Beat Poetry Quotes

I've got feathers in my hair,
I get down to beat poetry. ~ Lana Del Rey

What is poetry? Do not enquire. The secret dies by prying. How does the heart beat? I fainted when I saw it on the screen, opening and closing like a flower ... Poetry is like this, it is life moving, terrible, vivid. Look the other way when you write, or you might faint. ~ Elizabeth Smart

He told me things about himself that should have made him sound urbane but did the opposite. He told me, for example, that he liked Steve Reich's music, modern-art museums, and Beat poetry. These words flew out of his mouth and went boomeranging back as if they knew they weren't meant to take the conversation anywhere but back to him. He also explained that he really liked interacting with different kinds of people. When I didn't immediately respond to this, he repeated it, and so I assured him I believed it. ~ Olivia Sudjic

I eat a catfish sandwich
with onions and red sauce
20c. (Havana 1953) ~ Allen Ginsberg

I enjoy listening to contemporary rock on the college stations while I'm taking long walks, love gospel and soul music, am fascinated by hip-hop and rap as the new kind of urban 'beat' poetry and, come to think of it, find something interesting about just any kind of music. ~ Oscar Hijuelos

The trouble with fashions is you want to fuck the women in their fashions but when the time comes they always take them off so they don't get wrinkled.
Face it, the really great fucks in a man's life was when there was no time to take yr clothes off, you were too hot and she was too hot - none of yr Bohemian leisure, this was middleclass explosions against snowbanks, against walls of shithouses in attics, on sudden couches in the lobby -
Talk about yr hot peace. ~ Jack Kerouac

I never really liked "cool" books. I plowed through as much Borges and Joyce as possible, read the first half of V. and spent whole Bar Mitzvah checks on Beat poetry. ~ Simon Rich

Poets are Prisoners
8-29-2015
Poets are prisoners
Practitioners, commissioners &
conditioners of the spoken word
Caged by their own minds
Words are shackles ~ Debbie Tosun Kilday

It really was a whole generation who were listening to Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Ella Fitzgerald, Sonny Rollins, James Moody, Fats Navarro and, a little bit later on, Mongo Santamaría and Chuck Berry, and these dozen or so guys gave them a voice. They led the way. They wrote what a whole generation wanted to read. The time was right and they seized the day by writing about their lives. They travelled, they got into scrapes, they got arrested, they got wasted … and they wrote about it.

Isn't that something? ~ Karl Wiggins

This organ deserves to be styled the starting point of life and the sun of our microcosm just as much as the sun deserves to be styled the heart of the world. For it is by the heart's vigorous beat that the blood is moved, perfected, activated, and protected from injury and coagulation. The heart is the tutelary deity of the body, the basis of life, the source of all things, carrying out its function of nourishing, warming, and activating body as a whole. But we shall more fittingly speak of these matters when we consider the final cause of this kind of movement. ~ William Harvey

Faith. Blake had all the faith in the world in him. All these new, different people to protect were starting to scare him. How many fucking people will I have to beat the shit out of to keep them all happy and safe? ~ Debra Anastasia

I'll beat him so bad he'll need a shoehorn to put his hat on. ~ Muhammad Ali

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

That is not how it works in Ravenclaw, Draco! If you have to push someone into a wall it means your brain is too weak to beat them the right way and everyone in Ravenclaw knows that - ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky

Gently touching with the charm of poetry. ~ Lucretius

So, I show my uncovered scars
with a sense of pride.
Damn you and damn me.
If we cross swords, neither of us will survive. ~ Anne Fall

Mermaid queens didn't often have a reason to move quickly. There were no wars to direct, no assassination attempts to evade, no crowds of clamoring admirers to avoid among the merfolk. In fact, slowness and calm were expected of royalty.
So Ariel found herself thoroughly enjoying the exercise as she beat her tail against the water- even as it winded her a little. She missed dashing through shipwrecks with Flounder, fleeing sharks, trying to scoot back home before curfew. She loved the feel of her powerful muscles, the way the current cut around her when she twisted her shoulders to go faster.
She hadn't been this far up in years and gulped as the pressure of the deep faded. She clicked her ears, readying them for the change of environment. Colors faded and transformed around her from the dark, heady slate of the ocean bottom to the soothing azure of the middle depths and finally lightening to the electric, magical periwinkle that heralded the burst into daylight.
She hadn't planned to break through the surface triumphantly. She wouldn't give it that power. Her plan was to take it slow and rise like a whale. Casually, unperturbed, like Ooh, here I am.
But somehow her tail kicked in twice as hard the last few feet, and she exploded into the warm sunlit air like she had been drowning.
She gulped again and tasted the breeze- dry in her mouth; salt and pine and far-distant fires and a thousand alien scents. ~ Liz Braswell

Laura remarked that science was dependent upon poetry, that all scientific description was metaphoric. ~ Anne Rice

My style of performance poetry came from the beatniks, Allen Ginsberg. ~ Patti Smith

I stumble and fall.
I weep and struggle to rise.
My mom feels it all. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

I never write. Never! I do not even remember if I can write ... This is a true freestyle in general. I put a beat, I said some stuff, I retain ideas, I do it again, with a particular intonation, I test, and especially I record live. ~ Young Thug

You know who else is high class? Hookers. Hookers are high class."

