Top 100 Poetry You Quotes
#1. Even poetry, you know, is in one sense an infinite brag & exaggeration.
Henry David Thoreau
#2. 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
#3. I've been reading poetry publicly for 20 years, and this is what you do - you express, you sometimes dig a bit to get a conversation started. That's the point of poetry. You're supposed to go, 'Hmmmm,' and 'Woooh!'
Jill Scott
#4. One reason why I like writing poetry - you can say so many things in it that are true in poetry but wouldn't be true in prose.
Lucy Maud Montgomery
#5. You don't go after poetry, you take what comes. Maybe the gods do it through me but I certainly do a hell of a lot of the work.
Phyllis Gotlieb
#6. You'll find i-poetry, you'll find that you can download poetry, that you can stuff your i-pod with recorded poetry. So just to answer the question that way, I think that poetry is gonna catch up with that technology quite soon.
Billy Collins
#7. I am not greedy. I do not seek to possess the major portion of your days. I am content if, on those rare occasions whose truth can be stated only by poetry, you will, perhaps, recall an image, even only the aura of my films.
Maya Deren
#8. 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
#10. No one wants to read poetry. You have to make it impossible for them to put the poem down
impossible for them to stop reading it, word after word. You have to keep them from closing the book.
Muriel Rukeyser
#11. In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.
Wallace Stevens
#12. Violence can read like poetry. You just have to describe the act as if you're in love with the way your characters bleed.
F.K. Preston
#13. When you're a student of poetry, you're lucky if you don't realize how untalented you are until you get a little better. Otherwise, you would just stop.
Tony Hoagland
#14. In poetry you can leave out everything but the truth.
Deborah Keenan
#15. Underneath the forms of fiction and poetry, you can bet your ass the ground comes from someone's actual life experience.
Lidia Yuknavitch
#16. If you go into a bar in most places in America and even say the word poetry, you'll probably get beaten up. But poetry is a really strong, beautiful form to me, and a lot of innovation in language comes from poetry.
Jim Jarmusch
#17. Miracles happen, lyrical inhalation of poetry, you will not stop my words from breathing.
Delano Johnson
#18. People who read poetry have heard about the burning bush, but when you write poetry, you sit inside the burning bush.
Li-Young Lee
#19. The more poetry you have in the head, the more poetry you will understand because you will be getting to the roots of what it is that makes people write poetry at all.
Peter Davison
#20. If you want to write poetry, you must have poems that deeply move you. Poems you can't live without. I think of a poem as the blood in a blood transfusion, given from the heart of the poet to the heart of the reader. Seek after poems that live inside you, poems that move through your veins.
Ralph Fletcher
#21. We will remain unwritten through history, no X will mark us on the map; but in books of prose and poetry, you loved me once, in a paragraph.
Lang Leav
#22. You'll never know that you had all of me. You'll never know the poetry you've stirred in me.
Kate Bush
#23. Images are the heart of poetry ... You're not a poet without imagery.
Anne Sexton
#24. In poetry you can express almost inexpressible feelings. You can express the pain of loss, you can express love. People always turn to poetry when someone they love dies, when they fall in love.
Erica Jong
#25. The poetry you read has been written for you, each of you - black, white, Hispanic, man, woman, gay, straight.
Maya Angelou
#26. You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.
Mario Cuomo
#27. You've known this for a while, Ryan. I'm sure of it. At the first mention of poetry, you knew this one was about you. You had to. Though I'm sure you must have thought, This can't be why I'm on the tapes. It wasn't a big deal.
Jay Asher
#28. Drama, it would be as if you wrote some poetry. You'd run the risk of being embarrassed if people read it, because you're pouring your heart out and you're not mitigating it with any humor or anything.
Woody Allen
#29. And at least in poetry you should feel free to lie. That is, not to lie, but to imagine what you want, to follow the direction of the poem.
Mark Strand
#30. In high school I was very much involved in poetry. You cannot read a poem quickly. There's too much going on there. There are rhythms and alliterations. You have to read poetry slow, slow, slow to absorb it all.
Eugene H. Peterson
#31. In order to write poetry, you must first invent a poet who will write it.
Antonio Machado
#32. I admire 'Adventure Time' for being a piece of art in the way that I think art should be. If you want to see it is poetry, you can, and if you don't, you can watch a fun cartoon.
Rebecca Sugar
#33. You want to hear a riddle, you say? I know a very good one. It begins, why is a raven like a writing desk?'
She lifted her chin. 'Have you gone mad, Hatta? I can't seem to tell.'
