Poets And Poetry Quotes

If I began to draw
myself away from you

we'd still be like
two mixed colors of paint
impossible to separate. ~ Sanober Khan

I am more interested in the insecure transparency in you than the pretentious character. Naked is surreal, it may make you feel vulnerable for a while yet it will take us on a journey worth remembering. ~ Suchet Chaturvedi

We will read books together inside the blanket and stay warm. And keep writing poetry in our respective journals. Time will fly but we will still remain inside the blanket forever. ~ Avijeet Das

Life is a River"

Life is a river
zig zag it goes on flowing
myriad memories quench thirst
in the swirling waves of life!

Life has its own colour
a mingling of blue, green, black and white
sweeping away all happiness and sadness
in the cascading bubbles of tears and delight

Life shares its own wisdom
to keep on flowing is its only zeal
whether it be summer or winter
life will keep on flowing but never still

Life is a river
it flows at its own pace
sometimes it may have no direction
and this is life's story and grace!

- Poet Manjushree Mohanty

Translated from Odiya to English by Poet Avijeet Das ~ Manjushree Mohanty

A 21st century poet is a woman who can speak her mind and stand upright like a mountain with her convictions, but can adapt like water in an ever changing season without losing her genuine elements. ~ Roseville Nidea

Some poets write pages upon pages because their hearts have a song to sing and their melodies cannot be contained in a single stanza... and I find myself typing out a quote because my soul is still gasping for breath, and all the words form a single sentence: I miss us. ~ Alfa H

the time will come, my dear
when I will hold you close

and all will be
right again
in the world. ~ Sanober Khan

When we were kids I begged cupid to come and shoot me. ~ Delano Johnson

And poets do really know the things about which they seem to the many to speak so well? ~ Plato

The birth of a true poet is neither an insignificant event nor an easy delivery. Complications generally begin long before the fated soul carries its dubious light into whatever womb has been kind enough to volunteer the intricate machinery of its blood and prayers and muscles for a gestation period much longer than nine months or even nine years. ~ Aberjhani

Silken strings composing the harpsichord of life accommodate a score of emotional tidings. An orchestra of linked heartbeats strumming the melodious prose of our collective intones gives rise to sonnets of melancholy, producing an illimitable libretto stretching from the milky dawn of newborn's amaranth life to the speckled sunsets of gentle souls whom we cherish. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

A single poem, alone
can turn tides
scatter galaxies
and burst forth with rivers
from paradise. ~ Sanober Khan

A rain like melting pillows…
a rain so beautiful

I could never
have let go of

if not certain
that someday...it would find its way
into my poem. ~ Sanober Khan

Poetry never plays a more important role than it does during revolutionary periods; poetry gave the revolution its voice and in return the revolution liberated poetry from isolation; the poet now knows he is being heard by the people, especially young people; for youth, poetry and revolution are one and the same. ~ Milan Kundera

- April -

In this distance I hear a heartbeat...
The only sound I remember from my last life
I listen to it when I am awake or in sleep....
I know it is the heartbeat of my loved one
A heartbeat that inspires my heart to beat..
I don't know where you are... where to find
We on earth may never meet in real...
All I can listen is your heart murmur...... ~ Raigon Stanley

to be a poet means
to live
with a permanent wound

forever
susceptible
to either

the shade
of the sky

or someone's eyes. ~ Sanober Khan

She wants me to ruin her
And my pen makes her into poetry! ~ Avijeet Das

poets. have
the toughest job
in the universe-

of turning silence
into eloquence. ~ Sanober Khan

We hold on to poetry because it lights a fire in our soul and keeps our bodies warm. ~ Sanober Khan

When I pour out my hurt and sadness into the typewriter do I then begin to realize that I have created poetry! ~ Avijeet Das

I was too much in solitude, and consequently was obliged to be in continual burning of thought, as an only resource. ~ John Keats

Poets should never stop writing, because their words could be a powerful inspiration to someone else, whether it be now or 100 years from today. ~ Delano Johnson

It's been a thousand years since I became a poem I have been in your hear all along this journey. ~ Avijeet Das

