Hawaiian Poet Quotes

Now is History as fast as the mind remembers. ~ Kirby Wright

No poet will ever take the written word as a substitute for the spoken word; he knows that it is on the spoken word, and the spoken word only, that his art is founded. ~ Lascelles Abercrombie

All the poet can do today is warn. That is why true Poets must be truthful. ~ Wilfred Owen

Paint in blue and black ... sometimes gray - the colors of night - occasionally I surprise you with a mustard yellow, but then, I am a poet ... ~ John Geddes

The poet will be discontented even in the streets of heaven. The poet is always in revolt."
"There again," said Syme irritably, "what is there poetical about being in revolt? You might as well say that it is poetical to be sea-sick. ~ G.K. Chesterton

If you believe you're a poet, then you're saved.
~ Gregory Corso

They say, poetry is dead. I say, was there ever a time they had a clue of what the state of poetry is? ~ Jason E. Hodges

If one considers the characters in the plays of Shakespeare, in the poems of the Roman poet Ovid, in the Greek tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides, and even in the hieroglyphics of ancient Egypt, they can be recognized in our daily lives. Their actions were driven by the same motives as ours - ambition, love, pride, fear, anger, sympathy, and fun. ~ John H. Vanston

Young poets bewail the passing of love; old poets, the passing of time. There is surprisingly little difference. ~ Mason Cooley

He reaches for his pen. He yawns and puts it down and picks it up again. I shall be found dead at my desk, he thinks, like the poet Petrarch. The poet wrote many unsent letters: he wrote to Cicero, who died twelve hundred years before he was born. He wrote to Homer, who possibly never even existed; but I, I have enough to do with Lord Lisle, and the fish traps, and the Emperor's galleons tossing on the Middle Sea. Between one dip of the pen, Petrarch writes, 'between one dip of the pen and the next, the time passes: and I hurry, I drive myself, and I speed towards death. We are always dying - I while I write, you while you read, and others while they listen or block their ears; they are all dying. ~ Hilary Mantel

Nature, after all, is still the grand agent in making poets. ~ Thomas Carlyle

Have you ever wondered
What happens to all the
poems people write?
The poems they never
let anyone else read?
Perhaps they are
Too private and personal

Perhaps they are just not good enough.

Perhaps the prospect
of such a heartfelt
expression being seen as
clumsy
shallow silly
pretentious saccharine
unoriginal sentimental
trite boring
overwrought obscure stupid
pointless
or
simply embarrassing

is enough to give any aspiring
poet good reason to
hide their work from
public view.

forever.

Naturally many poems are IMMEDIATELY DESTROYED.
Burnt shredded flushed away
Occasionally they are folded
Into little squares
And wedged under the corner of
An unstable piece of furniture
(So actually quite useful)

Others are
hidden behind
a loose brick
or drainpipe
or
sealed into
the back of an
old alarm clock
or
put between the pages of
AN OBSCURE BOOK
that is unlikely
to ever be opened.

someone might find them one day,
BUT PROBABLY NOT
The truth is that unread poetry
Will almost always be just that.
DOOMED
to join a vast invisible river
of waste that flows out of suburbia.

well
Almost always.

On rare occasions,
Some especially insistent
piec ~ Shaun Tan

Far from his illness The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests, The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays; By mourning tongues The death of the poet was kept from his poems. ~ W. H. Auden

The people must grant a hearing to the best poets they have else they will never have better. ~ Harriet Monroe

I may as well tell you, here and now, that if you are going about the place thinking things pretty, you will never make a modern poet. Be poignant, man, be poignant! ~ P.G. Wodehouse

As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing. ~ T. S. Eliot

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

I believe that every English poet should read the English classics, master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them, travel abroad, experience the horrors of sordid passion, and - if he is lucky enough - know the love of an honest woman. ~ Robert Graves

The true poem is the poet's mind. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Working alone on a poem, a poet is of all artists the most free. The poem can be written with a modicum of technology, and can be published, in most cases, quite cheaply. ~ James Fenton

You can't break up with a soul mate. ~ Christina Strigas

I believe that poets have to be inside their poems somewhere, or the poem won't work. ~ Joy Harjo

...the Moon, the enemy of poets...

