Top 100 Poetry's Quotes
#1. I certainly can't speak for all cultures or all societies, but it's clear that in America, poetry serves a very marginal purpose. It's not part of the cultural mainstream.
Mark Strand
#2. In your sky, you are the brightest star.
Without you light, it's dark like tar.
So love yourself to enlighten others.
Debasish Mridha
#3. The head's a cloud anchor that the feet must follow. Travel light, he said, or don't travel at all.
Jim Harrison
#4. Reading a stranger's words and finding yourself in them.
Jenim Dibie
#5. Poetry springs from something deeper; it's beyond intelligence.
Jorge Luis Borges
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. Poetry is more than just art, it's like super glue to a broken heart. It can also be a light when your life seems a little dark.
Delano Johnson
#9. Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That's how I get my kicks.
Ed Koch
#10. Screw poetry, it's you I want, your taste, rain on you, mouth on your skin.
Margaret Atwood
#11. Linear's defeated form
The intangible reality rise.' ~ Wanderer
Stella Coulson
#12. The nerds are my favourite sort of boys - any guy with a passion - whether it be physics or film or writing or poetry even, I think it's super sweet and it's very attractive for a female.
Teresa Palmer
#13. Following dark winter's strife, a warm air rises, teemed with life. Birth, rebirth, as the waiting die. Old love, new love sprouts wings to fly.
Phar West Nagle
#14. 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
#15. Fear not the waking world, my mortal,
Fear not the flat, synthetic blood,
Nor the heart in the ribbing metal.
Fear not the tread, the seeded milling,
The trigger and scythe, the bridal blade,
Nor the flint in the lover's mauling.
Dylan Thomas
#16. I teach a lecture course on American poetry to as many as 150 students. For a lot of them, it's their only elective, so this is their one shot. They'll take the Russian Novel or American Poetry, so I want to give them the high points, the inescapable poets.
Robert Hass
#17. To have ruined one's self over poetry is an honour.
Oscar Wilde
#18. There are a lot of human experiences that challenge the limits of our language," she said. "That's one of the reasons that we have poetry.
Ava Dellaira
#19. There is nothing to me but you. I know it's pathetic but, oh darling, it's true.
F.K. Preston
#20. It still is on the run,
time that is.
Sometimes it seems like everything's changing;
my whole world is rearranging.
Everything's different,
and yet everything's the same.
Time is just a crazy game.
Amanda Leigh
#21. Fire is calling my name. It is whispering words of encouragement, sweet things. It wants out, for me to fan the heat until it's a vortex that can't and won't be stopped.
Alexandra Bracken
#22. American poetry is always about defining oneself individually,claiming one's right to be different and often to break taboos.
Diane Wakoski
#23. Life, it turns out, isn't poetry! And do you know why? Because it's so resistant to criticism!
Andrzej Sapkowski
#24. I have experienced healing through other writers' poetry, but there's no way I can sit down to write in the hope a poem will have healing potential. If I do, I'll write a bad poem.
Marilyn Hacker
#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. 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
#27. Then, the door opens and there he is; silhouetted in the hall light. Long hair, long legs, and a heartbeat in tune with my own.
Hunter S. Jones
#28. I'm a poet who practices Zen. And it's not, I'm somebody who practices Zen who writes poetry. There's no separation for me.
Sam Hamill
#29. Love's language is imprecise,
fits more like mittens than gloves.
Jeannine Atkins
#30. Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.
T. S. Eliot
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. When I usually outshine the light, I look for evanescence. The ending to my resplendence is much more divine, when it's singing a sweet lullaby of captured shine.
Lionel Suggs
#35. TOMORROW'S WILL
Silent world, I find myself,
Glad no one hears my thoughts.
In dark cocoon, I hibernate,
Yet spirit spills every thought.
A second chance to try again.
The risks I know too well.
Two sunsets turning into six-
Awaits tomorrow's will.
Giorge Leedy
#36. Hasten Little Maiden
...
stop and listen
for pearls of wisdom
stop and listen
as the river glistens ...
Muse
#37. What is desire but the hard wire argument given to the mind's unstoppable mouth
Mary Jo Bang
#39. 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
#40. It's not easy to define poetry.
