Top 64 Small Poetry Quotes
#1. Again I resume the long
lesson: how small a thing
can be pleasing, how little
in this hard world it takes
to satisfy the mind
and bring it to its rest.
Wendell Berry
#3. I grow into my death.
My life is small
and getting smaller. The world is green.
Nothing is all.
Mark Strand
#4. From my teenage years on, I sought out Native elders from many tribal nations and listened to their words. I also started a small press, The Greenfield Review Press, and became very involved with publishing the work of other American Indian authors, especially books of poetry.
Joseph Bruchac
#5. There is a pledge of the big and of the small in the infinite.
Dejan Stojanovic
#6. When one writes "the last apple on the tree," or "the one small peach as pink as dawn," one is beginning to deal with particulars - to develop texture ...
Such texture is vital to all poetry. It is what makes the poem an experience, something much more than mere statement.
Mary Oliver
#7. I also could see myself as a stand-up comedian, a fashion designer (for people of all sizes), a hairdresser, an earnest and eventually burnt-out politician, or the owner of a small bistro. But I fear that, without poetry, I would have simply been going through the motions.
Denise Duhamel
#8. Making it in poetry
The young teller
at the credit union
asked why so many
small checks
from universities?
Because I write
poems I said. Why
haven't I heard
of you? Because
I write poems
I said.
Bob Hicok
#9. He said that he felt that there was a book hidden between us. Some small thing lodged between a rib or a summer. and He wanted to find it.
Mikl Paul
#10. I opened my veins. Unstoppably life spurts out with no remedy. Now I set out bowls and plates. Every bowl will be shallow. Every plate will be small. And overflowing their rims, into the black earth, to nourish the rushes unstoppably without cure, gushes poetry ...
Marina Tsvetaeva
#11. Nothing is too small. Nothing is too, quote-unquote, ordinary or insignificant. Those are the things that make up the measure of our days, and they're the things that sustain us. And they're the things that certainly can become worthy of poetry.
Rita Dove
#12. There's a freedom to simplicity;
a love that only grow in small spaces
killing yourself ever so slowly
to put a smile on your child's face
from born to fly
K.R. Albers
#13. I love all things, not only the grand but the infinitely small: thimble, spurs, plates, flower vases ...
Pablo Neruda
#14. This town of churches and dreams; this town I thought I would lose myself in, with its backward ways and winding roads leading to nowhere; but, I found myself instead. -Magic in the Backyard (excerpt from American Honey)
Kellie Elmore
#15. Everything here is a small offense and not of value as art or confession. It is not a whim. It is an attempt to peel another putrid skin.
Patti Smith
#16. My heart is small, like a love of buttons or black pepper.
S. Jane Sloat
#17. Poetry saves what is human in this world going gaudy & insane. In exploring small truths, something larger might turn up, adding dimension, insight, vision, recognition to our lives. We just might be more complete, more aware after a poem.
Diane Glancy
#18. Learning to be a lady / is like learning / to live within a shell, / to be a crustacean encased / in a small white / uncomfortable world.
Stephanie Hemphill
#19. Such a small, pure object a poem could be, made of nothing but air a tiny string of letters, maybe small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. But it could blow everybody's head off.
Mary Karr
#20. Usually when your imagination is bigger then one's comprehension, this normally means you've out grown the small circle. Get with like-mined people and go after your vision.
By T-cupp
Takina Cupp
#21. I'm not an academic, but I've always loved poetry since I've been small.
Naveen Andrews
#22. In cosmos and microcosmos scale can be/so great and be so small/neither can stay believable, each/cancels the other out and we, too big/for one an unapparent otherwise/live self-scaled lives where we are as if we were./Bring some words together toward a real.
William Bronk
#25. For poetry there exists neither large countries nor small. Its domain is in the heart of all men.
Giorgos Seferis
#27. I drink from a small spring,
my thirst exceeds the ocean.
Adam Zagajewski
#28. Why cry over dried flowers?
They're meant to be straw.
Why cry over miniature roses?
They're meant to be small.
Marilyn Chin
#29. I think language beautifully full of the poetry of immanent clarification of some small pinprick of what living might mean. Fuck. Why else would anyone care to spend a life writing sentences?
Jill Talbot
#30. I have a dark and dreadful secret. I write poetry ... I believe poetry is a primal impulse within all of us. I believe we are all capable of it and furthermore that a small, often ignored corner of us positively yearns to try it.