The reader reads aloud, with a sing-song up ... then down ... then down again cadence. My mood shifts from merely reluctant to derisive. It's a tired reading style. I'm sick of it. It attaches more importance to the words than the words themselves - as they've been arranged - could possibly sustain, and it gives poets and poetry a bad name. ~ Gabrielle Hamilton

In my heart, poetry screams, "I exist! ~ Delano Johnson

It is kind of ridiculous that a poet is expected to live in the real world. ~ Sanober Khan

Stop the tape, cut the paper! I will just write another poem and grab a microphone and push record again! ~ Delano Johnson

NASA's next urgent mission should be to send good poets into space so they can describe what it's really like.
Dangerous by Shannon Hale ~ Shannon Hale

Like Johnson, Lewis was more impressive in his conversation than in his poetry, and more impressive in his prose - particularly in his learned prose - than in his conversation. ~ Jocelyn Gibb

If you want to see mankind fully, look at a family. Within the family minds become organically one, and for this reason the family is total poetry. ~ Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

I feel deep gratitude for the life poetry has allowed me to live. I know the life I could have lived without it. Both on the physical plain, and the soul plain. Poetry helps us endure. ~ Dorianne Laux

I'm perfectly happy when I look out at an audience and it's all women. I always think it's kind of odd, but then, more women than men, I think, read and write poetry. ~ Diane Wakoski

doves exist, dreamers, and dolls;
killers exist, and doves, and doves;
haze, dioxin, and days; days
exist, days and death; and poems
exist; poems, days, death ~ Inger Christensen

Fireflies, to me, are nighttime butterflies,
Dazzling the night with magical flashes of light.
When I see these teeny tiny sparks dart in the night,
I am overcome with a sense of comfort and calm,
Same as when a butterfly flutters
around me during the day.
I'm drawn to the dance of both astonishing critters.
They remind me of life.
They remind me of hope. ~ Melody Lee

I think the novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers. The novel receives streams of science, philosophy, poetry and contains all of these; it's not simply telling a story. ~ Jose Saramago

If I can write just one poem that will turn the minds of a few to a more decent outlook...what does it matter if I compose a bad line or lose my reputation as a craftsman?...I used to think it very important to write only good poetry. Over and over I worked it to make it as flawless as I could. What does it matter now, when men are dying for their hopes and their ideals? If I live or die as a poet it won't matter, but anyone who believes in democracy and freedom and love and culture and peace ought to be busy now. He cannot wait for the tomorrow. ~ Nancy Milford

It comes down to this: we're pieces of equipment
To be counted and signed for.
On occasion some of us break down,
And those parts which can't be salvaged
Are replaced with other GI parts, that's all. ~ Rolando Hinojosa

I should've probably warned you:
once you end a relationship with an artist,
you are perpetually reminded of them.
They have now ruined classical music and jazz for you.
They have ruined books and poetry.
You should just forget about galleries and museums.
But you know what the worst part is?
It's how they witnessed and observed you,
making you feel like the only person in the room.
And you secretly loved being looked at,
being worshipped.
So now you avoid mirrors.
Because when you look at yourself,
you remember me. ~ Kamand Kojouri

We are against war and the sources of war.
We are for poetry and the sources of poetry. ~ Muriel Rukeyser

For summer and his pleasures wait on thee,
And, thou away, the very birds are mute:
Or, if they sing, 'tis with so dull a cheer,
That leaves look pale, dreading the winter's near. ~ William Shakespeare

My first spoken word poem, packed with all the wisdom of a 14-year-old, was about the injustice of being seen as unfeminine. The poem was very indignant, and mainly exaggerated, but the only spoken word poetry that I had seen up until that point was mainly indignant, so I thought that that's what was expected of me. ~ Sarah Kay

Without artists, would this heritage have descended to us? Would the words and deeds - the revelation - have survived the arduous journey into the present without the painters, the mosaic workers, the storytellers, the stone carvers, the poets, the singers, the workers in stained glass? Wasn't it art, I thought - as I watched Bernard open a handsome black wallet and remove a handful of lire - that had been the carrier of the divine? Popes had understood that. The Emperor Constantine. Monks in damp Irish monasteries illuminating the Word. ~ Rachel Pastan