("Merchant's Two Sons") ~ Giambattista Basile

This is really what you want? To live with a poet?" "Yes," she said. "With the hot plate? And the lice? ~ Joshua Ferris

Jean Valentine and Jane Cooper were my professors at Sarah Lawrence College - and they were uncompromised in their art. They gave me models of how to live one's life as a poet. ~ Denise Duhamel

This spending of the best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to England and live the life of a poet. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Annant is Pickwick paperless, the hunter of wisdom and due to Lovelace heart, a budding poet-ass. ~ Aporva Kala

But should we continue to linger amid a scene so featureless and wild, or venture adown some yawning opening into the abyss beneath, where all is fiery and yet dark,-a solitary hell, without suffering or sin,-we would do well to commit ourselves to the guidance of a living poet of the true faculty,-Thomas Aird and see with his eyes. ~ Hugh Miller

Sufism is the reconciliation of all opposites: the outer and the inner, the material and the spiritual, the finite and the infinite, the here and the hereafter, freedom and servanthood, the human and the divine. Enlightenment in this tradition does not prevent us from functioning in a practical and humble way in life, does not entitle us to special treatment, does not exclude us from the inevitable joys and griefs of life. The Sufi's union with God does not cancel servanthood. What I found through Sufism far exceeded my hopes. As an example, one poet said to me: "All of my reading, study, and creative writing could not have prepared me for the poetry of Rumi." And yet all Rumi's poetry is just the wave on the surface of the ocean of Sufi spirituality. Perhaps it is consistent with the idea of Divine generosity that it should exceed in actuality the gift we had foreseen in our imagination. The Source is not only infinitely generous, it is infinitely creative, and its gifts surpass human imagination. ~ Kabir Edmund Helminski

Chekhov is this poet of melancholy and isolation and of wishing you were somewhere else than where you are. ~ Salman Rushdie

For a poet, style is the only morality. ~ Jennifer Stone

A poet is an unpaid laborer of a mine where he digs into the mountain to find rough diamonds. He then polishes them with his imagination and emotion to share with everyone. ~ Debasish Mridha

Mervyn Peake is a finer poet than Edgar Allan Poe, and he is therefore able to maintain his world of fantasy brilliantly through three novels. It (Gormenghast trilogy) is a very, very great work ... a classic of our age. ~ Mervyn Peake

There are two classes of men called poets. The one cultivates life, the other art, ... one satisfies hunger, the other gratifies the palate. ~ Henry David Thoreau

One of the most intuitive nature writers of our recently past century, Peter Matthiessen, lends a poets voice to the desperate effort to save the tiger. ~ Ron Franscell

Some poems are for holidays only. They are polished and sweet, but it is the sweetness of sugar, and not such as toil gives to sour bread. The breath with which the poet utters his verse must be that by which he lives. ~ Henry David Thoreau

The poet or the revolutionary is there to articulate the necessity, but until the people themselves apprehend it, nothing can happen ... Perhaps it can't be done without the poet, but it certainly can't be done without the people. The poet and the people get on generally very badly, and yet they need each other. The poet knows it sooner than the people do. The people usually know it after the poet is dead; but that's all right. The point is to get your work done, and your work is to change the world. ~ James Baldwin

All important words, all the words marked for grandeur by a poet, are keys to the universe, to the dual universe of the Cosmos and the depths of the human spirit. ~ Gaston Bachelard

I defer to all these other American poets who, for some reason, I both envy and admire. ~ Charles Olson

While the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space,
the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

A poet is a musician who can't sing. ~ Patrick Rothfuss

I have thought many times since that if poets when they get discouraged would blow their brains out, they could write very much better when they got well. ~ Mark Twain

It is telling that the first recorded name in history belongs to an accountant, rather than a prophet, a poet or a great conqueror.1 ~ Yuval Noah Harari

Matt Mason must be declared the poet laureate of the Midwest! No other native son celebrates the overlooked America, its unsung citizens (from the anonymous poets to the part-time English teachers), and its expansive indigenous landscape, as well as he does. Mason's poetry is humorous when he wants to be quirky, heartbreaking when he wants to be eloquent, and though he moves effortlessly into other moods and geographies, he always returns to his first and most enduring love (and to what he knows best)-his homeland. ~ Rigoberto Gonzalez

Practice Aloha Around The World:

You don't have to live in Hawai'i--- or even be Hawaiian to embrace the Aloha Spirit.

Aloha can be found in the most surprising places at the most unlikely times. You just have to have an open heart and mind to recognize it! ~ Mark Ellman

But here's the thing: what you do as a screenwriter is you sell your copyright. As a novelist, as a poet, as a playwright, you maintain your copyright. ~ Beth Henley

The farm brook ran down from the mountain in a straight line for the fold then swerved to the west to go its way down into the marshes. There were two knee-high falls in it and two pools, knee-deep. At the bottom there was shingle, pebbles and sand. It ran in many curves. Each curve had its own tone, but not one of them was dull; the brook was merry and music-loving, like youth, but yet with various strings, and it played its music without thought of any audience and did not care though no one heard for a hundred years, like the true poet. ~ Halldor Laxness

It made me happy that poems are referred to in the present tense even when the poet is in the past tense. ~ David Benioff

We are made aware that magnitude of material things is relative, and all objects shrink and expand to serve the passion of the poet. Thus, in his sonnets, the lays of birds, the scents and dyes of flowers, he finds to be the shadow of his beloved; time, which keeps her from him, is his chest; the suspicion she has awakened, is her ornament ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson