Israeli Poetry Quotes

A man doesn't have time in his life
to have time for everything.
He doesn't have seasons enough to have
a season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes
Was wrong about that.

A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment,
to laugh and cry with the same eyes,
with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,
to make love in war and war in love.
And to hate and forgive and remember and forget,
to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest
what history
takes years and years to do.

A man doesn't have time.
When he loses he seeks, when he finds
he forgets, when he forgets he loves, when he loves
he begins to forget.

And his soul is seasoned, his soul
is very professional.
Only his body remains forever
an amateur. It tries and it misses,
gets muddled, doesn't learn a thing,
drunk and blind in its pleasures
and its pains.

He will die as figs die in autumn,
Shriveled and full of himself and sweet,
the leaves growing dry on the ground,
the bare branches pointing to the place
where there's time for everything.
~ Yehuda Amichai

I'd spent way more years worrying about how to look like a poet
buying black clothes, smearing on scarlet lipstick, languidly draping myself over thrift-store furniture
than I had learning how to assemble words in some discernible order. ~ Mary Karr

I live in a shell, so I can't blame people when they don't want to crack me. But people like you are the reason I left the nest. ~ Maria Elena

people used to tell me that i had beautiful hands
told me so often, in fact, that one day i started to believe them until i asked my photographer father, "hey daddy could i be a hand model"

to which he said no way,

i dont remember the reason he gave me and i wouldve been upset,

but there were far too many stuffed animals to hold
too many homework assignment to write,
too many boys to wave at
too many years to grow,

we used to have a game, my dad and i about holding hands cus we held hands everywhere, and every time either he or i would whisper a great
big number to the other, pretending that we were keeping track of how many times we had held hands that we were sure, this one had to be 8 million 2 thousand 7 hundred and fifty three.

hands learn more than minds do,
hands learn how to hold other hands,
how to grip pencils and mold poetry,
how to tickle pianos and dribble a basketball,
and grip the handles of a bicycle
how to hold old people, and touch babies ,
i love hands like i love people,

they're the maps and compasses in which we navigate our way through life, some people read palms to tell your future,

but i read hands to tell your past,
each scar marks the story worth telling,
each calloused palm,
each cracked knuckle is a missed punch
or years in a factory,

now ive seen middle eastern hands cl ~ Sarah Kay

I'm heading for a clean-named place
like Wisconsin, and mad as a jack-o'-lantern, will get there
without help and nosy proclivities. ~ John Ashbery

Israeli government & the neocons want US to bomb Iran. ~ Ron Paul

Sometimes when I've got a baseball player alone, I'll just read Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman to him. And the guys are so sweet, they always stay and listen. Course, a guy'll listen to anything if he thinks its foreplay. ~ Ron Shelton

The artist does not exist except as a personification, a figure of speech that represents the sum total of art itself. It is painting that is the genius of the painter, poetry of the poet, and a person is a creative artist to the extent that he participates in that genius. ~ Harold Rosenberg

The silvery tears of April? Youth of May?
Or June that breathes out life for butterflies? ~ John Keats

There are so many things that poetry is about, one of which is memory. ~ Peter Davison

When my pillow would no longer be wet,
when I won't curl up, cursing my fate,
maybe then I'll fly, feel alive again
then somehow maybe I'll get rid of this pain. ~ Anangsha Alammyan

The readers of our era are less favoured. But courage! I will not pause either to accuse or repine. 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. Powerful angels, safe in heaven! they smile when sordid souls triumph, and feeble ones weep over their destruction. Poetry destroyed? Genius banished? No! Mediocrity, no: do not let envy prompt you to the thought. No; they not only live, but reign and redeem: and without their divine influence spread everywhere, you would be in hell - the hell of your own meanness. While ~ Charlotte Bronte

To be a poet you have to break all the boundaries that society has built around you so you can dig out the hidden obstacles and reveal it . ~ Debasish Deb MD

Today I write,
riots with insite!
Tomorrow I read,
take the lead!
Sometimes I sleep, health to keep!
But for now I write,
and got no gripe! ~ Leslie Austin

Songs given at night will bury themselves (as seeds do) in the dark in you, to shoot a shoot up come morning. Come, give them water. ~ Allison Boyd Justus

Consciousness is the only home of which we know. ~ Emily Dickinson

Carpe Diem

By Edna Stewart

Shakespeare, Robert Frost, Walt Whitman did it, why can't I?

The words of Horace, his laconic phrase. Does it amuse me or frighten me?

Does it rub salt in an old wound? Horace, Shakespeare, Robert Frost and Walt Whitman my loves,

we've all had a taste of the devils carpe of forbidden food.

My belly is full of mourning over life mishaps of should have's, missed pleasure, and why was I ever born?

The leaf falls from the trees from which it was born in and cascade down like a feather that tumbles and toil in the wind.

One gush! It blows away. It's trampled, raked, burned and finally turns to ashes which fades away like the leaves of grass.

