Poetry Loneliness Quotes

I'm telling you it's cold inside the body that is not the body,
lonesome behind the face
that is certainly not the face
of the person one meant to become. ~ Denis Johnson

Birth is the start of loneliness and loneliness the start of poetry ... ~ Erica Jong

This is the age of science, of steel -- of speed and the cement road. The age of hard faces and hard highways. Science and steel demand the medium of prose. Speed requires only the look -- the gesture. What need then, for poetry?

Great need!

There are souls, in these noise-tired times, that turn aside into unfrequented lanes, where the deep woods have harbored the fragrances of many a blossoming season. Here the light, filtering through perfect forms, arranges itself in lovely patterns for those who perceive beauty... ~ Roy J. Cook

The prettiest girls shine brightest in the dark. ~ Atticus Poetry

As a relentless gatherer of moments, I find that my favorite images, although grounded in the present, are like spirits shaped by memories. They whisper of fairy tales, poetry, and other lives, as each gesture connects with another and raises yet another from the dead. Shadows flicker on film to an inner melody as I navigate, camera at hand and at the speed of light, through unimaginable worlds - desperately trying to make sense of the joy and suffering before it all disappears. ~ Sylvia Plachy

And here was the thing I didn't understand then but do now - the loneliness. I was right, in that there was just the three of us. Or the two of us. Nobody else, not Clemence, not even my mother herself, cared as much as we did about my mother. Nobody else thought night and day of her. Nobody else knew what was happening to her. Nobody else was as desperate as the two of us, my father and I, to get our life back. To return to the Before. ~ Louise Erdrich

I called it a baptism in flaming ink that forced me to shed my shyness about recognizing myself as a poet and to accept the fact that life had never given me any choice in the matter. And then I had to discover exactly what that meant. ~ Aberjhani

We had a moment once when I felt that we were one, in the same feeling, in the same soul. But I've come to learn that these moments can imprison us for years when they were only moments followed by many more that were not the same. ~ Najwa Zebian

The master said You must write what you see.
But what I see does not move me.
The master answered Change what you see. ~ Louise Gluck

Poetry is paying attention to life when all the world seems asleep to its beauties and truths ... ~ John Geddes

If you're looking for fine art or literature, you might want to read some stuff written by the Greeks. Because to create true fine art, slaves are a necessity. That's how the ancient Greeks felt, with slaves working the fields, cooking their meals, rowing their ships, all the while their citizens, under the Mediterranean Sun, indulged in poetry writing and grappled with mathematics. That was their idea of fine art. ~ Haruki Murakami

I love being part of poetry conversations. I love talking about what I've read. ~ Victoria Chang

In the forefront of our move toward change, there is only poetry to hint at possibility made real. ~ Audre Lorde

Poetry is itself a thing of God;
He made his prophets poets; and the more
We feel of poesie do we become
Like God in love and power,-under-makers. ~ Philip James Bailey

Piecemeal the body dies, and the timid soul
has her footing washed away, as the dark flood rises. ~ D.H. Lawrence

Marriage I think
For women
Is the best of opiates.
It kills the thoughts
That think about the thoughts,
It is the best of opiates.
So said Maria.
But too long in solitude she'd dwelt,
And too long her thoughts had felt
Their strength. So when the man drew near,
Out popped her thoughts and covered him with fear.
Poor Maria!
Better that she had kept her thoughts on a chain,
For now she's alone again and all in pain;
She sighs for the man that went and the thoughts that stay
To trouble her dreams by night and her dreams by day. ~ Stevie Smith

The rhyme pad was a spell book - it summoned asphalt elementals, elder gods, and weeping ancestors, all of whom had your back. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

It's so diffuse
being alive. Suddenly one is aware
that nobody really gives a damn. ~ Amiri Baraka

Some poems are written great, some poems are written swell. But then there are poems that could win a prize in Hell. ~ Stanley Victor Paskavich

He viewed us, as we passed him by,
With calm and yet with questioning eye,
But moveless still, as though the stone
Were portion of his being's own. ~ Edward Robeson Taylor

For maybe this is how poetry can be of use. Though it can't move with us, we can move it between us, pass it among us, so it is held up by our voices, so it moves with our breath, our living breath. ~ Helen Humphreys

Everyone lives by selling something. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

One day, your beauty will manifest in someone's eye. ~ Anthony Liccione

Colors of spring have turned upside down.
Red once burned underfoot, now hangs over the horizon--a blood bruise where sky
smashed itself against hills. Green once gathered in the quick-shaping clouds carrying a mix of sand and rain and left quickly as it arrived; now it cushions your steps, hides the evidence of bones. ~ D.A. Gray

I didn't feel lonely until there was something to yearn for. Loneliness and longing are two sides of the same coin. ~ Jostein Gaarder