...citizens of the U.S. live under an Empire of "evil doers" who have set themselves juxtaposed to humanity instilling in us from our youngest days how to slay our human element in exchange for an external existence of malnourished pride. ~ Steven Storm

Steve Jobs thus became the greatest business executive of our era, the one most certain to be remembered a century from now. History will place him in the pantheon right next to Edison and Ford. More than anyone else of this time, he made products that were completely innovative, combining the power of poetry and processors. With a ferocity that could make working with him as unsettling as it was inspiring, he also built the world's most creative company. And he was able to infuse into its DNA the design sensibilities, perfectionism, and imagination that make it likely to be, even decades from now, the company that thrives best at the intersection of artistry and technology. ~ Walter Isaacson

When the two become the one
And the inside outside, the outside in
So that the male be not male nor the female female
Then will you see me. ~ Wesley Stace

Night falls
And the sun rises,
And I dig niggers, niggers, niggers of all shades and sizes
And the sun, the sun it plays on my eyes
And I hear the hungry cries
Of black children
Their stomachs turned inside out
Their minds full of fear and doubt
Being told lies
Being watched by spies
With loophole-proof alibis
While another nigger, nigger, nigger in Vietnam dies
But the sun still rises and the night still falls
And junkies still O.D. in ghetto halls
And Miles he still blows
And the oppression still grows
And where it stops, nobody knows
And black people cry out in vain
Against injustice and pain
To one whose mind is insane...

from "Surprises" by the Last Poets ~ Jalal Mansur Nuriddin

But as men grow more industrialised and regimented, the kind of delight that is common in children becomes impossible to adults because they are always thinking of the next thing and cannot let themselves be absorbed in the moment. This habit of thinking of the 'next thing' is more fatal to any kind of aesthetic excellence than any other habit of mind that can be imagined, and if art, in any important sense, is to survive it will not be by the foundation of solemn academies, but by recapturing the capacity for wholehearted joys and sorrows which prudence and foresight have all but destroyed. ~ Bertrand Russell

Believing then … that human life is actually worth living, one can combat one's natural pessimism by stoicism and the refusal of illusion, while embellishing the scene with any one of the following. There are the beauties of science and the extraordinary marvels of nature. There is the consolation and irony of philosophy. There are the infinite splendors of literature and poetry, not excluding the liturgical and devotional aspects of these, such as those found in John Donne or George Herbert. There is the grand resource of art and music and architecture, again not excluding those elements that aspire to the sublime. In all of these pursuits, any one of them enough to absorb a lifetime, there may be found a sense of awe and magnificence that does not depend at all on any invocation of the supernatural. Indeed, nobody armed by art and culture and literature and philosophy is likely to be anything but bored and sickened by ghost stories, UFO tales, spiritualist experiences, or babblings from the beyond. ~ Christopher Hitchens

The acute scenes were still on our eyes, immediate and clear in the passion; and there were moments, too, in which we were outsiders and could draw away, as if we were in a plane and rose far, to a high focus above that coast, those cities, and this sea, with sight and feelings sharper than before ~ The Life Of Poetry

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ME AND YOU

When I hold a rose,
I see the soft, velvety petals
and smile, because
tucked between
those precious petals
is a special gift -
the one of a fragrance,
pure and sweet.
When you hold a rose,
you see the thorns
along the stem,
and you frown
because those thorns
can bring you pain
and cause you to bleed.
I see the gift.
You see the tragedy.
More and more
I fear that one of these days
someone will hand me a rose
and all I will see
are thorns.
Talk about tragedy. ~ Lisa Schroeder

Little Cinder

Girl, they can't understand you.
You rise from the as-heap in a blaze
and only then do they recognize you
as their one true love.

While you pray beneath your mother's
tree you carrve a phoenix into your palm
wth aa hazel twig and coal;
every night she devours more of you.

You used to believe in angels.
Now you believe in the makeover;
if you can't get the grime off your face
and your foot into a size six heel

who will ever bother to notice you?
The kettle and the broom sear in your grasp,
snap into fragments. The turtledoves sing,
"There's blood within the shoe."

You deserve the palace, you think, as you signal
the pigeons to attack, approve the barrel filled with red-hot nails.
Its great hearth beckons, and the prince's flag
rises crimson in the angry sun.