Did Horace get it right? Trust in nothing?

The shortness of Life is seventy years, Robert Frost and Whitman bared more, but Shakespeare did not.

Butterflies of Curiosities allures me more.

Man is mortal, the fruit is ripe. Seize more my darling!

Enjoy the day. ~ Edna Stewart

Contrasts
The windows of my poetry are wide open on the boulevards and in the shop windows
Shine
The precious stones of light
Listen to the violins of the limousines and the xylophones of the linotypes
The sketcher washes with the hand-towel of the sky
All is color spots
And the hats of the women passing by are comets in the conflagration of the evening
Unity
There's no more unity
All the clocks now read midnight after being set back ten minutes
There's no more time.
There's no more money.
In the Chamber
They are spoiling the marvelous elements of raw material
("Contrasts") ~ Blaise Cendrars

How long your closet held a whiff of you,
Long after hangers hung austere and bare.
I would walk in and suddenly the true
Sharp sweet sweat scent controlled the air
And life was in that small still living breath.
Where are you? since so much of you is here,
Your unique odour quite ignoring death.
My hands reach out to touch, to hold what's dear
And vital in my longing empty arms.
But other clothes fill up the space, your space,
And scent on scent send out strange false alarms.
Not of your odour there is not a trace.
But something unexpected still breaks through
The goneness to the presentness of you. ~ Madeleine L'Engle

She is in love with herself and every ounce of it. ~ Nidhi M. Jhaveri

I don't want to wake up to a beautiful morning, nor I would seek my destiny in sunlit paths. The secret of life is the darkness of it, a void that would pull you deep to where you disappear into your truest self. Alas O world, little you have for an earnest heart that sings the beauty of vibrant life. ~ Preeth Nambiar

A few cold words on yonder stone,
A corpse as cold as they can be -­
Vain words, and mouldering dust, alone -­
Can this be all that's left of thee?

O, no! thy spirit lingers still
Where'er thy sunny smile was seen:
There's less of darkness, less of chill
On earth, than if thou hadst not been.

Thou breathest in my bosom yet,
And dwellest in my beating heart;
And, while I cannot quite forget,
Thou, darling, canst not quite depart. ~ Anne Bronte

Surrender your pain, look within and see your perfect and divine self. ~ Earthschool Harmony

When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever. ~ Adrienne Rich

Among those today who believe that modern poetry must do without rhyme or metre, there is an assumption that the alternative to free verse is a crash course in villanelles, sestinas and other such fixed forms. But most ... are rare in English poetry. Few poets have written a villanelle worth reading, or indeed regret not having done so. ~ James Fenton

Poetry was a discipline grounded in experience that drew its life and worth from a source much greater than oneself, and as it realized its potential to touch others in their innermost being, what [Kathleen] Fraser has termed their "yearning side," it could be a profoundly communal act. Poetry, when it succeeded, did so in ways that were not quantifiable, and did not look much like worldly success, but that might be summed up as the joy on the face of a girl in a dingy classroom who finds a kindred spirit in a poem by Garcia Lorca. ~ Kathleen Norris

Nothing fills the world quite as poetry does. A poet need not dwell on the pagecount of his life. ~ D.A. Botta

Writers today must navigate the shifting verbal currents of the post-Gutenberg era. When does jargon end and a new vernacular begin? Where's the line between neologism and hype? What's the language of the global village? How can we keep pace with technology without getting bogged down in buzzwords? Is it possible to write about machines without losing a sense of humanity and poetry? ~ Constance Hale

The universe on your skin is empty
from all the silence on your tongue.
Forgive yourself. Let your body heal
from all the wounds you did not inflict
on yourself. Drop the sword you carry
on your shoulder for self-defense.
Lower the armor you hold high up
for protection. Those who harmed you
are not going to come back. Those who
have left never intended to return. ~ Akif Kichloo

I hate and I love. And if you ask me how, I do not know: I only feel it, and I am torn in two. ~ Catullus

This is proof that she cares about something; it doesn't always have to be me. ~ Blythe Baird

Having nothing to struggle
against
they have nothing to struggle
for. ~ Charles Bukowski

So there they were, these over-enthusiastic Europhiles, who could speak so many of Europe's languages and recite its poetry, who believed in its moral superiority, appreciated its ballet and opera, cultivated its heritage, dreamed of its postnational unity, and adored its manners, clothes, and fashions, who had loved it unconditionally and uninhibitedly for decades, since the beginning of the Jewish Enlightenment, and who had done everything humanly possible to please it, to contribute to it in every way and in every domain, to become part of it, to break through its cool hostility with frantic courtship, to make friends, to ingratiate themselves, to be accepted, to belong, to be loved... ~ Amos Oz

What can be explained is not poetry. ~ W.B.Yeats

Moreover, resolving the mother of all problems - the Israeli-Palestinian question - requires cooperation between Europe and the U.S. ~ Romano Prodi