Missive Poetry Quotes

Reason to live, they repeat like a pop song,
The bones of a beloved emperor, and I, the
motionless chariot
trying to drag them home with forced hope. ~ Robin Sinclair

You're trying to take something that can be described in many, many sentences and pages of prose, but you can convert it into a couple lines of poetry and you still get the essence, so it's that compression. The best code is poetry. ~ Satya Nadella

Men
They hail you as their morning star
Because you are the way you are.
If you return the sentiment,
They'll try to make you different;
And once they have you, safe and sound,
They want to change you all around.
Your moods and ways they put a curse on;
They'd make of you another person.
They cannot let you go your gait;
They influence and educate.
They'd alter all that they admired.
They make me sick, they make me tired. ~ Dorothy Parker

she lived with hurricane eyes and fell in love with the way the waves collapsed against her cheeks. ~ Christopher Poindexter

Learning to be a lady / is like learning / to live within a shell, / to be a crustacean encased / in a small white / uncomfortable world. ~ Stephanie Hemphill

Poetry is language that speaks to our hearts. And I'm using the biblical word heart. I think the closest equivalent to that in 21st-century language is our imaginations. The heart, in biblical physiology, is the center of our emotions, but also of our intellect. Those two things cannot be separated. And poetic language is precise. It is detailed, it's realistic, but it is not the discursive language of mere fact. ~ Krista Tippett

I felt for the tormented whirlwinds
Damned for their carnal sins
Committed when they let their passions rule their reason. ~ Dante Alighieri

Lonely people often have great ideas but no support. People with support too often have bad ideas but power. And you don't give up power. No one does, regardless of whether they have good ideas or not. No one gives up power without a long, bloody fight - one that usually involves foul play. Lonely people typically can't stomach treachery, and that's another problem. They tend to tell the truth and fight fair. So we need art and music and poetry for the lonely people to rally around. ~ Matthew Quick

Drawing is a way of coming upon the connection between things, just like metaphor in poetry reconnects what has become separated. ~ John Berger

The kind of poem I produced in those days was hardly anything more than a sign I made of being alive, of passing or having passed, or hoping to pass, through certain intense human emotions. It was a phenomenon of orientation rather than of art, thus comparable to stripes of paint on a roadside rock or to a pillared heap of stones marking a mountain trail. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

When the holly's in the red
And the pine is in the green,
When the mornings all are frosty,
In a brilliant silver sheen
Then I love to go a' walking
Rambling here and there, quite slow,
Plucking greenery and berries;
Wishing for a Christmas snow ~ Rachel Heffington

The beauty of a mathematical theorem depends a great deal on its seriousness, as even in poetry the beauty of a line may depend to some extent on the significance of the ideas which it contains. ~ G.H. Hardy

Poetry can startle you, awaken you, make you fall in love, take your breath away. When those words sink in, you'll never look at your life or your journey the same way again. ~ Maria Shriver

But the summits of poetry are mysteries; they are shiftingly veiled, and those who catch the glimpses see different aspects of the transcendental; but they have seen something, and they come down with the glory lingering on them. ~ Ruth Pitter

How to resist nothingness? What power
Preserves what once was, if memory does not last?
For I remember little. I remember so very little. ~ Czesław Miłosz

We'll Go No More A-roving
So, we'll go no more a-roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart still be as loving,
And the moon still be as bright.
For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And love itself have rest.
Though the night was made for loving,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we'll go no more a-roving
By the light of the moon. ~ George Gordon Byron

Be patient my little wild one, wondrous things take time. A pearl is hidden before it's refined. A diamond's luster is dull before revealing brilliant magnificent breathtaking shine. ~ Melody Lee

When I'm with you,
The gravity of our moments,
The weight of our smiles
Makes time nearly stop. ~ L. Austen Johnson

Children seem naturally drawn to poetry - it's some combination of the rhyme, rhythm, and the words themselves. ~ Jack Prelutsky

When the words have been said and the music has been played, feelings
are the only form of art which will remain to reign. ~ Soar

For me, the measure of a poem is the word, not the line. ~ John Kinsella

The Bible has noble poetry in it ... and some good morals and a wealth of obscenity, and upwards of a thousand lies. ~ Mark Twain

There are days I am whole
Some days I feel bruised
A silhouette of verse emerges
To mirror my mood
And with every word
I undress my soul
Baring it to the world ~ Collette O'Mahony

Death is like the insect
Menacing the tree,
Competent to kill it,
But decoyed may be.
Bait it with the balsam,
Seek it with the saw,
Baffle, if it cost you
Everything you are.
Then, if it have burrowed
Out of reach of skill -
Wring the tree and leave it,
'Tis the vermin's will.
Of Nature I shall have enough
When I have entered these
Entitled to a Bumble bee's
Familiarities. ~ Emily Dickinson

Unsightly

If I strip my heart naked, you'll see all the unsightly scars, I'm afraid. ~ John Mark Green

There is an old Latin quotation in regard to the poet which says 'Poeta nascitur non fit' the translation of which is - the poet is born, not made. ~ Joseph Devlin

The weird thing about the bible is that almost everything in it is a metaphor.

So it seems to me that when the bible describes church as a place where two or more people discuss God, they don't mean just the cathedral like churches. I don't know what, who or where God is; but if everything is a metaphor, I think he or she is a comparison to us. I think we are like, or as God. I think when we get together, and talk about ourselves, about being human, about what hurts us; we are also talking about God.

So that's also church, right?

