Arabic Poetry Quotes

because you are die surface of my sky.
My body is the land,
the place for you...
the pigeons fly
the pigeons come down... ~ Mahmoud Darwish

إذا كنتم عبيداً في الأرض وقيل لكم: ازهدوا في حرية الأرض,ففي السماء تنتظركم حرية لاتوصف. اجيبوه: من لم يتذوق الحرية في الأرض لن يعرف طعمها في السماء

If you are slaves on Earth & you were told: "Renounce Earthly Freedom, for in Heaven awaits you unimaginalbe Freedom!" Answer him: "He who did not taste Freedom on Earth, will not know it in Heaven! ~ Mikhail Naimy

Dreamers don't abandon
their dreams, they flare and continue
the life they have in the dream…tell me
how you lived your dream in a certain place
and I'll tell you who you are. And now,
as you awaken, remember if you have wronged
your dream. And if you have, then remember
the last dance of the swan. ~ Mahmoud Darwish

Crows are harbingers of death and omens, good and bad, according to Big Jim according to Google. Midnight-winged tricksters associated with mystery, the occult, the unknown. The netherworld, wherever it is- Portland? We make people think of the deceased and super angsty poetry. Admittedly we don't help the cause when we happily dine on fish guts in a landfill, buy hey ho. ~ Kira Jane Buxton

The present is never poetic as it serves necessity, necessity, however, is prosaic. ~ Franz Grillparzer

<...>What a hell am I doing here? Why do I need a degree? I haven't heard a single sentence during all these lectures that would inspire one single line of poetry. ~ Jonas Mekas

She wanted him. Not in the sweet way of poetry, though there was that music in the symmetry of his body, in the careful meshing of bone and sinew and flesh that made him.
Her want was raw. Physical. She felt it in the palms of her hands and the flesh of her lips and the heaviness of her breasts.
In her life, she'd been hungry, and thirsty. She'd needed sleep. She had never, in her life, needed to touch a man. ~ Barbara Samuel

Poetry reveals that there is no empty space. ~ Hafez

The poet wants to 'say' something. Why, then, doesn't he say it directly and fortrightly? Why is he willing to say it only through his metaphors? Through his metaphors, he risks saying it partially and obscurely, and risks saying nothing at all. But the risk must be taken, for direct statement leads to abstraction and threatens to take us out of poetry altogether. ~ Cleanth Brooks

The scalpel is better for operations, but it is no good for anything else. Poetry confines itself more and more to what only poetry can do; but this turns out to be something which not many people want done. Nor, of course, could they receive it if they did. Modern poetry is too difficult for them. It is idle to complain; poetry so pure as this must be difficult. But neither must the poets complain if they are unread. When the art of reading poetry requires talents hardly less exalted than the art of writing it, readers cannot be much more numerous than poets. If you write a piece for the fiddle that only one performer in a hundred can play you must not expect to hear it very often performed. The musical analogy is no longer a remote one. ~ C.S. Lewis

I've always been a fan of comedy, and I understood from a young age that what makes most comedy work is the immediacy of first person experience. I'd spent a lot of time from 1995-1998 focusing almost exclusively on poetry, and it's an incredibly difficult form in which to achieve a sustained comic tone unless you're Alexander Pope. ~ Kevin Keck

Love is
throwing yourself into a stormy sea
hoping there are arms to catch you
knowing that without the leap
there is only the safe
and lonely shore ~ Atticus Poetry

No Child of Yours

I saw a child hide in the corner
So I went and asked her name
She was so naive and so petite
With such a tiny frame.

'No one,' she replied, that's what I am called
I have no family, no one at all
I eat, I sleep, I get depressed
There is no life, I have nothing left.'

'Why hide in the corner?' I had to ask twice
Because I've been hurt, it not very nice
I tried to stop it, it was out of my control
I feared for myself I wanted to go.

I begged for my sorrow to disappear
I turned in my bed, oh God, I knew they were near
'So come on little girl, where do you go
A path ahead, or a path to unknown?'

With that she arose, her head hung low
She held herself for only she knows
Her tears held back, her heart like ice
It looks as though she has paid the price.

The ice started melting, her tears to flow
The memories flood back, still so many years to go
The pain, the anger all built up inside
Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.

