Favorite Poets Quotes

Some of my favorite poets had a tremendous sense of whimsy, so it's a writing style I guess I admire. ~ Jewel

That being said, some of my favorite poets are extremely funny. The aforementioned Matt Rohrer, for instance. Mary Ruefle. James Tate might be the best example of someone who is systematically misread because he can be hilarious. In his poems, as in all great funny poems, the humor is one very appealing version of the surprise and associative movement that is at the heart of all poetry. ~ Matthew Zapruder

Not anyone who says "I'm going to be
careful and smart in the matters of love,"
who says, "I'm going to choose slowly,"
but only those lovers who didn't choose at all
but were, as it were, chosen
by something invisible
and powerful and uncontrollable
and beautiful and possibly even
unsuitable--
only those know what I'm talking about
in this talking about love. ~ Mary Oliver

My favorite poets may not be your bread and butter. I have more favorite poems than favorite poets. ~ Rita Dove

One of my favorite poets, Neruda, writes close to the bone. Though I know only a little Spanish, I like to compare the Spanish and English lines and see how the translator worked. ~ Anita Diament

SELF-HELP FOR FELLOW REFUGEES

If your name suggests a country where bells
might have been used for entertainment,

or to announce the entrances and exits of the seasons
and the birthdays of gods and demons,

it's probably best to dress in plain clothes
when you arrive in the United States.
And try not to talk too loud.

If you happen to have watched armed men
beat and drag your father
out the front door of your house
and into the back of an idling truck,

before your mother jerked you from the threshold
and buried your face in her skirt folds,
try not to judge your mother too harshly.

Don't ask her what she thought she was doing,
turning a child's eyes
away from history
and toward that place all human aching starts.

And if you meet someone
in your adopted country
and think you see in the other's face
an open sky, some promise of a new beginning,
it probably means you're standing too far.

Or if you think you read in the other, as in a book
whose first and last pages are missing,
the story of your own birthplace,
a country twice erased,
once by fire, once by forgetfulness,
it probably means you're standing too close.

In any case, try not to let another carry
the burden of your own nostalgia or hope.

And if you're one of those
whose left side of the face does ~ Li-Young Lee

Poets write for an audience. And when the audience is soulful and sensitive to understand the nuances and subtleties of poetry then writing and reading the lines of your poetry becomes a pleasure! ~ Avijeet Das

No one lets dead poets lie in peace. We are like old meat on a crowded dinner table. ~ Steven Erikson

LOVE: A word properly applied to our delight in particular kinds of food; sometimes metaphorically spoken of the favorite objects of all our appetites. ~ Henry Fielding

What is your favorite day of the year? The summer solstice. June twenty-first. The longest day of the year. It was a cute answer. But on cooler reflection, it struck me that when you're asked your favorite day of the year, there's a certain hubris in giving any day in June as your answer. It suggests that the particulars of your life are so terrific, and your command over your station so secure, that all you could possibly hope for is additional daylight in which to celebrate your lot. ~ Amor Towles

I have a good memory for certain things. And a very short memory for painful things - that's my favorite Martha Stewart quote, by the way. ~ Reese Witherspoon

I think the 'Lethal Weapon' movies contain my favorite performances. It sounds really crummy, I know, but although the work doesn't look hard, it's difficult to create 'effortless' on screen. ~ Mel Gibson

My favorite Elton John song is "Daniel"; my son is named Daniel and he's partly named after my wife's father, but also partly named after that song. ~ Steven Drozd

Each reader discovers for himself that, with respect to the simpler features of nature, succeeding poets have done little else than copy his similes. ~ Henry David Thoreau

There were, in Feo's experience, five kinds of cold. There was wind cold, which Feo barely felt. It was fussy and loud and turned your cheeks as red as if you'd been slapped, but couldn't kill you even if it tried. There was snow cold, which plucked at your arms and chapped your lips, but brought real rewards. It was Feo's favorite weather: The snow was soft and good for making snow wolves. There was ice cold, which might take the skin off your palm if you let it, but probably wouldn't if you were careful. Ice cold smelled sharp and knowing. It often came with blue skies and was good for skating. Feo had respect for ice cold. Then there was hard cold, which was when the ice cold got deeper and deeper until at the end of a month you couldn't remember if the summer had ever really existed. Hard cold could be cruel. Birds died in midflight. It was the kind of cold that you booted and kicked your way through.
And then there was blind cold. Blind cold smelled of metal and granite. It took all the sense out of your brain and blew the snow into your eyes until they were glued shut and you had to rub spit into them before they would blink. Blind cold was forty degrees below zero. This was the kind of cold that you didn't sit down to think in, unless you wanted to be found dead in the same place in May or June.
Feo had felt blind cold only once. ~ Katherine Rundell

