Poets 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

Joyce's writing in Dubliners contains some of the most unshowily beautiful sentences in the English language. I learned from him that if you write a good, clean line of English, you can get under a reader's skin. The reader won't even know why, but there you are. Didion, Berger, the many others I mentioned above, and many, many poets I haven't mentioned. Writers of this calibre are the moving targets the rest of us are always chasing. ~ Teju Cole

Eugenio Montale - born in Genoa in 1896, died in Milan, 1981 - is one of the twentieth-century Europeans who has spoken most meaningfully to American and British poets. ~ Jonathan Galassi

He was very interested in everything that lay to the North because no one ever went that way and he was never allowed to go there himself. When he was sitting out of doors mending the nets, and all alone, he would often look eagerly to the North. One could see nothing but a grassy slope running up to a level ridge and beyond that the sky with perhaps a few birds in it.

Sometimes if Arsheesh was there Shasta would say, 'O my Father, what is there beyond that hill?' And then if the fisherman was in a bad temper he would box Shasta's ears and tell him to attend to his work. Or if he was in a peaceable mood he would say, "O my son, do not allow your mind to be distracted by idle questions. For one of the poets has said, 'Application to business is the root of prosperity, but those who ask questions that do not concern them are steering the ship of folly towards the rock of indigence'.

Shasta thought that beyond the hill there must be some delightful secret which his father wished to hide from him. In reality, however, the fisherman talked like this because he didn't know what lay to the North. Neither did he care. He had a very practical mind. ~ C.S. Lewis

Think it's so unfair when people think that you're not a "real artist" unless you're getting paid for it ... I personally know so many poets that work a 9 to 5 in a cubicle and come home and write poetry. Their poetry is just as powerful and moving as anything that I've ever written, if not more. ~ Sarah Kay

It isn't possible to love and part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal. ~ E. M. Forster

You had an image of life inside you, a belief or an ideal, that you were ready to do good deeds, to suffer, and to sacrifice – and by degrees you noticed that the world had no need of your good deeds, or sacrifices, and such like; that life was not an heroic tale, with roles for heroes, and such like, but a comfortable bourgeois parlour, where one is perfectly satisfied with eating and drinking, coffee and knitted stockings, tarot readings and music on the radio. And he who wants otherwise and has the heroic and the beautiful inside him, the veneration of great poets or the adoration of saints inside him, he is a fool and a knight errant, a latter day Don Quixote? ~ Hermann Hesse

Our hospital was famous and housed many great poets and singers. Did the hospital specialize in poets and singers or was it that poets and singers specialized in madness? ~ Susanna Kaysen

Metaphor impinges on everything, allowing us - poets and non-poets alike - to experience and think about the world in fluid, unusual ways. ~ James Geary

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

Unforgettable
Poets should not be loyal to poets,
but to poems.
Even less enamored of the poem
than of the line.
Pledge their fealty not as much to a line
as to its original image,
For it is that indelible image
makes the line,
which makes poem,
which makes the poet
unforgettable. ~ Beryl Dov

Poets, we know, are terribly sensitive people, and in my observation one of the things they are most sensitive about is money. ~ Robert Penn Warren

I have a story to tell. It is a tale for those who can still see, can still question.

A story of where you are and how you got here. A tale foretold by your poets and prophets through the ages. Read their words, their thoughts, so that you may understand. ~ W.H. Wisecarver

I don't see my artist friends as any more neurotic or addiction-prone than the others. The roommates I have had who were into triathlons or environmentalism were just as crazy as the poets, just as prone to tears over gardening or air conditioners, just as ready to kite a cheque or binge on cookie dough. ~ Russell Smith

I detest farewells and feel that parting, as some foreign poets say, is "dying a little." I do not like to meet death, however easy it may be, nor do I like to be aware of it, to await it, or to fear it. I prefer for it to take me by complete surprise, that it should snatch me away suddenly, that I should exit life as inadvertently as I entered it. ~ Taha Hussein

You ask me to write you a poem,
I pen you an empty ocean,
You run away.
You ask me who I am,
I paint you a breaking sky,
You weep in the rain. ~ Jenim Dibie

