Top 100 Poetry Was Quotes
#1. Especially once those poetry events began, because, yeah, the stuff was still on the page, but the page was starting to spill into real space, spill into air, once you could hear it, once there was a typewriter, once there was a body of a typist, it was getting rid of the confines of the page.
Vito Acconci
#2. Life makes writing poetry necessary to prove I really was paying attention.
Mark Strand
#3. I was kind of an outcast in school 'cause I always kept to myself and was writing poetry and then going on tour with my brother band all the time, so kids didn't know what to make of me.
Christina Perri
#4. Forced relations between two things that superficially appear foreign create a new, instantaneous state. Authentic poetry asks nothing more. A kinship completely nonexistent moments ago was created by the poet's authority, just as it might have been created in life by the authority of chance.
Odysseus Elytis
#5. The Net
I made you many and many a song,
Yet never one told all you are
It was as though a net of words
Were flung to catch a star;
It was as though I curved my hand
And dipped sea-water eagerly,
Only to find it lost the blue
Dark splendor of the sea.
Sara Teasdale
#6. It's not that he lacked poetry. But his poetry was of the body, not the mind. He spoke it in the way he moved, the way he held a hammer, rowed a boat, built a fire. I, on the other hand, was like a brain in a box, a beating heart in a coal scuttle.
Meg Rosoff
#7. That was not sex. That was naked poetry.
Hank Moody
#8. Since the dawn of time, primitive humans thought, loved and had poetry. They also pooped on everything. It was horrible.
Dana Gould
#9. He looked like a butler dressed by his four-year-old daughter - a mishmash of good intentions and ill design. And there I was, an unshaven, rumpled page of discarded poetry, extending a hand and smiling, no doubt wolfishly.
Walter Mosley
#10. Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow; - vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow - sorrow for the lost Lenore.
Edgar Allan Poe
#11. Autumn Dusk
I saw above a sea of hills
A solitary planet shine,
And there was no one, near or far,
to keep the world from being mine.
Sara Teasdale
#12. I have always been a fire, and everyone I loved walked away as ashes, until I met a phoenix who was born to love flames.
Jenim Dibie
#13. What differentiated us was our perception of our mutual reality, which made no difference.
Mie Hansson
#14. 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
#15. I started off in England and very few people knew I was Australian. I mean, the clues were in the poems, but they didn't read them very carefully, and so for years and years I was considered completely part of the English poetry scene.
Peter Porter
#16. Poetry was a barrier against raw
emotions. It distilled them into bearable
music, allowed one to accommodate them
a little at a time.
Alexander Moncrieffe
Julie Anne Long
#17. I was intoxicated by the romantic poetry of our great writers. I arranged the world according to my private use, looking at it through the poems I had devoured.
Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont
#18. She captured the spot of my world's centre and sent me in elliptic rings about it, causing the ground beneath me to vanish and the breath of my lungs to disperse. I was a rock locked in helpless orbit.
Richard Ronald Allan
#19. I got a bit obsessed with the whole English language and was writing journals and poetry. I've always been intrigued about psychology and philosophy and how people's minds work.
Lara Pulver
#20. 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
#21. I never thought I'd be doing poetry books. I never really studied poetry. But the first one I did was after my mother died, and I realized that people sort of think and talk about her style and fashion, but in fact, what made her the person she was was really her love of reading and ideas.
Caroline Kennedy
#22. Sometimes you know that you are destined to die, but somehow you are given a parenthesis after the punctuation mark: more years, more time that wasn't meant for you but still was meant for you, a bridge stretching out into the stars, a confidence built of invisible threads, a miracle.
Lene Fogelberg
#23. She made a firm resolution, one of the resolutions she was making almost daily these days. No more sleepovers, no more writing poetry, no more wasting time. Time to tidy up your life. Time to start again.
David Nicholls
#24. The inlet
our friend looks as he did
when we first knew him,
and until I wake I believe
I will die of grief, for I know
that this boy grew into a man
who was a faithful friend
who died.
Wendell Berry
#25. In poetry, and in my study in graduate school, I was drawn to a particular poet, Theodore Roethke. I did a dissertation on "The Evolution of Matter and Spirit in the Poetry of Theodore Roethke" for my Ph.D.
Frederick Lenz
#26. A sky
full
of stars
and he
was staring
at her.
- ATTICUS
Atticus Poetry
#27. I was twenty when I discovered war and photography. I can't say that I wanted to bear witness and change the world. I had no good moral reasons: I just loved adventure, I loved the poetry of war, the poetry of chaos, and I found that there was a kind of grace in weaving between the bullets.