Bob Dylan
#41. THE COLLECTED SHORT FICTION OF ORSON SCOTT CARD Experience Card's full versatility, from science fiction to fantasy, from traditional narrative poetry to modern experimental fiction.
Orson Scott Card
#42. Poetry most often communicates emotions, not directly, but by creating imaginatively the grounds for those emotions. It therefore communicates something more than the emotion; only by means of that something more does it communicate the emotion at all.
C.S. Lewis
#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. our foundation is rocky
because we made a home
in each other's skin.
the damage is beginning
to show.
K.Y. Robinson
#45. Then who is it?" said Arthur. "Well," said Ford, "if we're lucky it's just the Vogons come to throw us in to space." "And if we're unlucky?" "If we're unlucky," said Ford grimly, "the captain might be serious in his threat that he's going to read us some of his poetry first ... .
Douglas Adams
#46. The greatness of poetry comes from its struggle to express the rapture of the soul in the contemplation of beauty.
Anthony S. Maulucci
#47. 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. 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
#49. To fine that light within
that's the genius of poetry.
Julie Harris
#50. 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
#51. Poetry can change hearts but not the politician's heart.
Marty Rubin
#52. Television excites me because it seems to be the last stamping ground of poetry, the last place where I hear women's hair rhapsodically described, women's faces acclaimed in odelike language.
Ben Hecht
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. Gotta get a tight grip, don't slip, loose lips, sank ships, it's a trip, I love the way she licks her lips.
Tupac Shakur
#57. He who does not know how to encircle a girl so that she loses sight of everything he does not want her to see, he who does not know how to poetize himself into a girl so that it is from her that everything proceeds as he wants it-he is and remains a bungler
Soren Kierkegaard
#58. When I first started reading poetry, all the poets I read - Edgar Allan Poe, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Greenleaf Whittier - were rhyme poets. That's what captured me.
Marv Levy
#59. I could not eat a kangaroo. But many fine Australians do. Those with cookbooks as well as boomerangs Prefer him in tasty kangaroo-meringues.
Ogden Nash
#60. And so I've written everything down, too afraid of my demons and what they may say, the doubt that eats at me from the inside. Too afraid that I'll forget and it'll all be a madwoman's dream.
Nadege Richards
#61. Prose exists to convey meaning, and no meaning such as prose conveys can be expressed as well in poetry. That's not poetry's purpose.
Basil Bunting
#62. I've been here before, dreaming myself
backwards, among grappling hooks of light.
True to the seasons, I've lived every word
spoken. Did I walk into someone's nightmare?
Yusef Komunyakaa
#63. I exaggerate. I oversimplify. I generalize. But there's no cynicism here. American poetry is a mess. Long live American poetry.
David Biespiel
#64. How light the raindrop's contents are;
how gently the world touches me.
From View With a Grain of Sand
Wislawa Szymborska
#65. Some say, don't burn your bridges.
I say, if necessary,
let the kerosene
kiss it on the lips,
and watch it
turn to ash.
There's always more than one way
to cross the water.
Rudy Francisco
#66. Fuck I hate fucks
Who think they're so fucking great
They know everything about fucking,
When they're just fucking fucks fucking!
And no one changes the fucking world
When they keep fucking to another fuck's fuck.
Initially NO
#67. 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
#68. The poets are almost always wrong about the facts. That's because they're not interested in the facts, only the truth.
William Faulkner
#69. It's not about putting forth the questions, it's about accepting the answers we ask for.
Shane Koyczan
#70. The respect + love for humanity that's why I travel.
We are all special and gifted beings, no matter our religious differences. The message should be peace,
love and prosperity. There should be no adversity but solidarity.
Henry Johnson Jr
#71. What my character is or how many jails I have lounged in, or wards or walls or wassails, how many lonely-heart poetry readings I have dodged, is beside the point. A man's soul or lack of it will be evident with what he can carve upon a white sheet of paper.
Charles Bukowski
#72. How can the confessor teach/ those who are lost and sick at heart,/ when he himself, among the sinners,/ is worst, and most forsaken?/ It is only a game we play/ with other people's sins./ Besides, everyone knows/ that everyone lies confessing.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
#73. Failures of nerve and energy are not permitted. That's what it means to be an object.