Firing up my iPod, I selected my favorite workout playlist and started at a slow jog. "The Final Countdown" came on, putting me instantly in the zone. ~ L. H. Cosway

You can recollect the sayings of great men, you treasure up verse of renowned poets; ought you not be equally profound in your knowledge of the words of God, so that you may be able to quote them readily when you would solve a difficulty or overthrow a doubt? ~ Charles Spurgeon

Poet's Work
Grandfather
advised me:
Learn a trade
I learned
to sit at desk
and condense
No layoffs
from this
condensery ~ Lorine Niedecker

Why are poets so apt to choose their mates, not for any similarity of poetic endowment, but for qualities which might make the happiness of the rudest handicraftsman as well as that of the ideal craftsman of the spirit? Because, probably, at his highest elevation, the poet needs no human intercourse; but he finds it dreary to descend, and be a stranger. ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

I had always believed that the very best food contains something elementally repugnant. That its innate grotesquerie is what makes it so perversely alluring. My own favorite foods tended toward a certain sludgy, muddy texture. And from the most expensive and genteel through to the indulgently crass, the appeal of slop abides: caviar, escargots, foie gras or hamburgers, kebabs, macaroni and cheese. Even vegetable soup forms a membrane. Apples begin rotting from the very first bite. No matter which end of the spectrum, there lies fundamentally and yet delectably disgusting, some squirmy, sinewy, oozing, greasy, sticky, glutinous, mushy, fatty, chewy, viscous thing that compels. The line between pleasure and revulsion can seem so very thin, if it even exists at all. ~ Lara Williams

I did my first Broadway play, 'The Vertical Hour,' in 2006, with Julianne Moore, who's always been one of my favorite actresses. My scene was with her, so it was nerve-racking. ~ Rutina Wesley

Pynchon has been a favorite writer and a major influence all along. In many ways I see him as almost the start of a certain mutant pop culture imagery with esoteric historical and scientific information. Pynchon is a kind of mythic hero of mine, and I suspect that if you talk with a lot of recent SF writers you'll find they've all read Gravity's Rainbow (1973) several times and have been very much influenced by it. I was into Pynchon early on- I remember seeing a New York Times review of V. when it first came out- I was just a kid- and thinking, Boy, that sounds like some really weird shit! ~ William Gibson

I have lots of favorites movies. I say this only because it's a favorite movie because it's a sport I love. I'm a huge baseball fan. There are movies I like as much as this, but I sort of single this movie out because I'm a baseball nut, and that's 'Field of Dreams.' ~ Rick Santorum

The worship had already begun. It was my favorite part about the whole thing. There was something electric about everyone lifting their hands up to the ceiling as if they were trying to pull things down from heaven. They reached and they reached and I couldn't help but wish I would find a reason to reach my hands up too. ~ Hannah Brencher

Books have always been my escape - where I go to bury my nose, hone my senses, or play the emotional tourist in a world of my own choosing... Words are my best expressive tool, my favorite shield, my point of entry...When I was growing up, books took me away from my life to a solitary place that didn't feel lonely. They celebrated the outcasts, people who sat on the margins of society contemplating their interiors. . . Books were my cure for a romanticized unhappiness, for the anxiety of impending adulthood. They were all mine, private islands with secret passwords only the worthy could utter. If I could choose my favorite day, my favorite moment in some perfect dreamscape, I know exactly where I would be: stretched out in bed in the afternoon, knowing that the kids are taking a nap and I've got two more chapters left of some heartbreaking novel, the kind that messes you up for a week. ~ Jodie Foster

Under bright scarlet hair, teachers' favorite pigmentation of ink, the awful cast splashed and dripped down his face, a grisly reminder of mistakes bruising that had bruised. ~ Jazz Feylynn

Poets, with no sponsors, no agenda, are the truest form of freedom today, bleeding out every drop of themselves for the world to either hate or devour. ~ Jason E. Hodges

I'm happy to just sit in a cafe and watch people. It's my favorite thing to do, for sure. ~ Zoe Kravitz

I cannot love evergreens - they are the misanthropes of nature. To them the spring brings no promise, the autumn no decline; they are cut off from the sweetest of all ties with their kind - sympathy ... I will have no evergreens in my garden; when the inevitable winter comes, every beloved plant and favorite tree shall drop together - no solitary fir left to triumph over the companionship of decay. ~ Letitia Elizabeth Landon

Rare almost as great poets, rarer, perhaps, than veritable saints and martyrs; are consummate men of business. A man, to be excellent in this way, requires a great knowledge of character, with that exquisite tact which feels unerringly the right moment when to act. A discreet rapidity must pervade all the movements of his thought and action. He must be singularly free from vanity, and is generally found to be an enthusiast who has the art to conceal his enthusiasm. ~ Arthur Helps

