Chinese Poetry Quotes

Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later. ~ Robert Morgan

READING LAOZI

Those who speak do not know, those who know are silent,
I heard this saying from the old gentleman.
If the old gentleman was one who knew the way,
Why did he feel able to write five thousand words? ~ Bai Juyi

In the midst of a thousand clouds and countless waters
there is an idle person.
By day, he roams the green mountains,
at night, he returns to sleep beneath the cliff.
Quickly, the seasons pass
in serenity, with no worldly bonds.
How joyful! What does he depend upon?
Quiet, like a large autumn river. ~ Peter Levitt

I did not have a very literary background. I came to poetry from the sciences and mathematics, and also through an interest in Japanese and Chinese poetry in translation. ~ Robert Morgan

It's really rather easy to write eighth-century Chinese poetry," said Angus Lordie. "In English, of course. It requires little effort, I find. ~ Alexander McCall Smith

Beneath the moon, chilly winds blow through the pines
as wisps of clouds arise.
So many mountain ridges layer into each other
for miles around!
The valley stream is quiet and clear --
I'm not done with this boundless joy. ~ Peter Levitt

Men do not trip over mountains: They fall over earth mounds. ~ Pierre Stephen Robert Payne

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

Rap in its form is poetry, meaning the point of convergence is words. ~ Unarine Ramaru

Poetry is not an art, it's a symptom. ~ Michele Brenton

Poetry is the most mistaught subject in any school because we teach poetry by form and not by content. ~ Nikki Giovanni

The poems turned up everywhere. Soon the lady of the house went into fits of hysteria when she kept discovering this attack of poetry in the most unlikely places - under doors, in the mother-of-pearl latticework of windowpanes, under jars, stones, flowerpots, loaves of bread, and even delivered by homing pigeons, around whose rose-coloured claws the young matador lovingly wound poems in which he declaimed his love in the quaint language whose provenance was unknown to the world and still evoked images of the uninterrupted empires of Visigiths, the unbridled lust of the Huns and the intransigence of the Berbers. The young maiden recognized only a few words, but to her they were fragments of a secret music: zirimiri, fine rain; senaremaztac, husband and wife; nik behar diren guzian eginen ditut, I shall do everything necessary ... ~ Eric Gamalinda

My Name
Once when the lawn was a golden green
and the marbled moonlit trees rose like fresh memorials
in the scented air, and the whole countryside pulsed
with the chirr and murmur of insects, I lay in the grass,
feeling the great distances open above me, and wondered
what I would become and where I would find myself,
and though I barely existed, I felt for an instant
that the vast star-clustered sky was mine, and I heard
my name as if for the first time, heard it the way
one hears the wind or the rain, but faint and far off
as though it belonged not to me but to the silence
from which it had come and to which it would go. ~ Mark Strand

Anything is a poem if you say it often enough. ~ Catherynne M Valente

Fiction - and poetry and drama - cleanse the doors of perception. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

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

Chinese national Internet policy is very simple: Block and clone. ~ Michael Anti

The sky can never be frozen
because its vastness has chosen
all warmth of our lives as we look above
with unbreakable hearts armoured in love ~ Munia Khan

Lucy happily settled down to work. First she sent for papyrus and handmade a book leaf by leaf, binding the leaves together between board covers. Then she filled each page from memory, drew English roses budding and Chinese roses in full bloom, peppercorn-pink Bourbon roses climbing walls and silvery musk roses drowsing in flowerbeds. She took every rose she'd ever seen, made them as lifelike as she could (where she shaded each petal the rough paper turned silken), and in these lasting forms she offered them to Safiye. ~ Helen Oyeyemi

Men had always been the reciters of poetry in the desert. ~ Michael Ondaatje

It starts off like climbing a tree or solving a puzzle - poetry, if nothing else, is just fun to write. But deeper into each and every piece, you no longer hesitate to call it work. It's passion. A poet's sense of lyrical accomplishment is then his food and water, his means of survival. ~ Criss Jami

The Last Toast

I drink to our demolished hose,
to all this wickedness,
to you, our loneliness together,
I raise my glass -

And to the dead-cold eyes,
the lie that has betrayed us,
the coarse, brutal world, the fact
that God has not saved us.

1934 ~ Anna Akhmatova

T.S. Eliot's influence was enormous on my generation. Much more than Ezra Pound. I actually had to put T.S. Eliot books out of the house because my poetry was so influenced. Everything I wrote sounded like Eliot. ~ Lawrence Ferlinghetti

You bothered yourself and changed the season. I was left behind with your awful sounds. ~ Cat Alonso

It seems just possible that a poem might happen to a very young man: but a poem is not poetry -That is a life. ~ T. S. Eliot

Poor land, poor land, what do you mean
to the heart that moves in me?
Poor love, poor love, poor wife of mine,
why do you weep so bitterly?