Mary Kinzie
#74. For me music is central, so when one's talking about poetry, for the most part Plato's talking primarily about words, where I talk about notes, I talk about tone, I talk about timbre, I talk about rhythms.
Cornel West
#75. For me, poetry is the colour of Elizabeth Taylor's eyes, or the pauses in Pinter's plays - only the pauses, not the words.
Roger Lewis
#76. There's a love of rhetorical skill in the Muslim world. Osama bin Laden doesn't just go on tape cassettes and say, 'America sucks.' He recites poetry; he finds things that 'America sucks' rhymes with.
P. J. O'Rourke
#77. 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
#78. If I Must Go
If I must go to heaven's end
Climbing the ages like a stair,
Be near me and forever bend
With the same eyes above me there;
Time will fly past us like leaves flying,
We shall not heed, for we shall be
Beyond living, beyond dying,
Knowing and known unchangeably.
Sara Teasdale
#79. Now the power of the imagination is a unifying power, hence the force of metaphor; and the poet is the supreme manipulator of metaphor ... the world needs the unifying power of the imagination. The two things that give it best are poetry and religion.
R.S. Thomas
#80. 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
#81. Poetry can bridge that gap between what is solid and what is suggested; poetry can pull cogent meaning from the veiled truths outside of reason's grasp.
Bryant McGill
#82. They who in folly or mere greed
Enslaved religion, markets, laws,
Borrow our language now and bid
Us to speak up in freedom's cause.
Cecil Day-Lewis
#84. I hope that the feeling of making poetry is not confined to the people who write it down. There is no luxury like it, and I hope we all share it ... I am sure that the great glory of poetry in one's heart does not wait on achievement.
Stella Benson
#85. [Short Talk on the Sensation of Airplane Takeoff] Well you know I wonder, it could be love running toward my life with its arms up yelling let's buy it what a bargain!
Anne Carson
#86. Poetry operates by hints and dark suggestions. It is full of secrets and hidden formulae, like a witch's brew.
Anthony Hecht
#87. Let's say intelligence is your ability to compose poetry, symphonies, do art, math and science. Chimps can't do any of that, yet we share 99 percent DNA. Everything that we are, that distinguishes us from chimps, emerges from that one-percent difference.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#88. We, too, can divide ourselves, it's true. / But only into flesh and a broken whisper. / Into flesh and poetry.
Wislawa Szymborska
#89. True love ennobles and dignifies the material labors of life; and homely services rendered for love's sake have in them a poetry that is immortal.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
#90. Translated poetry filled the no-man's-land between my own work and other writers', and I found this fascinating to explore.
Edwin Morgan
#91. There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money either. - Robert Graves
Robert Graves
#92. 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
#93. Part of what we love about poetry is the fact that it seems ancient, that it has an authority of ancient language and ancient form, and that it's timeless, that it reaches back.
Robert Morgan
#94. You have to really dive deep back into yourself and get rid of so much modern analytical categorization. It's one of the great things poetry does.
Robert Morgan
#95. You pick up loads of baggage with your first record with reaction to it from fans and critics. So I went to Ireland by myself for a couple of weeks with my guitar. I read lots of poetry, I read Patti Smith's autobiography and started words and phrases and then songs started to take shape.
Ellie Goulding
#96. What you're feeling now, and the person you may reach with your words five years from now-that's why you write poetry.
Colleen Hoover
#97. Whitman's poems present no trace of rhyme, save in a couple or so of chance instances. Parts of them, indeed, may be regarded as a warp of prose amid the weft of poetry,
Walt Whitman
#98. Poetry is a kind of distilled insinuation. It's a way of expanding and talking around an idea or a question. Sometimes, more actually gets said through such a technique than a full frontal assault,
Yusef Komunyakaa
#99. I find it incredibly amazing how at every sunset, the sky is a different shade. No cloud is ever in the same place. Each day is a new masterpiece. A new wonder. A new memory.
Sanober Khan
#100. I want to write a book of poetry, as well as children's stories.
Bobby McFerrin
