Top 100 Women Poetry Quotes
#1. Why should it happen that among the great many women whom I see and am fond of, suddenly somebody I meet for half an hour opens the door into poetry?
May Sarton
#2. Reading poetry gives me a sense of calm, well-being, and love for humanity - the same stuff more flexible women get from yoga.
J. Courtney Sullivan
#3. She will blaze through you like a gypsy wildfire. Igniting you soul and dancing in its flames. And when she is gone, the smell of her smoke will be the only thing left to soothe you.
Nicole Lyons
#4. Sand lines my soul which is filled with the breath of the ocean.
A.D. Posey
#5. And now we who are writing women and strange monsters
Still search our hearts to find the difficult answers,
Still hope that we may learn to lay our hands
More gently and more subtly on the burning sands.
May Sarton
#6. The faint hints of color in her complexion, her tawny blond hair, her extraordinary thinness, all spoke of that unearthly grace modern poets find in the medieval statues. Had she been happy, she'd have been ravishing: happiness constitutes pure poetry, for women.
Honore De Balzac
#7. I think that poetry is perfect for women raising children, with just bits of time and such need to connect to other women out of the isolation of motherhood.
Francesca Lia Block
#8. i sometimes think i'm too in love with alone.
who could i love more than this peace?
AVA.
#9. Women are like beautiful flowers. Only when you love them and take good care of them will they fully bloom into the beautiful flowers that they are.
Avijeet Das
#10. love is myself in the mirror.
i will see love every time.
AVA.
#12. Men have jobs, while women have Roles: Mother, Wife, Goddess, Temptress, etc. That's probably why it's so hard for women to rewrite the rules. You're not just changing a job description, but an ancient myth. You're revising the Bible, Poetry, Legend and Psychoanalytic Scripture.
Caryl Rivers
#14. Happiness is the inner poetry of women, just as fine clothes are the mask of beauty
Honore De Balzac
#16. Stranger inside me, when you are born, I will give you
a closed book and ask you never to read it, never rest,
never forgive a man who wants to save you.
Traci Brimhall
#17. It costs me never a stab nor squirm / To tread by chance upon a worm. / Aha, my little dear, / I say, Your clan will pay me back one day.
Dorothy Parker
#18. So when you inhale and exhale, notice your breath and realize God is dwelling in your chest.
Trinka Polite
#19. A compelling and important story of First Word War Scotland, a time when women redefined the word hope as the world was losing its innocence. Andrea MacPherson writes beautifully, balancing the lives of her characters between history and the poetry of gesture, secrets and love.
Ami McKay
#20. do not let anyone in
until they love you so fiercely,
you have no defense against their love.
AVA.
#21. - so much like riding dangerous women
with whiskey coloured eyes -
such women as once fell dead with their lovers
with fire in their heads and slippery froth on thighs
Al Purdy
#22. Women are treated as unjustly in poetry as in life. The feminine ones are not idealistic, and the idealistic not feminine.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#23. You'll want to read books - novels, because ladies are frivolous; poetry because ladies are sentimental; and sermons, because we are pious. If you must read essays, Mr. Emerson might be best. Your gentleman may have a nodding acquaintance with his works.
Donald McCaig
#24. A maidenhead, the virgin's trouble
Is well-compare-d to a bubble
on a navigable river
Soon 'tis touched t'is gone forever
John Clare
#25. It's always good when women win things in fiction because it tends to be more male-dominated, unlike poetry, which is more equal.
Carol Ann Duffy
#26. Women who focus on style over substance usually find themselves in a big fucking hole, with other men who want to fuck the hole. Oh so smooth, and none sophistacted. Because, you know, how sophisticated can hole-fucking really be
Emilie Autumn
#27. i act harder than i am.
i am softer than i look.
AVA.
#28. I am born with WINGS, that is my DESTINY'..
says the butterfly..
'Just let me come into my own'...
Abha Maryada Banerjee
#29. Women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time ... Women, then, have not had a dog's chance of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one's own.
Virginia Woolf
#30. For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence.
Audre Lorde
#31. I'm very sensual and very rhythm-oriented and into poetry. Women can feel that.
Steven Tyler
#33. Anyone who has no need of anybody but himself is either a beast or a God.
Aristotle
Bruce Wayne Sullivan
#34. Meredith,' interposed Celia, 'makes one of his women, Emilia in England, say that poetry is like talking on tiptoe; like animals in cages, always going to one end and back again.