Love is poetry, poetry is love ~ Milan Kundera

Emerging from chaos,
came Light,
filling need. ~ E'yen A. Gardner

Victims of police brutality is not new.
It happened to me and can happen to you.
I hope you learn a lesson or two
From this incident I've been through. ~ Heide Velarde, A Fadeaway Dream Of Justice To Redeem

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A poet is an artist that paints pictures by mixing thought, imagination, and emotion with words. ~ Debasish Mridha

Poetry vs. Novel [10w]
A novel can kindle the imagination;
poetry sets it aflame. ~ Beryl Dov

All those big words produce disgust today. ~ Dejan Stojanovic

The poetry you could write about Rufus helping me out of my grave isn't lost on me. ~ Adam Silvera

live with somebody, peaceably, dreaming beside each other, sharing meals, making a family, but there seems no special excitement to it, even though you know, as Tim did, that you're living with a person of exceptional kindness. And then she's gone and the depth of the loss almost surpasses understanding, even when you realize you're also mourning your loneliness, and the inevitability of it. Judge ~ Scott Turow

He loves her for a reason and its not rational ~ Gwen Calvo

The Fallen

It was the night
a comet with its silver tail
fell through darkness
to earth's eroded field,
the night I found
the wolf,
starved in metal trap,
teeth broken
from pain's hard bite,
its belly swollen with unborn young.

In our astronomy
the Great Wolf
lived in the sky.
It was the mother of all women
and howled her daughter's names
into the winds of night.

But the new people,
whatever stepped inside their shadow,
they would kill,
whatever crossed their path,
they came to fear.

In their science,
Wolf as not the mother.
Wolf was not wind.
They did not learn healing
from her song.

In their stories
Wolf was the devil, falling
down an empty,
shrinking universe,
God's Lucifer
with yellow eyes
that had seen their failings
and knew that they could kill the earth,
that they would kill each other.

That night
I threw the fallen stone back to sky
and falling stars
and watched it all come down
to ruined earth again.

Sky would not take back
what it had done.
That night, sky was a wilderness so close
the eerie light of heaven
and storming hands of sun
reached down the swollen belly
and dried up nipples of a hungry world.

That night,
I saw the trapper's shadow
and it had four legs. ~ Linda Hogan

This status thing could help connect people to those who weren't there. It wasn't just about sharing what kind of music you were listening to or where you were at that moment; it was about connecting people and making them feel less alone. It could be a technology that would erase a feeling that an entire generation felt while staring into their computer screens. An emotion that Noah and Jack and Biz and Ev had grown up feeling, finding solace in a monitor. An emotion that Noah felt night after night as his marriage and company fell apart: loneliness. ~ Nick Bilton

You've got a lot to say for the one who walked away. ~ Stacy Morris

She was no better than the shells by her feet, tumbling this way and that at the beck and call of the waves. ~ Katherine McIntyre

You'd think hindsight would do us some good
But all it does sometimes
Is add glass to the kaleidoscope ~ J.D. Estrada

Many times I wondered whether my achievement was worth the loneliness I experienced, but now I realize the price was small. ~ Gordon Parks

Some people make tunes, but it is lines that run like moving messages through my head. Whatever else I am saying and doing often has no bearing on this inner, verbal life. ~ Susan Hill

Harmony of period and melody of style have greater weight than is generally imagined in the judgment we pass upon writing and writers. As a proof of this, let us reflect what texts of scripture, what lines in poetry, or what periods we most remember and quote, either in verse or prose, and we shall find them to be only musical ones. ~ William Shenstone

Jamie enjoyed solitude, but loneliness was a constant ache. ~ Sidney Sheldon

You artists think you're the only ones who can relate to these things. Many of us have the same feelings, the same emptiness, the same loneliness. But we don't have the tools to verbalize them. So we carry on, we struggle. Feelings are feelings. I think people's feelings are pretty much the same all over the world. ~ Patricia Cornwell

A language so beautiful and lethal
My mouth bleeds when I speak it. - ~ Gwendolyn MacEwen

To think of writing poetry as a "career" is not only ridiculous, it's dangerous. To the imagination. To the way one thinks of art. The reason poetry as a genre is so special is because it cannot be made a commodity. ~ Cate Marvin

I did a weird thing when I was about 24. For four years I had written quite a lot of poetry, and I started reading through it and thought some of it was really good. So I burnt it all. ~ Cliff Curtis

Like Hamlet, Goethe's Faust offers a wide panorama of scenes from the vulgar to the sublime, with passages of wondrous poetry that can be sensed even through the veil of translation. And it also preserves the iridescence of its modern theme. From it Oswald Spengler christened our Western culture 'Faustian,' and others too have found it an unexcelled metaphor for the infinitely aspiring always dissatisfied modern self.
Goethe himself was wary of simple explanations. When his friends accused him of incompetence in metaphysics, he replied. 'I, being an artist, regard this as of little moment. Indeed, I prefer that the principle from which and through which I work should be hidden from me. ~ Daniel J. Boorstin