He will love you for the heat you generate,
for the flames you ignite around you,
though he encase your tiny feet in glass
to keep them from scorching the ground. ~ Jeannine Hall Gailey

And that was love. True love. The kind that carried on and lasted through the good days and the difficult days. The kind of love that always gave, and never hurt. It might not be the kind of mad love poets wrote about, but it was the kind of love strong enough to build a home upon, secure in the knowledge that this man would be there when things went wrong and would do everything in his considerable power to make things right again. ~ Karen Hawkins

That is what all the poets do: they talk to themselves outloud and the world overhears them. But it's horribly lonely not to hear someone else talk sometimes. ~ George Bernard Shaw

The great pleasure that comes from reading poets such as Mark Doty and Marianne Moore is the realisation that the essential virtues - compassion, wonder, humility, respect for the mysterious - are far from conventionally heroic. ~ John Burnside

The house became full of love. Aureliano expressed it in poetry that had no beginning and no end. He would write it on the harsh pieces of parchment that Melquiades gave him, on the bathroom walls, on the skin of his arms, and in all of it Remedios would appear transfigured: Remedios in the soporific air of two in the afternoon, Remedios in the soft breath of the roses, Remedios in the water-clock secrets of the moths, Remedios in the steaming morning bread, Remedios everywhere and Remedios forever. ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

If I had another life
I would want to spend it all on some
unstinting happiness.
I would be a fox, or a tree
full of waving branches.
I wouldn't mind being a rose
in a field full of roses.
Fear has not yet occurred to them, nor ambition.
Reason they have not yet thought of.
Neither do they ask how long they must be roses, and then what.
Or any other foolish question. ~ Mary Oliver

She couldn't think of anyone else who remotely resembled him. He was complicated, almost contradictory in so many ways, yet simple, a strangely erotic combination. On the surface he was a country boy, home from war, and he probably saw himself in those terms. Yet there was so much more to him. Perhaps it was the poetry that made him different, or perhaps it was the values his father had instilled in him, growing up. Either way, he seemed to savor life more fully than others appeared to, and that was what had first attracted her to him. ~ Nicholas Sparks

Endymion

The rising moon has hid the stars;
Her level rays, like golden bars,
Lie on the landscape green,
With shadows brown between.

And silver white the river gleams,
As if Diana, in her dreams,
Had dropt her silver bow
Upon the meadows low.

On such a tranquil night as this,
She woke Endymion with a kiss,
When, sleeping in the grove,
He dreamed not of her love.

Like Dian's kiss, unasked, unsought,
Love gives itself, but is not bought;
Nor voice, nor sound betrays
Its deep, impassioned gaze.

It comes,--the beautiful, the free,
The crown of all humanity,--
In silence and alone
To seek the elected one.

It lifts the boughs, whose shadows deep
Are Life's oblivion, the soul's sleep,
And kisses the closed eyes
Of him, who slumbering lies.

O weary hearts! O slumbering eyes!
O drooping souls, whose destinies
Are fraught with fear and pain,
Ye shall be loved again!

No one is so accursed by fate,
No one so utterly desolate,
But some heart, though unknown,
Responds unto his own.

Responds,--as if with unseen wings,
An angel touched its quivering strings;
And whispers, in its song,
"Where hast thou stayed so long? ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The reason I often say, for me, photography is analogous to poetry, for my kind of work more so than journalism, is because it's so open to interpretation. And I'm very happy having different interpretations of it. ~ Alec Soth

Dreamers don't abandon
their dreams, they flare and continue
the life they have in the dream…tell me
how you lived your dream in a certain place
and I'll tell you who you are. And now,
as you awaken, remember if you have wronged
your dream. And if you have, then remember
the last dance of the swan. ~ Mahmoud Darwish

Then there were his education and his reading, the books he bought and borrowed, his knowledge of things that could not be eaten or worn or cohabited with, his interest in poetry and his respect for good writing. ~ John Steinbeck

Did men but know that there was a fixed limit to their woes, they would be able, in some measure, to defy the religious fictions and menaces of the poets; but now, since we must fear eternal punishment at death, there is no mode, no means, of resisting them. ~ Lucretius