Harold Frederic
#35. Passion for survival is the great theme of women's poetry.
Adrienne Rich
#36. Women who have been disappeared by violence are howling. The voices of disappeared women are echoing. I sing with these voices.
Kim Hyesoon
#37. Don't be concerned with other women's beauty. Only admire God's amazing work and wish them well., this earth was made to bite us in half and grind us to bone, but we were made to be kind.
Key Ballah
#38. Women like poetry. A soft word in their ears and they melt - a grease spot on the grass.
Mary Ann Shaffer
#39. Women have burnt like beacons in all the works of all the poets from the beginning of time.
Virginia Woolf
#40. Here is Lady Winchilsea, for example, I thought, taking down her poems. She was born in the year 1661; she was noble both by birth and by marriage; she was childless; she wrote poetry, and one has only to open her poetry to find her bursting out in indignation against the position of women:
Virginia Woolf
#41. Power within
A wiser woman kin
I cannot give her
The proper word
She is worth so much more
She is the one that should be adored
Maddy Kobar
#42. Women invented misery,
but we don't understand it.
Rita Dove
#43. things keep falling in and out of place.
this is the universe's way of taking care of me.
AVA.
#44. Women are not as sentimental as men, and are not so easily touched with the unspoken poetry of nature, being less poetical, and having less imagination; they are more fitted for practical affairs, and would make fewer failures in business.
Charles Dudley Warner
#45. Godlike the man who
sits at her side, who
watches and catches
that laughter
which (softly) tears me
to tatters: nothing is
left of me, each time
I see her ...
Catullus
#46. They made comments about the women's legs, but, as they were not witty, their remarks had no finesse. Since their emotion was not torn by any point, they quite naturally skidded along on a stagnent ground of poetry.
Jean Genet
#47. I think happy, companionate marriages between men and women who respect each other (as far as is consistent with being actual human beings) should be every bit as poetry-worthy as angst, bitterness, and shame.
Delia Sherman
#48. The window of her sadness was so vast that it almost opened a path to her soul.
Ondjaki
#49. Haunted by demons of the past, hounded by demons not yet met, the nevermore and evermore left her little peace." ~A Tale of Two Women
Kimberly Kinrade
#51. She is unable to dream, think or love. In a woman, poetry never comes naturally, but always as the result of education. Only the woman of the world is a woman; the rest are simply females.
Edmond De Goncourt
#52. Women who are inclined to write poetry at all are inspired by being mad at something.
Amy Clampitt
#53. She was mined for the children
in her, one daughter, then another,
a short seam, quick to clay,
and not a single son to save them.
Robert Wrigley
#54. Yes, it is true that beauty is only skin deep, and internal loveliness resonates to the outside; but deep down inside every woman secretly longs to possess the allure of a royal queen.
Terry A. O'Neal
#55. The English were fascinated with the Italian people and their amazing Epicurean culture. Italian poetry, painting, pornography, music, drama, fashion, wine, women, cheese, anything Italiano was a premium commodity in London during Shakespeare's day.
Mark Lamonica
#56. Ah, hello." He gathered his courage. This was just like reading poetry, but subtract poems and add people casually placing hunting knives and daggers on their tables. One of the women was filing her fingernails into sharp points, like claws. Just like reading poetry.
Cynthia Hand
#57. It takes one a long time to become young. - Picasso
Patsy Asuncion
#58. Since she's discovered
men would rather drown
than nibble,
she does just
fine.
Rita Dove
#59. You can learn more by going to the opera than you ever can by reading Emerson. Like that there are two sexes.
David Markson
#60. I have heard that hysterical women say
They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow,
Of poets that are always gay
William Butler Yeats
#61. It is a sad paradox that when male authors impersonate women ... they are said to be dealing with 'cosmic, major concerns' - but when we impersonate ourselves we are said to be writing 'women's fiction' or 'women's poetry.
Erica Jong
#62. 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
#63. When I try to achieve greatness, it spits on me the night before.
Monroe Ariel
#64. Men and women who are lonely create. Those who are gregarious rarely do ... Any poet would rather bed with a girl than write a poem about her. All art is the result of frustration. Art is energy deflected from its normal course in action.