Luc Delahaye
#28. I love the simple poetry of theater, where you can stand in a spotlight on a stage and wrap a coat around you, and say, 'It was 1860 and it was winter ... '
Gary Oldman
#29. 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
#30. even in death, his last breath was poetry
existing in the wind
and on the breeze of
"it used to be likes"
forever remembering,
yet never reliving
his life
will never be what it used to be like.
N'Zuri Za Austin
#31. Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.
Derek Walcott
#32. Poetry taught me a great deal about language and images, but when it came to plotting, I was stumped. It's been very much a learn-by-doing thing for me.
Jennifer McMahon
#33. The dark night was the first book of poetry and the constellations were the poems.
Chet Raymo
#34. When a good poet is confronted with difficult facts that he knows to be true but also are inimical to poetry, he has no choice but to flee to the margins; it was ... this very retreat that allowed him to hear the hidden music that is the source of all art.
Orhan Pamuk
#35. She was afraid of heights
but she was
much more afraid
of never flying.
Atticus Poetry
#36. When African slave Phillis Wheatley wrote poetry, 18 men came to assess whether that was possible.
Jacky Fleming
#37. Milton saw not, and Beethoven heard not, but the sense of beauty was upon them, and they fain must speak.
John Ruskin
#38. And this is when I knew I was black for real.
This is when I knew black was a city
whose walls were constantly under siege....
Roger Bonair-Agard
#39. I was born in the night of the second and third
Of January, ninety-something-or-other,
An unreliable year, and the centuries
Surround me with fire.
Osip Mandelstam
#41. 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
#42. With the rain falling
surgically against the roof,
I ate a dish of ice cream
that looked like Kafka's hat.
It was a dish of ice cream
tasting like an operating table
with the patient staring
up at the ceiling.
Richard Brautigan
#43. Whiteness is the color of death, you know, not black. Wetness is life, the breeder and shaper of life. In the beginning the sun was black. So all light was absorbed before it had a chance to return. And our dreams, then, were empty.
Jim Carroll
#44. She wasn't looking for a knight, she was looking for a sword.
Atticus Poetry
#45. 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
#46. She was too busy wishing
on shooting stars
to see the dreams
come true around her.
Atticus Poetry
#47. The mind-blowing, ridiculous sex which was the stuff of both poetry and porn - so unlike anything else I had ever experienced before.
Emily Giffin
#48. Peculiar as I was, and remain, I was trained to be practical. I'm still amazed at the radical temerity of my friends, you included, Julie, who choose poetry as their vocation. I envy your faith.
Debra Dean
#49. I was not sorrowful, but only tired
Of everything that ever I desired.
Ernest Dowson
#50. I think it was Milosz, the Polish poet, who when he lay in a doorway and watched the bullets lifting the cobbles out of the street beside him realised that most poetry is not equipped for life in a world where people actually die. But some is.
Ted Hughes
#51. To break the pentameter, that was the first heave
Ezra Pound
#52. When I was asked to be Writer in Residence at Edinburgh I thought, you can't teach poetry. This is ridiculous.
Norman MacCaig
#53. Every avalanche was once a lonely snowflake, every flood was once an aching raindrop.
Jenim Dibie
#54. Without even intending it, there is that little shiver of a moment in time preserved in the crystal cabinet of the mind. A little shiver of internal space. That's what I was looking for.
Allen Ginsberg
#55. I don't need your praise
to survive. I was here first,
before you were here, before
you ever planted a garden.
And I'll be here when only the sun and moon
are left, and the sea, and the wide field.
I will constitute the field.
Louise Gluck
#56. My nerves were wrapped so tight I could explode at any second. Some jaguar reciting poetry was not helping. Just tell me which way to go, Shakespeare.
Lisa Kessler
#57. I think there was a revolution in poetry, associated chiefly with Eliot and Pound; but maybe it is of the nature of revolutions or of the nature of history that their innovations should later come to look trivial or indistinguishable from technical tricks.
Howard Nemerov
#58. As a very young poet, I had been brought up on that dogma that politics was bad for poetry.
Adrienne Rich
#59. The sun surrendered its splendor - why, it was like poetry; he was a poet; Norman smiled. He was many things. If they only knew - - But
Robert Bloch
#60. Poetry was the maiden I loved, but politics was the harridan I married.
Joseph Howe
#61. The way you walked away
The way you stopped and waited
All that time
What was in your heart?
A laugh?
A sarcasm?
Couldn't we be lovers?
Though we have never walked together
Shasika Amali Munasinghe
#62. I think poetry was always where I went to deal with my deepest feelings.
Jonathan Galassi
#63. 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
#64. And there he would lie all day long on the lawn brooding presumably over his poetry, till he reminded one of a cat watching birds, when he had found the word, and her husband said, "Poor old Augustus--he's a true poet," which was high praise from her husband.
