Filipino Poet Quotes

English is now ours. We have colonized it, too. ~ Gemino Abad

Jewish, black, Filipino, whatever the specificity is, it's specificity that makes a good story. And I think people are tired of seeing the same old shtick on network television. It's just a group of white people hanging out talking about their jobs. Who cares? We've seen that. ~ Rachel Bloom

There were moments of despondency when Shakespeare thought himself no poet, and Raphael no painter; when the greatest wits have doubted the excellence of their happiest efforts. ~ Charles Caleb Colton

It is a marble statue of a man with his children near him, and the man has such desperation on his face and the children at his feet appear to be clinging, begging him, while he gazes out toward the world with a tortured look, his hands pulling at his nouth, but his children look only at him, and when I finally saw this, I said inside myself, Oh.
I read the placard, which let me know that these children are offering themselves as food for their father, he is being starved to death in prison, and these children only want one thing - to have their father's distress disappear. They will allow him - oh, happily, happily - to eat them.
And I thought, So that guy knew. Meaning the sculptor. He knew.
And so did the poet who wrote what the sculpture has shown. He knew too. ~ Elizabeth Strout

I am not that strong but my words are more powerful than I am. My soul is drowning under the weight of my own insecurities,
my heart is often broken and my mind desperately struggles for the right words, often failing, but I hope that the words that I write with a vulnerable heart
are strong enough to lift your spirit, awaken your consciousness and push you to the edge of your greatness. ~ J. Autherine

The void yields up nothing. You have to be a great poet to make it ring. ~ Jules Renard

VALENTINE: Are you talking about Lord Byron, the poet?
BERNARD: No, you fucking idiot, we're talking about Lord Byron, the chartered accountant. ~ Tom Stoppard

The best prose is written by authors who see their universe with a poet's eyes. ~ Vera Brittain

This is something that I dream about: to live films, to arrive at the point at which one can live for films, can think cinematographically, eat cinematographically, sleep cinematographically, as a poet, a painter, lives, eats, sleeps painting. ~ Bernardo Bertolucci

The painter puts brush to canvas, and the poet puts pen to paper. The poet has the easier task, for his pen does not alter his rhyme. ~ Robert Breault

I hold with the old-fashioned criticism that Browning is not really a poet, that he has all the gifts but the one needful and the pearls without the string; rather one should say raw nuggets and rough diamonds. ~ Gerard Manley Hopkins

If you can't be the poet, be the poem. ~ David Carradine

And as to experience-well, think how little some good poets have had, or how much some bad ones have. ~ Elizabeth Bishop

A comic writer should of all others be the least excused for deviating from nature, since it may not be always so easy for a serious poet to meet with the great and the admirable; but life every where furnishes an accurate observer with the ridiculous. ~ Henry Fielding

The poet discovers that what men value as substances have a higher value as symbols; that Nature is the immense shadow of man. A man's action is only a picture-book of his creed. He does after what he believes. Your condition, your employment, is the fable of you. The world is thoroughly anthropomorphized, as if it had passed through the body and mind of man, and taken his mould and form. Indeed, good poetry is always personification, and heightens every species of force in nature by giving it a human volition. We are advertised that there is nothing to which man is not related; that everything is convertible into every other. The staff in his hand is the radius vector of the sun. The chemistry of this is the chemistry of that. Whatever one act we do, whatever one thing we learn, we are doing and learning all things, - marching in the direction of universal power. Every healthy mind is a true Alexander or Sesostris, building a universal monarchy. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The most available example of how poetry works for a poet is yourself, and yet you'll probably be the last one to know exactly how you're serving the art and how the art is serving you. ~ Wendell Berry

Sculptors, poets, painters, musicians-they're the traditional purveyors of Beauty. But it can as easily be created by a gardener, a farmer, a plumber, a careworker. ~ Charles De Lint

Did the poet know how lucky he was, to have such beautiful words and a place to put them and keep them? ~ Ally Condie

It was an epiphany when I realized you don't have to call yourself a linguist, a translator, a poet. You can call yourself an artist and you can do all these things. ~ Jan Peacock

The poet can only write the poems; it takes the reader to complete the meaning. ~ Nikki Giovanni

Autumn
The passion
Is still flourishing in the branches
Yellow funny and daring red
The sun warms even in the days
Where the fog
Stubbornly in the morning
From a distance
A woodpecker knocks
Impermanence
Is the enemy of beauty ~ Kristian Goldmund Aumann

It were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its color and odor, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot. ~ Salvador Dali

You puff the poets of other days, The living you deplore. Spare me the accolade: your praise Is not worth dying for. ~ Martial

Women have burnt like beacons in all the works of all the poets from the beginning of time. ~ Virginia Woolf

The only truth is face to face, the poem whose words become your
mouth
and dying in black and white we fight for what we love, not are ~ Frank O'Hara

It is quite cruel that a poet cannot wander through his regions of enchantment without having a critic, forever, like the old man of the sea, upon his back. ~ Marianne Moore

A totally new kind of education is needed in the world. The person who is born to be a poet is proving himself stupid in mathematics and the person who could have been a great mathematician is just cramming history and feeling lost. Everything is topsy-turvy because education is not according to your nature: it does not pay any respect to the individual. It forces everybody into a certain pattern. ~ Osho

Love is wind for the soul ~ D. Antoinette Foy

Poetry transcends the nation-state. Poetry transcends government. It brings the traditional concept of power to its knees. I have always believed poetry to be an eternal conversation in which the ancient poets remain contemporary, a conversation inviting us into other languages and cultures even as poetry transcends language and culture, returning us again and again to primal rhythms and sounds. ~ Sam Hamill

Milton says, that the lyric poet may drink wine and live generously, but the epic poet, he who shall sing of the gods, and their descent unto men, must drink water out of a wooden bowl. For poetry is not "Devil's wine," but God's wine. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I'm a poet first and foremost, before the modelling. ~ Jessica White

My opinion is that a poet should express the emotion of all the ages and the thought of his own. ~ Thomas Hardy

The prosaic man sees things badly, or with the bodily sense; but the poet sees them clad in beauty, with the spiritual sense. ~ Henry David Thoreau

A poet has to adapt himself, more or less consciously,to the demands of his vocation, and hence the peculiarities of poets and the condition of inspiration which many people have said is near to madness ... The problem of creative writing is essentially one of concentration ... a focusing of the attention in a special way. ~ Stephen Spender

- Was I a swordsman then? sends Johnny. Or a poet? [Yes There is never one without the other] ~ Dan Simmons

I thought poetry could change everything, could change history and could humanize, and I think that the illusion is very necessary to push poets to be involved and to believe, but now I think that poetry changes only the poet. ~ Mahmoud Darwish

I fancy the character of a poet is in every country the same,
fond of enjoying the present, careless of the future; his conversation that of a man of sense, his actions those of a fool. ~ Oliver Goldsmith

Nine-tenths of English poetic literature is the result either of vulgar careerism or of a poet trying to keep his hand in. Most poets are dead by their late twenties. ~ Robert Graves

The job of the poet (a job which can't be learned) consists of placing those objects of the visible world which have become invisible due to the glue of habit, in an unusual position which strikes the soul and gives them a tragic force. ~ Jean Cocteau

But I'm too old to be written about as a young poet. ~ Philip Levine

The Difference Between Good Poetry and Good Prose
The prose writer deletes all errors,
irrelevancies, discontinuities and vagueness.
The poet knows which of these to keep,
to embellish upon, to follow through with
and make even more ambiguous. ~ Beryl Dov