of ashes.
Rabindranath Tagore
#19. My pond life with hydra is over; now I'm into the ocean world of poetry to dive deeper..
Munia Khan
#20. I grow into my death.
My life is small
and getting smaller. The world is green.
Nothing is all.
Mark Strand
#21. But life, they said, means life. Dying inside.
The Devil was evil, mad, but I was the Devil's wife
which made me worse. I howled in my cell.
If the Devil is gone then how could this be hell?
Carol Ann Duffy
#22. Within my reflection I see tears, for what I see is the truth, are my greatest fears.
Atarah L. Poling
#23. In The Land of Poetry and Fighting, Efficiency rules the throne. I try to live here, so I shave my head because hair is dead and dead is inefficient.
Cameron Conaway
#24. Allen Ginsberg instructs: "First thought, best thought." Oh, to have my every spontaneous thought count as poetry! No draft after draft like a draft horse.
Clayton Eshleman, laughing, said, "'First thought best thought' is not 'First word best word ' Ginsberg does rewrite. I'm sure he does.
Maxine Hong Kingston
#25. If after I die, people want to write my biography, there is nothing simpler. They only need two dates: the date of my birth and the date of my death. Between one and another, every day is mine.
Fernando Pessoa
#26. My art is that of the 35mm kind; my poetry is of the lead and ink kind; my happiness is of the product of both; and my legacy is of the story of my soul, that my life left behind
Jeremy Aldana
#27. I don't find any direct statements in life. My poetry imitates or reproduces the way knowledge or awareness come to me, which is by fits and starts and by indirection. I don't think poetry arranged in neat patterns would reflect that situation. My poetry is disjunct, but then so is life.
John Ashbery
#28. Poetry alters my dna. every poem is a different life. every poem brings me closer to myself. and breaks open a new future inside of me.
Nayyirah Waheed
#29. My life's purpose is to write poetry - but behind the poetry must be the vision of a fresh revelation for men.
William Soutar
#30. The next big push in my life is trying to get poetry popular again.
Joshua Sasse
#31. Some say; "Poetry is what gets lost in translation!"
In this sense, my life is a bitter poem. But that is the force of nature.
I already changed it to my alternative order: "Poetry must find ways of breaking distance.
Fereidoon Yazdi
#32. Writing is my soul food, sometimes I eat alone, sometimes I share the bread.
Marie H. Curran
#33. I'm not really quiet or shy. Ask any of my friends! But I always ground my poetry in life itself. Poetry is an art of language, though, so I am always aware of every word's meaning, or multiple meanings.
Anne Stevenson
#34. Most of my life is in the past.
There goes some more of it.
I taught my sheep how to fight lions
so I would have more time
Chad Sweeney
#35. It is time I came back to my real life
After this voyage to an island with no name,
Where I lay down at sunrise drunk with light.
May Sarton
#36. What is that you express in your eyes? It seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life.
Walt Whitman
#37. As I string, a swift rhythm is played out with my hands, a cadence known only to those who have strung tobacco. To many of the poor workers, the meter and rhythm of stringing tobacco is the only poetry they've ever known.
Brenda Sutton Rose
#38. Medicine is my life, but literature is my mistress, and mysteries and poetry are my drugs of choice.
John A. Vanek
#39. One thing is certain, and I have always known it - the joys of my life have nothing to do with age. They do not change. Flowers, the morning and evening light, music, poetry, silence, the goldfinches darting about
May Sarton
#40. I still write poetry from time to time, but my whole life is so music-oriented at this point that it's hard for me to even think about having other hobbies.
Jack Tatum
#41. You smile and draw me near and whisper, "Do as dreamers do."
I lean to you and whisper in your ear, "I cannot dream tonight my Dear. For it is you.
Shaun Hick
#42. Poetry is my understanding with the world, my intimacy with things, my participation in what is real, my engagement with voices and images. This is why a poem speaks not of ideal life but of actual life: the angle of a window; the reverberation of streets, cities, rooms; shadows along a wall.
Sophia De Mello Breyner Andresen
#43. Poetry at least in my own life, is really about your own mortality. Everything in poetry makes me think of my mortality. It is not a dark thing in life; it prepares you for the graceful things that happen in your life. It gives me a license to make any kind of picture I want with great courage.
Keith Carter
#44. Some days I don't know what is greater.
My wisdom, or my stupidity.
Sanober Khan
#45. She has a charm that is incomparable. She has a beautiful heart that flows with love. And she has a sensitive soul that enthralls with magic. She was the spark I had been waiting for all my life.