(from Retribution book 2, I) ~ Alexander Blok

In fact, poetry has always been like archives that peoples have continually used to serve their feelings, thoughts, national identities and cultures, and it has served as a factor uniting different historical periods. Those who had lost contact with their past for a certain period found and experienced the expression of their own selves in poetry, and the were able to see their history as a whole in it. ~ M. Fethullah Gulen

What do you do when the alienating silence deafens your 'bootless cries'? ~ Solange Nicole

They have the guns, we have the poets. Therefore, we will win. ~ Howard Zinn

That the nobility of Man, acquired in a hundred centuries of trial and error, lay in making himself the conquerer of matter, and that I had enrolled in chemistry because I wanted to maintain faithful to that nobility. That conquering matter is to understand it, and understanding matter is necessary to understanding the universe and ourselves: and that therefore Mendeleev's Periodic Table, which just during those weeks we were laboriously learning to unravel, was poetry, loftier and more solemn than all the poetry we had swallowed doen in liceo; and come to think of it, it even rhymed! ...
[T]he chemistry and physics on which we fed, besides being in themselves nourishments vital in themselves, were the antidotes to Fascism ... because they were clear and distinct and verifiable at every step, and not a tissue of lies and emptiness like the radio and newspapers. ~ Primo Levi

Poetry is the language of a state of crisis. ~ Stephane Mallarme

A lyric, it is true, is the expression of personal emotion, but then so is all poetry, and to suppose that there are several kinds of poetry, differing from each other in essence, is to be deceived by wholly artificial divisions which have no real being. ~ John Drinkwater

Whosoever loves not picture is injurious to truth, and all the wisdom of poetry. Picture is the invention of heaven, the most ancient and most akin to nature. It is itself a silent work, and always one and the same habit. ~ Ben Jonson

O you
can't tell someone just how lonely he is ~ Jeramy Dodds

Multinationals are more sensitive to public pressure because they have bigger brand names, and they have made commitments to be environmentally sensitive. Chinese firms are not used to this kind of pressure yet. ~ Ma Jun

What is the world? What is it for?
It is an art. It is the best of all possible art, a finite picture of the infinite. Assess it like prose, like poetry, like architecture, sculpture, painting, dance, delta blues, opera, tragedy, comedy, romance, epic. Assess it like you would a Faberge egg, like a gunfight, like a musical, like a snowflake, like a death, a birth, a triumph, a love story, a tornado, a smile, a heartbreak, a sweater, a hunger pain, a desire, a fufillment, a desert, a waterfall, a song, a race, a frog, a play, a song, a marriage, a consummation, a thirst quenched.
Assess it like that. And when you're done, find an ant and have him assess the cathedrals of Europe. ~ N.D. Wilson

...then we'll journey
until we find the world in which we both fit.
And when the path grows too dark to see even
the bright parts of me, have faith in the sound
of my voice. I'm here. I'm still the one leading. ~ Paige Lewis

I am not obsessing.
I am just sitting here
perforating this post-it
with a push-pin. ~ Ada Limon

I hear you knocking but I can't let you in. The last time almost killed me.
Love,
My heart ~ Alfa Holden

Possibly I want to bring my acting into the cooking, blending the two together. What I love is cooking for other people and seeing them enjoy what I have created for them. And same thing goes for acting. I have even tried to make some Chinese dishes before. It's very difficult. That's probably why eating at authentic Chinese restaurants is part of my journey here. ~ Jeremy Miller

I don't know if anyone has ever mentioned this, we need to be careful with drugs! They're not just all fun and games! And of course poetry would be immeasurably worse without humor. ~ Matthew Zapruder

All you need do is refrain from smoking, drinking and the use of drugs. Eat only wholesome,low-fat foods, with the emphasis on vegetables, grains and fish. Seek work. Work hard. Show up on time. Do more than is expected. Think of ways to make the job efficient. Don't complain. Shave, bathe and wear clean clothes. Be cheerful. Don't gamble. Live within your means. Save. And then, when you have all this in balance, study things of substance. Read to satisfy your curiosity. Don't father children out of wedlock or bear them as a single mother. Exercise. You will find that you will be promoted - perhaps not knighted, but promoted. Is that doesn't happen, look quietly for a better position. Find a husband or a wife whom you love and who has the same good habits. Invest. Assume a mortgage if you must. Teach your children the virtues. And then, having become the means of production, you will own your share of the means of production, and if you do those things, all of which are within your power, you will live your own lives."

They looked at him as if he were an armadillo that has just spoken to them in Chinese. Not having assimilated a single phrase, they all got up and went to the bus. ~ Mark Helprin

A poet's work ... to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep. ~ Salman Rushdie

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

At the end of the day
all we ever need is
something
that helped
pass the time
and something
that keeps time from passing. ~ Sanober Khan

I'm not asking for much. A more tender world
with less hatred strutting the streets.
Perhaps a downtick in state-sanctioned violence
against civilians. Wind through the trees.
Water under the bridge. Kindness. ~ Matthew Olzmann

Stani walks in later, glaring at them both.
"Bloody bastards. One minute punching each other, next minute reading poetry. What's wrong with everyone this week?"
Tom can tell that ~ Melina Marchetta

When Chinese get together - what's buried stays buried. We don't even discuss our embarrassing early days struggling in Chicago. ~ Anchee Min

It's exciting to watch young children read poetry for the first time. You can sense the wheels turning and you just know their brain is doing this wonderful thing called learning. It's magical! ~ Elaine Grey