Top 100 Poetry You 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. 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
#3. In your sky, you are the brightest star.
Without you light, it's dark like tar.
So love yourself to enlighten others.
Debasish Mridha
#4. You write so beautifully
the inside of your mind must be a terrible place
Unknown
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. It is impossible to translate poetry. Can you translate music?
Voltaire
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. This world is not enough, but it will have to do. You can either hold on or let go.
Margaret Atwood
#11. There are two kinds of love. One kind you live with, the other you write poetry about.
Debasish Mridha
#12. 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.
#13. 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
#14. Screw poetry, it's you I want, your taste, rain on you, mouth on your skin.
Margaret Atwood
#15. 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
#16. keep following your heart.
it won't always be easy, but it'll be the most important thing you'll do.
AVA.
#17. 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
#18. There is no poetry or song.
There is no short or long.
There is only you.
Debasish Mridha
#19. You're my story,
you're my poetry,
you're my flower
you're my deep driving desire.
Debasish Mridha
#20. If you can explain a poem, it is not a poem. Poetry has to be inexplicable.
Luis Gonzalez
#21. remember you are capable of the most powerful thing in the universe.
you are capable of love.
AVA.
#22. There is nothing to me but you. I know it's pathetic but, oh darling, it's true.
F.K. Preston
#23. 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
#24. Life, it turns out, isn't poetry! And do you know why? Because it's so resistant to criticism!
Andrzej Sapkowski
#25. Sometimes the rain
falls
just for you and me
to be the violin
playing
in the background
of our loneliness's song.
Sanober Khan
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. Poetry can take you places that were once only traveled by your imagination.
Delano Johnson
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. Even poetry, you know, is in one sense an infinite brag & exaggeration.
Henry David Thoreau
#35. 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
#36. You are the Worst Kind of Animal. A Butcher by Day and a Pussy Cat by Night.
Monroe Ariel
#37. 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
#38. Dear:
I am dying
without you, and I won't be dying long. But don't come.
Best always,
Frank
Frank O'Hara
#39. 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
#40. It is so hard to stay afloat in a world
that just wants to drown you.
Schuyler Peck
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. 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.
#45. 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
#48. And they can't understand, what hurts more - Missing the other person, or pretending not to.
Khadija Rupa
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. Reality is not made of dreams, until you make them real.
Soar
#52. A mask you ask? Optional I find!
Masks lend appeal of a mysterious kind.
E.A. Bucchianeri
#53. Don't you just love poetry that gives you a crinkly feeling up and down your back?
L.M. Montgomery
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. I balance you
on the end of my pen.
Teetering between love
and letting go.
Jessica Kristie
#59. Women are beautifully created without a woman you wouldn't know how to be a man
Martellis Thurmand
#60. 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
#61. That is what you meant to me: a light that shone through the darkness. (Your smile, p. 56)
Chimnese Davids
#63. Poetry is language against which you have no defenses.
David Whyte
#64. Poetry ought to be a by-product of living, and you can't have a by-product unless you've got a product first.
Wallace Stegner
#65. I wanna make growing old with you
the last poem I ever have to write
Michael Biondi
#66. no one needs love from you
more than you need love from you.
love yourself first,
and you will always be in love.
AVA.
#67. Mysteries do not lose their poetry when solved. Quite the contrary; the solution often turns out more beautiful than the puzzle and, in any case, when you have solved one mystery you uncover others, perhaps to inspire greater poetry
Richard Dawkins
#68. The wind has a purpose - to rattle the window panes, disturb the cat and make me miss you ...
John Geddes
#69. Matt smirked. Well, it is interesting because lots of poems have mathematical imagery or structure. Concrete triangular poems and syllabic verse, for example. Did you know that we subconsciously track the sound properties in poetry?
Jessica Park
#70. Much Madness Is Divinest Sense
Much Madness is divinest Sense
To a discerning Eye
Much Sense - the starkest Madness
'Tis the Majority
In this, as All, prevail
Assent - and you are sane
Demur - you're straightway dangerous
And handled with a Chain -
Emily Dickinson
#71. These days, if you happen to be a poet you have to sing your words to get your ideas out.
Sara Genn
#72. What exists in this heart is not imaginary. This hand would not grasp air in trying to hold you, nor this eye blind itself in searching for you in vain.
Chrissy Moon
#73. My dreams are tangled in images of stars and clouds and firelight - we go camping at night - it's my lucid dream of being with you ...
John Geddes
#74. 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
#75. My tongue remembers your wounded flavor.
The vein in my neck
adores you. A sword
stands up between my hips,
my hidden fleece sends forth its scent of human oil.
Li-Young Lee
#76. Later that night she picked the polish off
with her front teeth until the bed you shared
for seven years seemed speckled with glitter
and blood.
Warsan Shire
#77. Rejoice, Florence, seeing you are so great that over sea and land you flap your wings, and your name is widely known in Hell!
Dante Alighieri
#78. Madeline: Form of poetry.
Olly: that assumes that I have one
Madeline: You're not a heathen.
Olly: limericks
Madeline: You are a heathen. I'm going to pretend you didn't say that.
Nicola Yoon
#79. I act as the tongue of you,
... tied in your mouth ... in mine it begins to be loosened.
Walt Whitman
#80. It is absurd and anti-life to be a part of a system that compels you to listen to a stranger reading poetry when you want to learn to construct buildings, or to sit with a stranger discussing the construction of buildings when you want to read poetry.
John Taylor Gatto
#81. I am my own reflection
But when I look at me
I can see your affliction
Munia Khan
#82. Sometimes having little or no money makes you want to steal and live your life the only way you want to
Martellis Thurmand
#83. I may not always be with you
But when we're far apart
Remember you will be with me
Right inside my heart
Marc Wambolt
#84. Poetry should be written the way adultery is committed: on the run, on the sly, during the time not accounted for. And then you come home, as if nothing ever happened,
Vera Pavlova
#85. 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
#86. At the age of four, you were an artist. And at seven, you were a poet.
Seth Godin
#87. So quiet now my dearest knight
your armor shines white still
for my lips shall not say the words
that make you flee with fear
White Knight
Shay Leigh
#88. You can't build a life
on another human being. We're foundations
of sand. We're Atlas buckling under the sky.
Elisabeth Hewer
#89. Pices : Without you I'm nothing,you're my everything
Aquarius : Without you I'm lonely and unpretty,you're my happiness and beauty
Patrick Cruz
#90. If it weren't for you, mornings wouldn't be so comforting - slippers wouldn't scrape through the rooms of my heart ...
John Geddes
#91. stay curious and stay the brave, strong, unrelenting soldier of love that you are.
AVA.
#92. show me all the parts of you
that you do not love
so i know where to begin.
AVA.
#94. You are afraid to let anyone in, but you still leave the door open, hoping someone good will shut the door behind him and throw away the keys.
Jenim Dibie
#96. Write poetry as if you were in love. If you are always in love you will not always write the same poem, but if you are never in love, you may.
- from My Olivetti Speaks
Kenneth Koch
#97. That's what I do: I make coffee and occasionally succumb to suicidal nihilism. But you shouldn't worry - poetry is still first. Cigarettes and alcohol follow
Anne Sexton
#98. If I never meet you
In this life
Let me feel the lack
A glance from your eyes
Then my life
Will be yours
James Jones
#99. You hate him for turning you inside of yourself. You are still getting used to looking at your body in the light.
Kristina Haynes
#100. Feel you the barren flattery of a rhyme?
Can poets soothe you, when you pine for bread,
By winding myrtle round your ruin'd shed?
George Crabbe
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