I know this might seem blasphemous, but my priest tells me its okay to ask questions, even if they seem bizarre. ~ Elizabeth Acevedo

Laser technology has fulfilled our people's ancient dream of a blade so fine that the person it cuts remains standing and alive until he moves and cleaves. Until we move, none of us can be sure that we have not already been cut in half, or in many pieces, by a blade of light. It is safest to assume that our throats have already been slit, that the slightest alteration in our postures will cause the painless severance of our heads. ~ Ben Lerner

The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,
White as a knuckle and terribly upset.
It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet
With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here. ~ Sylvia Plath

Poetry is when words are robbed of their attributed truth. ~ Gunter Brus

Courage brought me here.
I desperately tried to dress myself with words.
Yet excuses can no longer defend my walls.

So here I am.
Clueless.
Defenseless.
But I will tell you this,
for this is all you have to know.

I love you.

Nothing in this life is more worth
fighting for than that. ~ Frederick Espiritu

she says, "Well, I hope you're making good use of youth."
Less, cross-legged on his towel and pink as a boiled shrimp:" I don't know."
She nods, "You should waste it."
"What's that?"
"You should be at the beach, like today. You should get stoned and drunk and have loads of sex." She takes another drag off her cigarette. "I think the saddest thing in the world is a twenty-five-year-old talking about the stock market. Or taxes. Or real estate, goddamn it! That's all you'll talk about when you're forty. Real estate! Any twenty-five-year-old who says the word refinance should be taken out and shot. Talk about love and music and poetry. Things everyone forgets they ever through were important. Waste everyday, that's what I say. ~ Andrew Sean Greer

I have written some poetry that I don't understand myself. ~ Carl Sandburg

I have just been to a city in the West, a city full of poets, a city they have made safe for poets. The whole city is so lovely that you do not have to write it up to make it poetry; it is ready-made for you. But, I don't know - the poetry written in that city might not seem like poetry if read outside of the city. It would be like the jokes made when you were drunk; you have to get drunk again to appreciate them. ~ Robert Frost

The journey is to find our way back to the start, And seek the future in our past, For far into the distance I see someone like me, Trying to figure out the same old lie that life is… ~ Piyush Rohankar

Poetry and prayer put ideas in people's heads that got them killed, distracting them from the ruthless mechanism of the world. ~ Colson Whitehead

Your Smile Ignites a Spark Down Deep In My Heart That Makes My Soul Shiver! ~ Richard M. Knittle Jr.

We measure everything by ourselves with almost a necessary conceit. ~ Dejan Stojanovic

My mother wrote poetry when I was young - I have an early memory of the sound of her typewriter - and my father told me inventive bedtime stories. ~ Eula Biss

You feel right
to me,
she said,
like naked
on cashmere. ~ Atticus Poetry

What does travel ultimately produce if it is not, by a sort of reversal, 'an exploration of the deserted places of my memory,' the return to nearby exoticism by way of a detour through distant places, and the 'discovery' of relics and legends: 'fleeting visions of the French countryside,' 'fragments of music and poetry,' in short, something like an 'uprooting in one's origins (Heidegger)? What this walking exile produces is precisely the body of legends that is currently lacking in one's own vicinity; it is a fiction, which moreover has the double characteristic like dreams or pedestrian rhetoric, or being the effect of displacements and condensations. As a corollary, one can measure the importance of these signifying practices (to tell oneself legends) as practices that invent spaces. ~ Michel De Certeau

The mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within ... could this influence be durable in its original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness of the result; but when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline; and the most glorious poetry that has been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet. ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

The science of government it is my duty to study, more than all other sciences; the arts of legislation and administration and negotiation ought to take the place of, indeed exclude, in a manner, all other arts. I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain. ~ John Adams

I used to think love was two people sucking
on the same straw to see whose thirst was stronger,

but then I whiffed the crushed walnuts of your nape,
traced jackals in the snow-covered tombstones of your teeth.

I used to think love was a non-stop saxophone solo
in the lungs, till I hung with you like a pair of sneakers

from a phone line, and you promised to always smell
the rose in my kerosene. I used to think love was terminal

pelvic ballet, till you let me jog beside while you pedaled
all over hell on the menstrual bicycle, your tongue

ripping through my prairie like a tornado of paper cuts.
I used to think love was an old man smashing a mirror

over his knee, till you helped me carry the barbell
of my spirit back up the stairs after my car pirouetted

in the desert. You are my history book. I used to not believe
in fairy tales till I played the dunce in sheep's clothing

and felt how perfectly your foot fit in the glass slipper
of my ass. But then duty wrapped its phone cord

around my ankle and yanked me across the continent.
And now there are three thousand miles between the u

and s in esophagus. And being without you is like standing
at a cement-filled wall with a roll of Yugoslavian nickels

and making a wish. Some days I miss you so much
I'd jump off the roof of your office building

ju ~ Jeffrey McDaniel

Nothing will sustain you more potently than the power to recognize in you humdrum routine, the true poetry of life - the poetry of the commonplace, of the ordinary person, of the plain, toilworn, with their loves and their joys, their sorrows and griefs. ~ William Osler

...passions, poetry and the ego have been seen as perpetual explosions? But if that's true, then so its its opposite; ever since that August when athe mushroom rose over cities reduced to a layer of ash, an age was born in which the explosion is symbolic only of absolute negation. ~ Italo Calvino

In addition to the original Executioner series I have also written a number of other works with diverse taste, even poetry. None, however, have provided the pleasure of touching so many people from so many lands as have the Executioners. ~ Don Pendleton