'They are both so full of poetry, you see. Darkness and whimsy, nightmares and song.
Marissa Meyer
#34. Becoming interested in poetics got me interested in theater. Theater is supposed to be poetry, you know, before it's anything else. It just doesn't fly if it isn't musical.
Steve Earle
#35. Life is about making mistakes. If you don't take chances, blindfolded and frightened as you are, you're not really living, are you? Heartache makes you stronger. Misery is the stuff of good poetry. You're denying yourself much more than the bad things in life by listening to Zita's fortunes.
Kimberly Karalius
#36. There is poetry in fiction. If you cannot see it and feel it when you write, you need to step back and examine what you are doing wrong. If you have not figured out how to write a simple declarative sentence and make it sing with that poetry, you are not yet ready to write an entire book.
Terry Brooks
#37. I think the pleasure of form is that you have a companion with you besides all the poetry you have ever read.
Billy Collins
#38. If you commit yourself to the art of poetry, you commit yourself to the task of learning how to see, using words as elements of sight and their sounds as prisms. And to see means to see something worth all the agony of learning how to see.
Archibald MacLeish
#39. What is poetry? you ask, while fixing your blue pupil on mine.
What is poetry! And you are asking me?
Poetry ... is you.
Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
#40. OMG! I DESIGNED THIS NEW SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORM! IT'S CALLED "POETRY" - YOU HAVE TO READ AMY KING'S POEMS TO GET AN INVITE ~
Amy King
#41. 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
#42. No holy place existed without us then,
no woodland, no dance, no sound.
Beyond all hope, I prayed those timeless
days we spent might be made twice as long.
I prayed one word: I want.
Someone, I tell you, will remember us,
even in another time.
Sappho
#43. In your sky, you are the brightest star.
Without you light, it's dark like tar.
So love yourself to enlighten others.
Debasish Mridha
#44. You write so beautifully
the inside of your mind must be a terrible place
Unknown
#45. At two o'clock in the morning, if you open your window and listen,
You will hear the feet of the Wind that is going to call the sun.
And the trees in the Shadow rustle and the trees in the moonlight glisten,
And though it is deep, dark night, you feel that the night is done.
Rudyard Kipling
#46. We are all instruments pulling the bows across our own lungs. Windmills, still startling in every storm. Have you ever seen a newborn blinking at the light? I wanna do that every day. I wanna know what the kite called itself when it got away, when it escaped into the night ...
Andrea Gibson
#47. It is impossible to translate poetry. Can you translate music?
Voltaire
#48. 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
#49. When you act, you've got to be like a poet or a musician. It's not about evidence before court. It's not a forensic subject. It's poetry; it's a completely different place.
Rhys Ifans
#50. This world is not enough, but it will have to do. You can either hold on or let go.
Margaret Atwood
#51. There are two kinds of love. One kind you live with, the other you write poetry about.
Debasish Mridha
#52. everything i know about love
is that it hurts
and is almost always never returned
the way you want it to.
but i have hope
because i do not know everything.
AVA.
#53. Promise me no promises,
So will I not promise you:
Keep we both our liberties,
Never false and never true:
Let us hold the die uncast,
Free to come as free to go:
For I cannot know your past,
And of mine what can you know?
Christina Rossetti
#54. Screw poetry, it's you I want, your taste, rain on you, mouth on your skin.
Margaret Atwood
#55. 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
#56. keep following your heart.
it won't always be easy, but it'll be the most important thing you'll do.
AVA.
#57. In my position, the right witchdoctor
Might have caught you in flight with his bare hands,
Tossed you, cooling, one hand to the other,
Godless, happy, quieted.
I managed
A wisp of your hair, your ring, your watch, your nightgown.
Ted Hughes
#58. There is no poetry or song.
There is no short or long.
There is only you.
Debasish Mridha
#59. You're my story,
you're my poetry,
you're my flower
you're my deep driving desire.
Debasish Mridha
#60. If you can explain a poem, it is not a poem. Poetry has to be inexplicable.
Luis Gonzalez
#61. remember you are capable of the most powerful thing in the universe.
you are capable of love.
AVA.
#62. There is nothing to me but you. I know it's pathetic but, oh darling, it's true.
F.K. Preston
#63. This is what I have.
The dull hangover of waiting,
the blush of my heart on the damp grass,
the flower-faced moon.
A gull broods on the shore
where a moment ago there were two.
Softly my right hand fondles my left hand
as though it were you.
