Poets Letters Quotes

There are many things you can lie your way through; poetry is not one of them. ~ Nicole Lyons

There are eight worlds, the first one said. They lie side by side, in degrees of perfection. This world is the most perfect one. Below these lines, written in a different ink, was: There is one single world, divided into three levels which are partitioned off from each other by greased membranes. Then in red ink: There are two worlds and they overlap. The first is the land of Day, which belongs to the humans. The second is the land of Twilight, which belongs to the free folk, and of which the woods is a little backwater part. Both lands must obey Time, but the Twilight is ruled by the Heart, whereas the Day is ruled by Thought. At the bottom of the page, large block letters proclaimed: ALL OF THIS IS TRUE. ~ Karin Tidbeck

For as long as there are poets, playwrights and men with hearts to break, tales will be told of the princess who died across the water and returned home to be crowned a queen, the queen of all our hearts. ~ Andrew Morton

Dear today,
i spend all of you pretending i'm okay when i'm not, pretending i'm happy when i'm not, pretending about everything to everyone. ~ Nina LaCour

She had a lot of nerve signing her note "Love." [ ... ] But she did sign it that way: "Love." What did that mean? Did she mean it, or was it habit? She probably signed all of her letters with "Love." Dear Insured, We are sorry but your policy will not pay for your barium enema as it was done for recreational purposes. Love, Jody. Claims Dept ...
Maybe not. ~ Christopher Moore

But now, seeing these letters his father wrote to June Bailey Roe, seeing his father's painful devotion to someone who simply wasn't real - a daughter he never had - Wade is unable to suppress his dread. All that love, all those feelings, all that pain, fastened to nothing, a terrible, drifting chaos. His future loss of mind becomes the new premise of his life, and he feels, already, the loss of the things he loves, feels himself trying to find some other way to hold on to them. ~ Emily Ruskovich

Never write a letter and never destroy one. ~ Cardinal Richelieu

Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present. ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

And what mattered most was not that I needed to see and hear that I was beautiful. No, what mattered most was that I was in love with a young woman whose love for me introduced me to the vastness of the universe, the infinite and the finite, from Timbuktu to me, the young Ever Park brother who played basketball and wrote secret letters, and who sometimes just happened to, you know, stumble in and find Kaya in the library after school. ~ Matthew Aaron Goodman

Harvey Publications hired me as a letterer, and they found out six seconds after I got the job that I couldn't letter. I still can't letter. So, they hired me to draw. ~ Ernie Colon

Indeed, there is something about reading in a restaurant that is borderline romantic. Leaning back in that corner booth, an evocative title in our hands, a stale cup of java in front of us, every so often bolting forward to jot a phrase onto the napkin, we look like, well, poets-unknown belletrists scraping through the hardscrabble years and awaiting the distinction that is imminent. the waiter of waitress refills our cup, we drop a memorable apothegm or two, share a laugh fraught with meaning, scope out the joint, and return to our tome. Nonbiblioholics strain to espy our title; conversation is struck up on things Kafkaesque and Kierkegaardian; and we forge a genuine biblioholic simpatico with all around. ~ Tom Raabe

There are people all over the world who carry the mermaid inside them, that otherworldly beauty and longing and desire that made her reach for heaven when she lived in the darkness of the sea. ~ Carolyn Turgeon

I get letters that say 'Stop being evil to Harry or we'll go to Hogwarts and kick your butt. Some fans are so weird. One changed his name legally to Lucius Malfoy and wanted to adopt me. ~ Tom Felton

Renaissance Humanism, which under Petrarch's formation and tutelage vindicated the importance of poetry and rhetoric as effectors of an intimate bond between reason and emotion, thought and action, intellect and will. Petrarchan Humanism became the historical force mobilizing thought and letters against the blind impulsiveness of an illusory popular culture and the elitism of the philosophical schools" (Trinkaus, 135). ~ Charles Edward Trinkaus

I think. Therefore, I am. I think."
- Anonymous

I found this written in tiny letters in the grout between the wall tiles above a urinal in a restroom at the University of Washington, circa 1980. I don't know if Descartes would have approved but I thought it was brilliant. ~ Gary Val Tenuta