Stephen Fry
#31. In each speck of mud of which we are made, however small or seemingly insignificant, one can find traces of the matter that melts and glows at high temperatures, that gets cold and hardens, becoming in the end what we sometimes call poetry.
Vladimir Tasic
#32. A poet must discover that it's his own story that is true, even if the truth is small indeed.
Jim Harrison
#33. I STILL THINK THE REVOLUTION IS TO MAKE THE WORLD SAFE FOR POETRY, MEANDERING, FOR THE FRAIL AND VULNERABLE, THE RARE AND OBSCURE, THE IMPRACTICAL AND LOCAL AND SMALL.
Rebecca Solnit
#34. What men call love is a very small, restricted, feeble thing compared with this ineffable orgy, this divine prostitution of the soul giving itself entire, all its poetry and all its charity, to the unexpected as it comes along, to the stranger as he passes.
Charles Baudelaire
#35. the hope is small
but it is everything.
AVA.
#37. 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
#38. From I Knew a Woman
I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,
When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them;
Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one:
The shapes a bright container can contain!
Theodore Roethke
#39. Old things climb out through my mouth and set themselves free in the air. On the high moor there are patterns and in my small mind there are patterns. [...] All the centuries drop away, and I am in the presence of something that does not know time.
Paul Kingsnorth
#40. I forgot to sup
annoyance
from his glass full of
mingled dread and rage
Now let me take
a small draught of solace
from my own little cup
full of predicaments!
From the poem- Draught
Munia Khan
#41. Some stars are large, and some are small,
And some are quite invisiball!
Walter R. Brooks
#42. He'd been let down so often
His brow was on the floor
But then they found
A small hole in the ground
And let him down some more
David Thewlis
#43. To grow up
is to find
the small part you are playing
in the extraordinary drama
written by
somebody else.
Madeleine L'Engle
#44. She wielded it easily, lightly. She carried it swinging like a baseball bat, only with more poetry to it. It was a frightening thing to watch, this small shadow of billowing grey fabric and sprawling, wild hair splaying out behind her, the axe held at the ready with both hands, poised and prepared.
Cherie Priest
#45. The city is like poetry; it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines.
E.B. White
#47. Sometimes poetry
words
give us a small, lovely look at ourselves. And sometimes that is enough.
Patricia MacLachlan
#48. I think poetry is able to say things in such a small, perfect way that are so hard to say. I think it's a perfect medium for expressing difficult ideas and concepts and feelings. It's one of my great loves.
Jerry Hall
#49. May came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.
E. E. Cummings
#51. Recipe For Happiness Khaborovsk Or Anyplace'
One grand boulevard with trees
with one grand cafe in sun
with strong black coffee in very small cups.
One not necessarily very beautiful
man or woman who loves you.
One fine day.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
#52. I know my breasts, small
as plums, would win no blue ribbons.
But in your hands they tremble and fill
with song like plump, white birds.
Cecilia Llompart
#53. Keep your small shy away from the dent you make.
Farrah Field
#54. Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You've got to go so far so fast in such a small space; you've got to burn away all the peripherals.
Sylvia Plath
#55. A fortress built long ago,
Walls made timeless by historic glory.
The small girl in the boat slows,
To listen to its story.
Rachel Lewis
#57. Because these wings are no longer wings to fly
But merely vans to beat the air
The air which is now thoroughly small and dry
Smaller and dryer than the will
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
T. S. Eliot
#58. Outside our small safe place flies mystery.
A.S. Byatt
#59. On a small table beside his chair were other haphazardly stacked volumes by such poets as Emerson, Whitman, and Wallace Stevens, a dangerous crew to let into your head.
Dean Koontz
#60. Composers need words, but they do not necessarily need poetry. The Russian composer, Aleksandr Mossolov, who chose texts from newspaper small ads, had a good point to make. With revolutionary music, any text can be set to work.
James Fenton
#61. I feel like the secretary to the morning whose only/
responsibility is to take down its bright, airy dictation/
until it's time to go to lunch with the other girls,/
all of us ordering the cottage cheese with half a pear.
Billy Collins
#62. Unforgiveness,
splinter in your breastbone, lives
there lodged like a small tree.
Withers in winter, looms
in spring. Its fruit is sweet
on first bite, then turns
into the taste of your own flesh.
Katerina Stoykova Klemer
#64. Today, find a point of stillness: brief, but precious slight, but full small, but luminously real. Find a point stillness in the balance of all things between the breathing out and breathing in.
Na'ama Yehuda