It will get better, just wait and see
You'll get a life, though you'll never be fire
Open your heart and love yourself
The abuse you suffered was NOT your fault. ~ Teresa Cooper

Go. Think. Turn black into white.
Night into day. I am tired of thinking.
I know where it will lead me and I don't
Want to be there.
Go love. Do your thinking. ~ Walter Dean Myers

Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin Dance me through the panic 'til I'm gathered safely in Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove Dance me to the end of love ~ Leonard Cohen

There's information about everything from poetry to
pills, from picture frames to pyramids, and from pudding to psychology
and that's just in the P aisle,
which we're walking down right now.
~ Lemony Snicket

You are there in my breaths and in the spaces between my breaths. ~ Avijeet Das

I will greet you with a mouth full of barbed wire until you learn to stop coming after me with your hands. ~ Trista Mateer

Then all the charm
Is broken
all that phantom-world so fair
Vanishes, and a thousand circlets spread,
And each mis-shape the other. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The truth is the object of our lust
But the light is still so very dim ... ~ Andrea Barbosa

Paradise is no whim.
It takes time and trust,
You see. ~ Scott Hastie

This road is a winding one.
We left the west flooded
with new loneliness. ~ Donika Kelly

In the distance, a Benz motor sounds. A neon light wraps itself around the driver and the winter that beats in his heart. His heart stays cold. stays melting. ~ Gwen Calvo

Dreams, the veins of the universe. ~ Gwen Calvo

Love starts as a feeling,
But to continue is a choice;
And I find myself choosing you
More and more every day. ~ Justin Wetch

I keep dying and hoping you notice me. But you're too busy living. ~ F.K. Preston

We are ordinarily so indifferent to people that when we have invested one of them with the possibility of giving us joy, or suffering, it seems as if he must belong to some other universe, he is imbued with poetry. ~ Marcel Proust

She likes that and I like it too because to/make a thing true all you've/got to do is believe ~ Charles Bukowski

When he was in college, a famous poet made a useful distinction for him. He had drunk enough in the poet's company to be compelled to describe to him a poem he was thinking of. It would be a monologue of sorts, the self-contemplation of a student on a summer afternoon who is reading Euphues. The poem itself would be a subtle series of euphuisms, translating the heat, the day, the student's concerns, into symmetrical posies; translating even his contempt and boredom with that famously foolish book into a euphuism.

The poet nodded his big head in a sympathetic, rhythmic way as this was explained to him, then told him that there are two kinds of poems. There is the kind you write; there is the kind you talk about in bars. Both kinds have value and both are poems; but it's fatal to confuse them.

In the Seventh Saint, many years later, it had struck him that the difference between himself and Shakespeare wasn't talent - not especially - but nerve. The capacity not to be frightened by his largest and most potent conceptions, to simply (simply!) sit down and execute them. The dreadful lassitude he felt when something really large and multifarious came suddenly clear to him, something Lear-sized yet sonnet-precise. If only they didn't rush on him whole, all at once, massive and perfect, leaving him frightened and nerveless at the prospect of articulating them word by scene by page. He would try to believe they were of the kind told in bars, not the kind to be ~ John Crowley

But the more poetry one reads the more one longs to read! ~ Katherine Mansfield

First of all I think that poetry is very noble and I always have with me the sense of the nobility of poetry. ~ Edward Hirsch

Not the poem which we have read , but that to which we return , with the greatest pleasure, possesses the genuine power, and claims the name of essential poetry . ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I was so used to doing art that my fingers were like albino spiders. So it was just natural for me to go to a typewriter and write poetry. ~ Patti Smith

...so i will greet you
in a way
all loved things
are meant to be greeted

with a tear in my heart
and a poem in my eye. ~ Sanober Khan

I spend most of my time reading non-fiction of all sorts. Then poetry. Then fiction to blurb. Then fiction I want to read. ~ Jim Shepard

Whenever I write a dramatic poem I can't understand why the characters should ever want to be anything but poets themselves. ~ Saul Bellow

FOR WANG LUN

Li Bai is already on the boat, preparing to depart,
I suddenly hear the sound of stamping and singing on the shore.
The water of Taohua pond reaches a thousand feet in depth,
But still it's not as deep as Wang Lun's feelings seeing me off. ~ Li Bai