Avijeet Das
#46. Real is overrated
No way in my life is that the gist
I'd be everything I am not
If I were a fictionist
A.A. Patawaran
#47. 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
#49. Your world is as big as you make it.
I know, for I used to abide
In the narrowest nest in a corner,
My wings pressing close to my side.
Georgia Douglas Johnson
#50. 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
#51. Love Was
Love Will Be
But Most of All,
Love is.
Life Cannot Be Without It
It is found in the Womb
In The Woods
In The Stars.
To Be or Not to Be
To Love, or not to Love
They Are Equal.
My Soul Whispers Into the Spaces.
Yes.
Cindy Martinusen Coloma
#52. My research is like my feeling, directed towards what is the principle value in the life
the poetry.
Le Corbusier
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. Even though I am the daughter of a poet, and my stepmother is also a poet, growing up, I didn't think I could understand poetry; I didn't think that it had any relevance to my life, the feelings that I endured on a day-to-day basis, until I was introduced to the right poem.
Natasha Trethewey
#56. I thought to spend my declining years writing poetry and teaching - but that won't pay the Bergdorf's bill. I think I'll move to somewhere life is cheaper.
Erica Jong
#57. Loneliness of heart
In the still of the night my heart doth cry out, who can hear it for time is far spent. In the darkness in the shadow of the depth I find isolation and fear ...
M.I. Ghostwriter
#58. This is my life and lovestory listen losely and hold on tight this a roller coaster hell of a ride
Patrick Cruz
#59. There is a voice in my head that is only silenced by the scratching of my pen
Jessica-Lynn Barbour
#60. 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
#61. Pardon me, but my father says that it is a lie that Americans have everything. You have no sheep, no goats, no trees, no oil, no vines, no wine, not even chickens. He asks, 'What kind of life is that?' He says, 'No wonder you don't sing or dance or recite poetry very often.
Robert Fulghum
#62. Then there was someone else I met,
whose face and voice I can't forget,
and the memory of her
is like a jail I'm trapped inside,
or maybe she is something I just use
to hold my real life at a distance.
Tony Hoagland
#63. My heart is strong,
I will not fail,
I won't be wronged,
I will prevail.
Alexandra Lanc
#64. What am I to do?
What is my destiny?
I have no idea, not a clue
Feeling lost and empty.
What is my dream?
What is my future?
I beg thee to listen to me,
I beg thee to answer.
Atarah L. Poling
#65. Poetry is at the centre of my life, too, emotionally speaking, and intellectually speaking - it's just that I'm one of those people who enjoy doing other stuff as well.
Andrew Motion
#66. Poetry is what I've done my whole life. And every important thing in my life had found itself into poems.
Donald Hall
#67. I feel my griefs too, and there scarce is ground
Upon my flesh t'inflict another wound.
Yet dare I not complain, or wish for death
With holy Paul; lest it be thought the breath
Of discontent; or that these prayers be
For weariness of life, not love of thee.
Ben Jonson
#68. I have always made my own rules, in poetry as in life - though I have tried of late to cooperate more with my family. I do, however, believe that without order or pattern poetry is useless.
Anne Stevenson
#69. Of all my seeking this is all my gain:
No agony of any mortal brain
Shall wrest the secret of the life of man;
The Search has taught me that the Search is vain.
Omar Khayyam
#70. Some people make tunes, but it is lines that run like moving messages through my head. Whatever else I am saying and doing often has no bearing on this inner, verbal life.
Susan Hill
#71. Cut my life into pizzas. this is my plastic fork. oven baking, no breathing, dont give a fuck if its carbs that i'm eating' -Catherine Spann
Catherine Spann
#72. I keep following this sort of hidden river of my life, you know, whatever the topic or impulse which comes, I follow it along trustingly. And I don't have any sense of its coming to a kind of crescendo, or of its petering out either. It is just going steadily along.
William Stafford
#73. Oh let me live my own! and die so too!
("To live and die is all I have to do:")
Maintain a poet's dignity and ease,
And see what friends, and read what books I please.
Alexander Pope
#74. I am smiling, for my trust for my Lord is above all uncertainties of the universe.
Preeth Nambiar
#75. Oh, precious losing streak,
you're too cute for your own good.
I try to laugh about it
but my face is made of wood.
Casey Renee Kiser
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. My highest aspiration in life is to serve as the Limerick Laureate of Nantucket.
Alan C. Baird
#79. The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself - as a vocation and an elevation almost.
Seamus Heaney