Mary Oliver
#64. Life, it turns out, isn't poetry! And do you know why? Because it's so resistant to criticism!
Andrzej Sapkowski
#65. Sometimes the rain
falls
just for you and me
to be the violin
playing
in the background
of our loneliness's song.
Sanober Khan
#66. After you have pumped your brains for thoughts and verses, there is a better poetry hinted in whistling a tune on your walk.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#67. My poetry doesn't change from place to place - it changes with the years. It's very important to be one's age. You get ideas you have to turn down - 'I'm sorry, no longer'; 'I'm sorry, not yet.
W. H. Auden
#68. Poetry can take you places that were once only traveled by your imagination.
Delano Johnson
#69. You mean you're comparing our lives to a sonnet? A strict form, but freedom within it? Yes. Mrs. Whatsit said. You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. What you say is completely up to you.
Madeleine L'Engle
#70. When you write about what you dream, you become a writer.
When you dream about what you write, you become haunted by a curse.
A. Saleh
#71. I think no matter how snarky you try to be, poetry will always find a way to make a spiritual goal out of what you're doing.
Mike Young
#72. I'm running out of things to say.
I've stopped stealing pages out of poetry books, but last week I pocketed a thesaurus and looked for synonyms for you and could only find rain
and more rain
and a thunderstorm that sounded like glass, like crystal, an orchestra.
Shinji Moon
#73. I
Like
The Way
That when you
Tilt
Poems
On their side
They
Look like
Miniature
Cities
From
A long way
Away.
Skyscrapers
Made out
Of
Words.
Matt Haig
#74. I am the poet, you are the poem; I hold the pen, you are the words, love is the ink, silence is the blank page.
Jenim Dibie
#75. You are the Worst Kind of Animal. A Butcher by Day and a Pussy Cat by Night.
Monroe Ariel
#76. Read. Read every chance you get. Read to keep growing. Read history. Read poetry. Read for pure enjoyment. Read a book called Life on a Little Known Planet. It's about insects. It will make you feel better.
David McCullough
#77. Dear:
I am dying
without you, and I won't be dying long. But don't come.
Best always,
Frank
Frank O'Hara
#78. Poetry is a pure meritocracy. There's no room for ambiguity: either a poem moves you and opens up new vistas in life, or it doesn't. It's completely objective, and the best always rise to the top.
Jim Goetz
#79. It is so hard to stay afloat in a world
that just wants to drown you.
Schuyler Peck
#81. This is hell,
but I planned it. I sawed it,
I nailed it, and I
will live in it until it kills me.
I can nail my left palm
to the left-hand crosspiece but
I can't do everything myself.
I need a hand to nail the right,
a help, a love, a you, a wife.
Alan Dugan
#82. Needle in a haystack's easy - just bring a magnet."
Eliot stared witheringly at Hardison. "You take the poetry out of everything."
"Says the man who'd just punch the haystack.
Keith R.A. DeCandido
#83. every choice i have ever made after you existed
has been dependent on exactly
how close i can have you next to me
and how long i can get you to stay.
AVA.
#86. And they can't understand, what hurts more - Missing the other person, or pretending not to.
Khadija Rupa
#87. Poetry is what you can't translate. Art is what you can't define. Film is what you can't explain. But we're going to try, anyway.
James Monaco
#88. No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer?
Henry David Thoreau
#89. Reality is not made of dreams, until you make them real.
Soar
#90. A mask you ask? Optional I find!
Masks lend appeal of a mysterious kind.
E.A. Bucchianeri
#91. Don't you just love poetry that gives you a crinkly feeling up and down your back?
L.M. Montgomery
#92. Because you fight it out, and stumble, and write bad poetry, and pick yourself up again, and at the end, hopefully, someday youre sitting with your kid on her bedroom floor, talking about how you screwed everything up too.
Josie Bloss
#93. When you are writing literary writing, you are communicating something subtextual with emotions and poetry. The prose has to have a voice; it's not just typing. It takes a while to get that voice.
Joyce Carol Oates
#94. 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
#95. On a summer night it can be lovely to sit around outside with friends after dinner and, yes, read poetry to each other. Keats and Yeats will never let you down, but it's differently exciting to read the work of poets who are still walking around out there.
Michael Cunningham
#96. I balance you
on the end of my pen.
Teetering between love
and letting go.
Jessica Kristie
#97. Women are beautifully created without a woman you wouldn't know how to be a man
Martellis Thurmand
#98. 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
#99. That is what you meant to me: a light that shone through the darkness. (Your smile, p. 56)
Chimnese Davids
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