Sacha didn't even miss a beat. He blinked those clear gray eyes at me and asked very seriously, "Do you know from experience? ~ Mariana Zapata

You can get beat any day. ~ Usain Bolt

I've never had a huge collection of records; I've never been a beat digga. ~ El-P

My favourite sound in the world -
hearing your heart beat
beat for my heart. ~ Timothy Joshua

Once upon a time, son,
they used to laugh with their hearts
and laugh with their eyes;
but now they only laugh with their teeth,
while their ice-block-cold eyes
search behind my shadow.
There was a time indeed
they used to shake hands with their hearts;
but that's gone, son.
Now they shake hands without hearts
while their left hands search
my empty pockets. ~ Gabriel Okara

You see, the bodily resurrection of Jesus isn't a take-it-or-leave-it thing, as though some Christians are welcome to believe it and others are welcome not to believe it. Take it away, and the whole picture is totally different. Take it away, and Karl Marx was probably right to accuse Christianity of ignoring the problems of the material world. Take it away, and Sigmund Freud was probably right to say that Christianity is a wish-fulfillment religion. Take it away, and Friedrich Nietzsche was probably right to say that Christianity was a religion for wimps. Put it back, and you have a faith that can take on the postmodern world that looks to Marx, Freud and Nietzsche as its prophets, and you can beat them at their own game with the Easter news that the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. ~ N. T. Wright

We barely touched, I barely breathed, and time barely moved. Even my heartbeat, which thundered in my ears, seemed to slow down until every. Single. Beat had time to echo into silence before the next one took its place. ~ L.A. Witt

There are two Souls, whose equal flow
In gentle stream so calmly run,
That when they part - they part? - ah no!
They cannot part - those Souls are One. ~ George Gordon Byron

Poetry is a fresh morning spider-web telling a story of moonlit hours of weaving and waiting during a night. ~ Carl Sandburg

I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch, the
red tiles glinting like bent
plates of blood behind his head, I
see my mother with a few light books at her hip
standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks with the
wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its
sword-tips black in the May air,
they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don't do it--she's the wrong woman,
he's the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of,
you are going to want to die. I want to go
up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,
her hungry pretty blank face turning to me,
her pitiful beautiful untouched body,
his arrogant handsome blind face turning to me,
his pitiful beautiful untouched body,
but I don't do it. I want to live. I
take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips like chips of flint as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it ~ Sharon Olds

I am coming
for all the monsters that ever touched him,
I am coming
for all the ones who twisted his stars into shadows,
They turned him into a nightmare,
so I'm going to be theirs...
and they'll never wake up ~ Anonymous

Not only does a good army commander not need any special qualities, on the contrary he needs the absence of the highest and best human attributes - love, poetry, tenderness, and philosophic inquiring doubt. He should be limited, firmly convinced that what he is doing is very important (otherwise he will not have sufficient patience), and only then will he be a brave leader. God forbid that he should be humane, should love, or pity, or think of what is just and unjust. ~ Leo Tolstoy

Poetry has been to me something more than amusement, it has been a cheering companion when I had no other to fly to, a delightful solace. ~ Henry Kirke White

I met the wolf alone and was devoured in peace. ~ Edna St. Vincent Millay

If you believe it, you can achieve it! ~ Sherria L. Grubbs

It is not given to each of us
To be desired. ~ Mina Loy

Phaedra's body pulled at the light, testing the softer side of midnight. Hyacinth usually slipped out of bed in the middle of the night, careful to fit her rustle inside Phaedra's dreams. ~ Naomi Jackson

I know poetry is not dead, nor genius lost; nor has Mammon gained power over either, to bind or slay: they will both assert their existence, their presence, their liberty and strength again one day. ~ Charlotte Bronte

Love does not always make perfect sense; that does not make it any less real, that does not make it any less ours. ~ Melody Lee

The guidance of a cultured human being will always beat the click of a mouse. ~ Elliot Perlman

I keep breaking things, as if to see what's going on inside of me. ~ Jenim Dibie

The poem began with the title. Then I was annoyed by one of the occasional poetry-is-dead articles. Then I refute that notion. ~ Thomas Lux

The most perfect solitude must entail the absence of all beings, but it must also tremble with the light of life. For example, a perfect solitude may find itself haunted by lives born of the imagination, characters lying on shelves in rows of books, or accompanied by figures waiting in dreams. The perfect solitude pushes one to sense the pulse of solitude itself; for example, a perfect solitude may be marked with the beat of one's heart. ~ Meia Geddes

I'd do entire music videos in my bedroom, where I used to stand in front of my television memorizing the moves to Michael Jackson's 'Beat It.' ~ Jimmy Fallon

It is in the more muddled moments of my life, that i become painfully aware of my issues. When nothing is going right, when life gets away from me. When i feel like life is living me, instead of me, living life. It's a difficult place be, but it's also where the seeds of change, often take root. And from those roots, a wellspring of hope and positive transformation, blooms. ~ Jaeda DeWalt

A far horizon
embraced by cloud
like a nameless God
beautiful and evaporating ~ Tamara Rendell

I know, a lot of the films I've done, it's obvious I'm going to beat up six guys and just walk out the door. There's not a lot of motivating factors - it's just action for the sake of action. ~ Jason Statham

Once you beat yourself,you will beat the world. ~ Abdel Halim Boudekhana