Virginia Woolf
#65. The garden was full of sorrow
Songbirds and unusual winds whistled a rhyme
Clouds caused to appear and cast down darkness
For this was the first day the sun didn't shine
John E. Wordslinger
#66. When I was in graduate school, my thesis included both poetry and essays. Influenced by the personal essays of James Baldwin and Norman Mailer, I loved the form, but pretty much stopped.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#67. Oh what a long time we shall not be and the world will endure,
Neither name nor sign of us will exist;
Before this we were not and there was no deficiency,
After this, when we are not it will be the same as before.
Omar Khayyam
#68. Francesca was feeling good feelings, old feelings, poetry and music feelings.
Robert James Waller
#69. It was her laughter that made me love her. Her shy inappropriate madness is what made her beautiful.
Jay Long
#70. When I was younger, I was so crazy about poetry that I didn't notice who was noticing. It seemed to me so tremendous and large.
Robert Hass
#71. 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
#72. From the shoulders, slowly a pair of wings unfolded, wings made of rainbows, of light upon water, of poetry.
Calvin fell to his knees.
"No," Mrs. Whatsit said, though her voice was not Mrs. Whatsit's voice. "Not to me Calvin. Never to me. Stand up.
Madeleine L'Engle
#73. In our time the blasphemies are threadbare. Pessimism is now patently, as it always was essentially, more commonplace than piety. Profanity is now more than an affectation - it is a convention. The curse against God is Exercise 1 in the primer of minor poetry.
G.K. Chesterton
#74. I was a 16-year-old girl at one point, so of course I wrote poetry.
Elizabeth Edwards
#75. I began writing poetry when I was about 10. Bad poetry, but you start with bad poetry.
Jonas Mekas
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. Poetry was the processing of my thoughts until the slag of justification fell away and I was left with the cold steel truths of life.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#79. I began writing early - very, very early ... I was already writing short stories for the radio and selling poems to poetry and art festivals; I was involved in school plays; I wrote essays, so there was no definite moment when I said, 'Now I'm a writer.' I've always been a writer.
Wole Soyinka
#80. I would tell him how he almost made us lose interest in passion by his obsession with the gestures empty of their emotions, and how we reviled him, because he almost caused us to take vows of chastity, because what he wanted us to exclude was our own aphrodisiac - poetry.
Anais Nin
#81. 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
#82. She dreamed that night of chickweed, which was a strange thing to dream about. Chickweed is a low, weedy little plant, not very distinguished. No one writes poetry comparing their lovers to chickweed (or if they do, the poems are rarely well received).
T. Kingfisher
#83. I was coming together...
limb by limb, after being broken
for an infinity.
Sanober Khan
#84. I love Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. I also love more cerebral poets like H.D. and Emily Dickinson. My parents subscribed to a monthly poetry periodical, and as a teenager I was introduced to Denise Levertov, who was an influence.
Francesca Lia Block
#85. Poetry is practically the only intellectual pursuit which we can be positive was highly developed and much practiced in pre-Islamic Arabia. It seems certain that the Arabic word for poet, shair, meant originally "one who knows," and the word for poetry, shir, "knowledge".
Franz Rosenthal
#86. A few drinks and the world was hers -
she wore her whiskey like a loaded gun.
Atticus Poetry
#88. i know it all ends the same,
but i was interested in seeing
how you would break my heart.
AVA.
#89. I once saw a small child go to an electric light switch as say, "Mamma, can I open the light?" She was using the age-old language of exploration, the language of art. It was a sort of metaphor, but she was not using it as ornamentation.
Ezra Pound
#90. I developed a definition - which I think becomes less and less accurate as poetry moves into the world - that poetry was a way of speaking to the world, but fiction was a way to get the world to speak to me.
Grace Paley
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. She pronounced each word carefully, as though she was tasting fruit. The words of her poems were a most private and fragrant orchard.
Pat Conroy
#94. Without intending to, without even knowing it, he demonstrated with his life that his father had been right when he repeated until his dying day that there was no one with more common sense, no stonecutter more obstinate, no manager so lucid or dangerous, than a poet.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#95. I wish I was what I have been
And what I was could be
As when I roved in shadows green
And loved my willow tree
To gaze upon the starry sky
And higher fancies build
And make in solitary joy
Loves temple in the field
John Clare
#96. Calico Kitty
My calico kitty
was painted and primed
she could prowl
the night away ~
without spending a dime...
Muse
#97. I imagined I was God for a millisecond
And became speechless for a long time.
Dejan Stojanovic
#98. My favorite subject probably was math. I love math. Figures just intrigue me. I was really good at math. English probably was my worst subject. But I used to write a lot of poetry. I used to write poetry all the time.
Herschel Walker
#99. 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
#100. I've always written poetry and lyrics. My first husband, who was a musician, we wrote a bunch of songs together.
P. J. Soles