Burton Rascoe
#65. Your skin reminds me of everything beautiful I've ever loved ...
how the moon gets jealous at how you mock her crescent figure with the shape of your mouth ...
echo of unborn galaxies bounce forth through your vocal chords ...
Brandi L. Bates
#67. Because, in fact, women, feminists, do read my poetry, and they read it often with the power of their political interpretation. I don't care; that's what poetry is supposed to do.
Diane Wakoski
#68. I ain't scared to lend a hand
I ain't scared to clench it either
Mie Hansson
#69. He remembers which sister
I like least and asks
how she is doing.
(lines 9-11 of the poem 'Divorce')
Carrie Etter
#70. Love in the Arab world is like a prisoner, and I want to set (it) free. I want to free the Arab soul, sense and body with my poetry. The relationships between men and women in our society are not healthy.
Nizar Qabbani
#71. show me all the parts of you
that you do not love
so i know where to begin.
AVA.
#72. Failures of nerve and energy are not permitted. That's what it means to be an object.
Mary Kinzie
#73. Women are beautifully created without a woman you wouldn't know how to be a man
Martellis Thurmand
#74. 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
#75. Hasten Little Maiden
...
stop and listen
for pearls of wisdom
stop and listen
as the river glistens ...
Muse
#76. The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.
Edgar Allan Poe
#77. It was actually a women's writing group I belonged to in graduate school that gave me the courage to move from poetry to fiction.
Mary Gordon
#78. a body betrayed
a heart destroyed
a mind in confusion
and yet a woman
is capable of taking pain
and transforming it into triumph
R H Sin
#79. At certain times, men regard poetry merely as a bright flame, but to women it was, and always will be, a warm fire.
Franz Grillparzer
#80. A man does not become a real man by showing his physical domination over women. A man becomes a real man by loving, respecting and protecting women.
Avijeet Das
#81. and stars sang like crickets in the dropping dusk and were.
Agnes McDonald
#82. I wonder how many women are held up in their bed waiting to be sung to, served wine to, read poetry to, kissed slowly with.
Brandon Villasenor
#83. There's two kinds of women
those you write poems about and those you don't.
Jeffrey McDaniel
#84. i am a woman
and i am alone,
and i cannot tell
which one of the two
i love being more.
AVA.
#87. Don't think you can ever forget her
don't even try
she's not going to budge
no choice but to grant her space
crown her with sky
for she is one of the many
and she is each of us
Rita Dove
#88. It is time to float on the waters of the night.
Time to wrap my arms around this book
and press it to my chest, life preserver
in a sea of unremarkable men and women,
anonymous faces on the street,
a hundred thousand unalphabetized things,
a million forgotten hours.
Billy Collins
#89. You are the Worst Kind of Animal. A Butcher by Day and a Pussy Cat by Night.
Monroe Ariel
#90. She is yet like a diamond on a heap of broken glass.
Mina Loy
#91. Women are not supposed to have uteruses, especially in poems.
Maxine Kumin
#92. Writing is a kind of revenge against circumstance too: bad luck, loss, pain. If you make something out of it, then you've no longer been bested by these events.
Louise Gluck
#94. In the world, it will be women, mostly colored and poor. women will have to bury children, and support themselves through grief.
Suheir Hammad
#95. Dream!
Forge yourself and rise
Out of your mind and into others.
Men, be women.
Fish, be flies.
Girls, take beards.
Sons, be your mothers.
The future of the world now lies
In coral wombs behind our eyes.
Clive Barker
#96. That's it? That's your big goodbye?" Eve asked.
Claire looked at Eve mystified. "I think I need guy CliffNotes."
"Guys aren't deep enough to need CliffNotes."
"What were you waiting for, flowery poetry?" Shane snorted. "I hugged. I'm done.
Rachel Caine
#97. I'm perfectly happy when I look out at an audience and it's all women. I always think it's kind of odd, but then, more women than men, I think, read and write poetry.
Diane Wakoski
#98. You and those shot-glass eyes, deep swirling pools of 80-proof firewater, with the depth and profundity of Saturn's spinning pulsars ...
Brandi L. Bates
#99. ...fine love poetry tends to be written when the object of one's affection is at a safe distance; also, it often reflects a love of words more than a love of women...
Kate Fox
#100. We were romantics. We didn't just read poetry. We let it drip from our tongues like honey. Spirits soared. Women swooned, and gods were created, gentlemen. Not a bad way to spend an evening, eh?
Robin Williams