Years ago, a Muslim woman called my radio show and asked me why I was not a Muslim. She asked this question with complete sincerity, and I answered her with equal sincerity.
The name of her religion, I told her, is Islam, which in Arabic means submission (to God). The name of the Jewish people is Israel, which in Hebrew means struggle with God. I'd rather struggle with God, I said, than only submit to God.
She thanked me and hung up. The answer apparently satisfied her.
Arguing/struggling with God is not only Jewishly permitted, it is central to the Torah and later Judaism. In this regard, as in others, the Torah is unique. In no other foundational religious text of which I am aware is arguing with God a religious expectation. The very first Jew, Abraham, argues with God, as does the greatest Jew, Moses. (It is worth noting that though Muslims consider Abraham their father as well, arguing with God has no place in the Quran or in normative Islam.)
It is difficult to overstate the importance of this Jewish concept. For one thing, it enabled Jews to believe in the importance of reason - God Himself could be challenged on the basis of reason and morality; one does not have to suspend reason to be a believing Jew. Indeed, it assured Jews that belief in God was itself the apotheosis of reason. For another, it had profound psychological benefits to Jews. We do not have to squelch our questioning of, or even our anger at, God. One can be both religious and real ~ Dennis Prager

Photography is painting with light! The blurs, the spots, those are errors! But the errors are part of it, they give it poetry and turn it into painting. And for that you need as bad a camera as possible! If you want to be famous, you have to do whatever you're doing worse than anyone else in the whole world. ~ Miroslav Tichy

This is why tyrants of all stripes, infernal servants, have such deep-seated hatred for the nomads - this is why they persecute the Gypsies and the Jews, and why they force all free peoples to settle, assigning the addresses that serve as our sentences.
What they want is to create a frozen order, to falsify time's passage. They want for the days to repeat themselves, unchanging, they want to build a big machine where every creature will be forced to take its place and carry out false actions. Institutions and offices, stamps,newsletters, a hierarchy, and ranks, degrees, applications and rejections, passports, numbers, cards, elections results, sales and amassing points, collecting, exchanging some things for others.
What they want is to pin down the world with the aid of barcodes, labelling all things, letting it be known that everything is a commodity, that this is how much it will cost you. Let this new foreign language be illegible to humans, let it be read exclusively by automatons, machines. That way by night, in their great underground shops, they can organize reading of their own barcoded poetry.

Move. Get going. Blesses is he who leaves. ~ Olga Tokarczuk

Years later the Romantic poet John Keats would complain that on that fateful day Newton had "destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to prismatic colors." But color - like sound and scent - is just an invention of the human mind responding to waves and particles that are moving in particular patterns through the universe - and poets should not thank nature but themselves for the beauty and the rainbows they see around them. ~ Victoria Finlay

I remember holding you against the sink,
with the sun soaking the window, the soft call
of your hips, and the intricate flickers
of thought chiming your eyes. Your mouth,
like a Saturday. ~ Tim Seibles

What did you think, that joy / was some slight thing? ~ Mark Doty

We all tend to judge others by ourselves; that's human nature. Edward Said, a Palestinian born in Jerusalem and an English professor, was bitterly and viciously anti-British. He assumed that an Englishman who was a professor of Arabic would have the same attitude to his subject as he had to his. [Explaining why he, as a Jewish and British, was accused of barely conceal disdain for subject matter of his scholarship in Edward Said's 'Orientalism'] ~ Bernard Lewis

I hope, you find the strength to let go of what hurts you. I hope, you realize that pain is simple, what breaks you, won't heal you. I hope you'll realize, that love is simple because what really loves you, won't leave you. ~ Ventum

I too was pinched off from a piece of clay,
I too modeled by omnipotence and flanked
by things too wonderful for me ~ Bryana Johnson

I do understand that they fall when I'm least able to pay attention because poems fall not from a tree, really, but from the richly pollinated boughs of an ordinary life, buzzing, as lives do, with clamor and glory. They are easy to miss but everywhere: poetry just is, whether we revere it or try to put it in prison. It is elementary grace, communicated from one soul to another. ~ Barbara Kingsolver