From oriole to crow, note the decline
In music. Crow is realist. But, then,
Oriole, also, may be realist. ~ Wallace Stevens

Now when he closes his eyes he can really look at himself. He no longer sees a mask. He sees without seeing, to be exact. Vision without sight, a fluid grasp of intangibles: the merging of sight and sound: the heart of the web. Here stream the different personalities which evade the crude contact of the senses; here the overtones of recognition discreetly lap against one another in bright, vibrant harmonies. There is no language employed, no outlines delineated. When a ship founders, it settles slowly; the spars, the masts, the rigging float away. On the ocean floor of death the bleeding hull bedecks itself with jewels; remorselessly the anatomic life begins. What was ship becomes the nameless indestructible. Like ships, men founder time and again. Only memory saves them from complete dispersion. Poets drop their stitches in the loom, straws for drowning men to grasp as they sink into extinction. Ghosts climb back on watery stairs, make imaginary ascents, vertiginous drops, memorize numbers, dates, events, in passing from gas to liquid and back again. There is no brain capable of registering the changing changes. Nothing happens in the brain, except the gradual rust and detrition of the cells. But in the minds, worlds unclassified, undenominated, unassimilated, form, break, unite, dissolve and harmonize ceaselessly. In the mind-world ideas are the indestructible elements which form the jewelled constellations of the interior life. We move within their orbits, freely if we fol ~ Henry Miller

In England, coffeehouses were dubbed penny-universities, because for the admission price of one cent, a person could sit and be edified all day long by scholars, merchants, travelers, community leaders, gossips, and poets. ~ Leah Hager Cohen

Poets, not otherwise than philosophers, painters, sculptors, and musicians, are, in one sense, the creators, and, in another, the creations, of their age. ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

And it's a pity too that I've no right to open your letters. I hope you don't get many, or my conscience will give me no peace. ~ Diana Wynne Jones

Safe Sex
If he and she do not know each other, and feel confident
they will not meet again; if he avoids affectionate words;
if she has grown insensible skin under skin; if they desire
only the tribute of another's cry; if they employ each other
as revenge on old lovers or families of entitlement and steel
then there will be no betrayals, no letters returned unread,
no frenzy, no hurled words of permanent humiliation,
no trembling days, no vomit at midnight, no repeated
apparition of a body floating face-down at the pond's edge ~ Donald Hall

If a synesthetic person says the letter a is green, it can't ever be anything but green. ~ Leni Zumas

She tried not to think in capital letters. It was a bad habit. If you weren't careful, pretty soon you'd find yourself Going to the Store to Buy a Carton of Milk - or worse, speaking German. ~ Max Gladstone

The most important thing is to be excellent, interesting, authentic, or useful. To be the thing, not the thing that sells the thing. That's fantastic news for creative people, who specialize in the stuff. Thanks to toomuchness, creativity, once exclusively the province of poets, has suddenly become a business imperative. ~ Andrew Essex

I get letters from young people telling me that they're broke and download my albums for free. They ask me what I think about that. I now have a standard line. I tell them, 'I would rather be heard than paid.' ~ Henry Rollins

My sweetheart, my love, my love, my love - do you know what - all the happiness of the world, the riches, power and adventures, all the promises of religions, all the enchantment of nature and even human fame are not worth your two letters. It was a night of horror, terrible anguish, when I imagined that your undelivered letter, stuck at some unknown post office, was being destroyed like a sick little stray dog . . . But today it arrived - and now it seems to me that in the mailbox where it was lying, in the sack where it was shaking, all the other letters absorbed, just by touching it, your unique charm and that that day all Germans received strange wonderful letters - letters that had gone mad because they had touched your handwriting. The thought that you exist is so divinely blissful in itself that it is ridiculous to talk about the everyday sadness of separation - a week's, ten days' - what does it matter? since my whole life belongs to you. I wake at night and know that you are together with me, - I sense your sweet long legs, your neck through your hair, your trembling eyelashes - and then such happiness, such simmering bliss follows me in my dreams that I simply suffocate . . . ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Playing Ann Landers is like channeling my mother. That combination of love and the enjoyment of life is my mother. And you find that combination in Ann Landers' letters. ~ Mimi Kennedy

Pythagoras argued that the souls of poets pass not from this world
but lodge themselves in the breastwork of swans.