I'm a Lakers fan. Kevin Garnett is my favorite player of all time because of his passion for the game. ~ Rahim Moore

On Salem's Lot: " My favorite vampire story ever. I first read this 20 years ago, and I can still quote lines from it.
"You have been ill-used, Mr Bryant."
"I will see you sleep like the dead, teacher."
"The boy makes ten of you, false priest."
Fuck twilight. Seriously ... ~ Jay Kristoff

I was well acquainted with the Calcutta literary circle since I was 17, when I lived in Bangladesh and published and edited a little magazine called 'Sejuti,' for which young poets from both Bengals wrote. If you look at my life, there is no question of using anyone for anything. I have only got banned, blacklisted and banished. ~ Taslima Nasrin

My son is getting close to the age that I remember watching Scrooge, and as he loves to be scared, I can't wait to start my favorite holiday tradition all over again with him. ~ Molly O'Keefe

People ask me who my favorite inker is and I tell them my favorite inker was Joe Sinnott ... but I was the best. Now I don't mean that as any kind of egotistical thing. It's just that I did what Jack wanted. ~ Mike Royer

Shadow of Your Spirit

At night I see the shadow of your spirit
Mixing with my blood and soul
During the day I see your photos
They tell me come to me
Come to my world and romance
Even I don't know by myself
How I fell into your love
I cannot remove it from my heart
Your love stabled my soul ~ Kamaran Ihsan Salih

& love is an evil word. Turn it backwards/see, see what I mean? An evol word. ~ Amiri Baraka

I nearly had a cakegasm at the table. My eyes rolled back in my head, and I moaned.
"Sweet Christ." I opened my eyes to find Hunter watching me with the strangest expression on his face.
"What? It's really good; you should try some," I said, pushing the plate at him. It was a testament of how embarrassed I was about the cakegasm that I was even sharing at all.
"I swear, if there weren't a table between us, I would be kissing you right now. And none too gently."
I put my form down and swallowed so I wouldn't choke. "You didn't seem to mind about the recliner," I said.
"True. But there wan't an audience, and that's a very ugly recliner. This is a very nice table. Also there is glass and sharp things I wouldn't want hurting you."
"Good point. Please, have some."
"If you're going to make that noise and that face again, I don't know if I can let you have any more."
"I'll be good. I swear."
"You're not good. That's the problem."
"You're right. I'm not," I said, giving him my own smirk. "I do try, though."
"Cruel. That's the word to describe you right now."
"Just have some cake. ~ Chelsea M. Cameron

Here's my favorite bonehead concept from the 1990s in the Pentagon: the theory of anti-access, area-denial asymmetrical strategies. Why do we call it that? Because it's got all those A's lined up I guess. This is gobbledygook for 'If the United States fights somebody, we're going to be huge. They're going to be small.' ~ Thomas P.M. Barnett

I try whistling to fill in the silence. The soprano sax from Coltrane's "My Favorite Things," though of course my dubious whistling doesn't come anywhere near the complex, lightning-quick original. I just add bits so what I hear in my head approximates the sound. Better than nothing, I figure. ~ Haruki Murakami

I was a boy when I first realized that the fullest life liveable was a Poet's. ~ Wilfred Owen

But it is not likely that he had reference to the kind of anguish that comes with destitution, that is so endlessly bitter and cruel, and yet so sordid and petty, so ugly, so humiliating - unredeemed by the slightest touch of dignity or even of pathos. It is a kind of anguish that poets have not commonly dealt with; its very words are not admitted into the vocabulary of poets - the details of it cannot be told in polite society at all. ~ Upton Sinclair

The world is full of people who have lost faith: politicians who have lost faith in politics, social workers who have lost faith in social work, schoolteachers who have lost faith in teaching and, for all I know, policemen who have lost faith in policing and poets who have lost faith in poetry. It's a condition of faith that it gets lost from time to time, or at least mislaid. ~ P.D. James

I have the biggest sweet tooth! You name it, I will eat it. My all-time favorite is my mother's butter cake. Every time I go home, my mom will already have the cake made because I love it so much. This makes my siblings mad because they think she favors me. I don't care because she probably does! ~ Michael Strahan

The ghosts of Rilke and Wordsworth
along with the 300+ MFA programs, which now seem to employ all Living Poets
have misled the American public egregiously into thinking that poets are morally pure and/or useless. ~ Katy Lederer

And Cindi came up with a new trick to use if she was having trouble falling asleep: "Counting backward from 300 by threes - it works like magic and you never get below 250." On the few occasions when I feel too wired to sleep, my panacea is a hot bath with my favorite bath salts. ~ Arianna Huffington

Music is my favorite thing in the world. I grew up completely around it and I think it's one of the most important things to me, but at this point I can't see myself doing that professionally. Luckily, for the most part, I don't feel pressured. ~ Riley Keough