Top 100 Poetry Literature Quotes
#1. I liked painting and drawing, and I liked humanities mainly - poetry, literature - this speculative attitude toward life.
Rafael Moneo
#2. Like speaks to like only; labor to labor, philosophy to philosophy, criticism to criticism, poetry to poetry. Literature speaks how much still to the past, how little to the future, how much to the East, how little to the West.
Henry David Thoreau
#4. He tries to find the exit from himself but there is no door.
Dejan Stojanovic
#6. Serious affairs and history are carefully laid snares for the uninformed.
Dejan Stojanovic
#7. American poetry is always about defining oneself individually,claiming one's right to be different and often to break taboos.
Diane Wakoski
#9. There are countless circles of hell; believers never penetrate the ninth circle.
Dejan Stojanovic
#10. There is a voice in my head that is only silenced by the scratching of my pen
Jessica-Lynn Barbour
#11. And the bush hath friends to meet him, and their kindly voices greet him
In the murmur of the breezes and the river on its bars,
And he sees the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended,
And at night the wond'rous glory of the everlasting stars.
A.B. Paterson
#14. At home the bookshelves connected heaven and earth.
Lisel Mueller
#16. I define influence simply as literary love, tempered by defense. The defenses vary from poet to poet. But the overwhelming presence of love is vital to understanding how great literature works.
Harold Bloom
#18. We measure everything by ourselves with almost a necessary conceit.
Dejan Stojanovic
#19. I visited many places,
Some of them quite
Exotic and far away,
But I always returned to myself.
Dejan Stojanovic
#21. Possible impossibility emerges
From an impossible possibility,
Or possibly, impossible possibility
Blooms from the impossibly possible impossibility.
Dejan Stojanovic
#23. There is a moonlight note in the Moonlight Sonata; there is a thunder note in an angry sky.
Dejan Stojanovic
#25. Literature is news which stays news.
Ezra Pound
#26. 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
#27. We can sum up the surrealist distinction between 'literature' and 'poetry' by saying where the former is artificial, fictive and elusive, the latter is natural, real, direct and spontaneous.
Michael Richardson
#30. Existence is the end of endless eternity without a beginning or an end.
Dejan Stojanovic
#31. When my words are concealed
With lies and disguises, truth and beyond
Insecurities in the veil of trust
Betrayal in bounds of lies
It's just the charm of words darling
Giving the illusion of happiness inside misery
Irum Zahra
#32. If emptiness is endless, then everything rests in emptiness.
Dejan Stojanovic
#33. I don't know anything that mars a good literature so completely as too much truth. Facts contain a great deal of poetry, but you can't use too many of them without damaging your literature.
Mark Twain
#34. Therapy is to make one happy. What is the point of that? Happy people are not interesting. Better to accept the burden of unhappiness and try to turn it into something worthwhile, poetry or music or painting: that is what he been believes.
J.M. Coetzee
#35. The only people who have trouble with poetry are the people who link it with literature. It's much more akin to mountain-walking, and dancing by yourself at 2 A.M.
Theo Dorgan
#36. A particular ikon an aid to devotion may be itself a word of art, but that is logically accidental; its artistic merits will not make it a better ... ikon. They may make it a worse one.
C.S. Lewis
#37. You ask how it is possible to be your own father and son. You should seek answers, although it is better to anticipate some, to be the light and dream.
Dejan Stojanovic
#39. Vandals listen only when others are stronger.
If vandals are equal or stronger
Their word is the last word.
Dejan Stojanovic
#40. Poetry is not a mere expression of a poet's self, but an enchantment, a spell of the muse, the inspiration. Poetry is thus magic and magic is poetry.
Shilpa Sandesh
#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
#43. Faith is a question of eyesight; even the blind can see that.
Dejan Stojanovic
#45. The most prevalent poetic representation of contemporary experience is the mimesis of disorientation by non sequitor.
Tony Hoagland
#46. Poetry is the most concentrated form of literature; it is the most emotionalized and powerful way in which thought can be presented ...
Amy Lowell
#48. Poetry is a good medium for revolutionary hope.
Susan Griffin
#50. A chronic poet should always be an inveterate nature-lover.
Munia Khan
#51. When the long bygone Lee Po wanted to say something, he could do it with only a few words.
Dejan Stojanovic
#52. 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
#55. My wife has a beastly habit of comparing poetry
all literature in fact
to the droppings of the goats among the rocks
mere excreta that fertilises the ground it falls on.
D.H. Lawrence
#57. Almost any poem has to be read twice, first for strangeness, second for clarity.
Peter J. Daniels
#59. Instead of trying to come up and pontificate on what literature is, you need to talk with children, to teachers, and make sure they get poetry in the curriculum early.
Rita Dove
#60. 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
#61. Cut quarrels out of literature, and you will have very little history or drama or fiction or epic poetry left.
Robert Staughton Lynd
#62. Calico Kitty
My calico kitty
was painted and primed
she could prowl
the night away ~
without spending a dime...
Muse
#63. My feelings are too loud for words and too shy for the world.
Dejan Stojanovic
#64. I imagined I was God for a millisecond
And became speechless for a long time.
Dejan Stojanovic
#66. If you cannot be a sun that illuminates the light, be a moon that never tires of reflecting the light.
Subhan Zein
#67. I'm afraid I take ... this rather clinical view of love: it's saving you from madness. I'm not so enthusiastic as other poets have been.
William Empson
#69. Although all days are equally long regardless of the season, some days are long not only seasonally but by rewards they offer.
Dejan Stojanovic
#70. 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
#71. The poet is a faker / Who's so good at his act / He even fakes the pain / Of pain he feels in fact.
Fernando Pessoa
#74. 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
#75. The glory of the protagonist is always paid for
by a lot of secondary characters
Tony Hoagland
#76. 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
#77. The world cannot be translated;
It can only be dreamed of and touched.
Dejan Stojanovic
#78. We like to admit to only that which already glows, although it is nobler to support brightness before it glows, not afterwards.
Dejan Stojanovic
#79. Reading great works of literature, discovering poetry, and listening to the best composers are all ways that we learn to love the Creator more.
Jennifer A. Marshall
#81. 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
#82. An aphorism is a synthesis of poetry and prose, it is a narrative precipitate, a didactic parable, an ideological concept, in practice it 's compressed and zipped philosophy . It is literature that adapts itself to the digital age.
William C. Brown
#83. What does infinity mean to you?
Are you not infinity and yourself?
Dejan Stojanovic
#84. Of everything
I have ever endured,
Y
O
U
are
My Favourite Tragedy.
Meraaqi
#85. 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
#86. For my part, I love to give myself up to the illusion of poetry. A hero of fiction that never existed is just as valuable to me as a hero of history that existed a thousand years ago.
Washington Irving
#88. Is it possible to write a poem or are these words just screams of outlaws exiled to the desert?
Dejan Stojanovic
#91. Nothing is inanimate; what is the rest is our interpretation.
Dejan Stojanovic
#92. Trying too hard to be too good, even when trying to be bad, is too good for the bad, too bad for the good.
Dejan Stojanovic
#93. 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
#94. A hidden spark of the dream sleeps
In the forest and waits
In the celestial spheres of the brain.
Dejan Stojanovic
#95. 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
#96. To not say all that can be said is the secret of discipline and economy.
Dejan Stojanovic
#97. One way or another, all the poets of the thirties and forties reacted to Auden, either by rejecting him or trying to absorb him.
Clive James
#98. A smiling lie is a whirlwind, easy to enter, but hard to escape.
Dejan Stojanovic
#100. 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
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