Let it be, then. Let some of us withdraw to the keel-shaped bones
to the tilted orrery of the thorax. But I think: if poets coalesce as swans
we're mostly in the feet of swans, black as drums

pressing our rageful webbing into the earth's flank. ~ Kiki Petrosino

Ah, you're the one who wrote the letter. So you can write then? ~ Prince Philip

A "file" was originally - in sixteenth-century England - a wire on which slips and bills and notes and letters could be strung for preservation and reference. Then came file folders, file drawers, and file cabinets; then the electronic namesakes of all these; and the inevitable irony. Once a piece of information is filed, it is statistically unlikely ever to be seen again by human eyes. ~ James Gleick

Never write a letter if you can help it, and never destroy one! ~ John A. Macdonald

She ventured to recommend a larger allowance of prose in his daily study; and on being requested to particularise, mentioned such works by our best moralists, such collections of fine letters, such memoirs of characters of worth and suffering, as occurred to her at the moment as calculated to rouse and fortify the mind. ~ Jane Austen

We were three hours from Chicago, so my blackness was less of a curiosity, more of a threat. And there were the black students on campus, the nerve of them, daring to pursue higher education. In the local newspaper, residents wrote angry letters about a new criminal element--the scourge of youthful black ambition, black joy. In my more generous moments, I tried to believe the locals were using anger to mask their fear of living in a dying town in a changing world. ~ Roxane Gay

It is strange, how quickly people want to obligate their poets, as it were, on the exile. ~ Peter Bichsel

Has she received any letters from Lockton?'
The question hit me like a bucket of cold water. 'You asking me to spy again?'
'Listen,' he started, 'Our freedom-'
I did not let him continue. 'You are blind. They don't want us free. They just want liberty for themselves. ~ Laurie Halse Anderson

Modern poets add a lot of water to their ink. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

When they coughed, they coughed like people accustomed to be forgotten on doorsteps and in draughty passages, waiting for answers to letters in faded ink ... ~ Charles Dickens

The wind swept the snow aside, ever faster and thicker, as if it were trying to catch up with something, and Yurii Andreievich stared ahead of him out of the window, as if he were not looking at the snow but were still reading Tonia's letter and as if what flickered past him were not small dry snow crystals but the spaces between the small black letters, white, white, endless, endless. ~ Boris Pasternak

Has anyone ... any distinct notion of what poets of a stronger age understood by the word inspiration? ... There is an ecstasy such that the immese strain of it is sometimes relaxed by a flood of tears, along with which one's steps either rush or involuntarily lag, alternately. There is the feeling that one is completely out of hand, with the very distinct consciousness of an endless number of fine thrills and quiverings to the very toes ... Everything happens quite involuntarily, as if in a tempestuous outburst of freedom, of absoluteness, of power and divinity. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

The Bible is the truest utterance that ever came by alphabetic letters from the soul of man, through which, as through a window divinely opened, all men can look into the stillness of eternity, and discern in glimpses their far-distant, long-forgotten home. ~ Thomas Carlyle

Ludwig's enormous, awe-inspiring genius, his productivity, his prescient modernism were all contained in music. Beside that, the letters to the Immortal Beloved looked no more impressive to her than bathroom stall graffiti: L.V.B. luvs his I.B. Wishes she wuz here. ~ Magnus Flyte

Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtle; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend. ~ Francis Bacon

A poet's object is not to tell what actually happened but what could or would happen either probably or inevitably ... For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts. ~ Aristotle.

the next time you're typing in drunken letters into your computer, know that you're actually helping digitize the world's libraries. ~ Peter H. Diamandis

Letters from the heart are thesis's for the soul. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

Shelley and Keats were the last English poets who were at all up to date in their chemical knowledge. ~ John B. S. Haldane