I think of published poets that you could know of...I think [Rainer Maria Rilke] probably has the most great published poems of any poet [...] but Rilke himself was an asshole. If you look at his biography, he was probably misogynist; he was a liar, a cheat; he was a terrible father; he was selfish; he put people down; he had no consideration for anyone [...] yet, he transcends that in his greatest poems. There's that ineffable, spiritual quality - that he himself couldn't reach! But somewhere underneath that reptilian exterior, that asshole exterior of Rainer Maria Rilke, there was some good that came through – like these little sunbursts coming through clouds – that had that moment. And he'd write the Duino Elegies, he'd write the New Poems, and somewhere, that came through.
And that's an amazing thing: you can have a lot of great people who are great individuals, who are loving and caring – and they can't do that. And that's not to say that their lives are meaningless, but they will never be able to affect anyone past the propinquity of their existence. They are never going to be able to affect someone in China; they are never going to be able to affect someone in 2132 the way Rilke can.
And that specialness needs to be acknowledged; that specialness needs to be upheld; it needs to be rewarded, and people need to say, 'Goddamn – that's a good thing! It's a good thing that people make art! ~ Dan Schneider

Native Soil

There's
Nobody simpler than us, or with
more pride, or fewer tears.
(1922)

Our hearts don't wear it as an amulet,
it doesn't sob beneath the poet's hand,
nor irritate the wounds we can't forget
in our bitter sleep. It's not the Promised Land.
Our souls don't calculate its worth
as a commodity to be sold and bought;
sick, and poor, and silent on this earth,
often we don't give it a thought.
Yes, for us it's the dirt on our galoshes,
yes, for us it's the grit between our teeth.
Dust, and we grind and crumble and crush it,
the gentle and unimplicated earth.
But we'll lie in it, become its weeds and flowers,
so unembarrassedly we call it - ours. ~ Anna Akhmatova

Some poets marry a language; some have affairs with it; some treat it as a parent, some as a child, some as an equal, or as a friend. ~ Stephen Burt

Some of my favorite poets had a tremendous sense of whimsy, so it's a writing style I guess I admire. ~ Jewel

I have never reached certain levels of fame, like Lindsay Lohan did, or even Brittany Murphy. My career has always been this sort of even-keeled, steady existence. I was also raised by poets, and I've been doing poetry as long as I've been acting. ~ Amber Tamblyn

Poets, when they write of love, give themselves and everyone else away! ~ Phyllis Bottome

I was able to read poets that were - allowed me to be humorous without being silly. ~ Billy Collins

Poets often have a conscious awareness that they are struggling with the daimonic, and that the issue is their working something through from the depths which push the self to a new plane. ~ Rollo May

Love doesn't make you a poet; it makes you poetry. ~ Yarro Rai

Whereever a poet is born enduring
depends on the frailest of chances:
Who listened to your murmuring
over your little rubbish who let you be
who gave you the books
who let you know you were not
alone ~ Adrienne Rich

Brilliant. [Lasdun] seems to me certainly among the most gifted, vivid, and deft poets now writing in English, and far better than many who are more famous. His capacities are solidly established; his promise is nearly infinite. ~ Anthony Hecht

Novelists invent characters; poets invent themselves. ~ Marty Rubin

American poets celebrate their bodies, very specifically, as Whitman did. ~ Diane Wakoski

Reviewers are usually people who would have been, poets, historians, biographer, if they could. They have tried their talents at one thing or another and have failed; therefore they turn critic. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

In the end, time is the best ally of poets. It clarifies their works and makes them accessible to an ever widening circle of readers. ~ Mieczyslaw Jastrun

A versifier passes through the sound; sounds go through a poet. ~ Dejan Stojanovic

Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar. ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

The poets who have written the best poems about war seem to be the poets whose countries have experienced an invasion or vicious dictatorships. ~ Billy Collins

Poets are sitting in my kitchen.
Why do these poets lie?
Why do children get children and
Did you hear what it said? ~ Anne Sexton

The birds, the poets of the animal creation - what though they never get beyond the lyrical! - awoke to utter their own joy, and awake like joy in others of God's children. ~ George MacDonald

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

Whatever you get out of poetry - take it. take it. take it.
Words are better off felt than understood. ~ Sanober Khan

When I began writing, I didn't read any other children's poets ... I didn't want to be influenced until I'd found my own voice. Now I read them all. ~ Jack Prelutsky

The people of the heart - the painters, the poets, the musicians, the dancers, the actors - are all irrational. They create great beauty, they are great lovers, but they are absolutely unfit in a society that is arranged by the head. Your artists are thought by your society to be almost outcast, a little bit crazy, an insane type of people. Nobody wants his or her children to become musicians or painters or dancers. Everybody wants them to be doctors, engineers, scientists, because those professions pay. Painting, poetry, dance, are dangerous, risky - you may end up just a beggar on the street, playing on your flute. ~ Osho

The fortitude of a Christian consists in patience, not in enterprises which the poets call heroic, and which are commonly the effects of interest, pride and worldly honor. ~ John Dryden

You simply do not understand the human condition," said the robot.

Hah! Do you think you do, you conceited hunk of animated tin?"

Yes, I believe so, thanks ot my study of the authors, poets, and critics who devote their lives to the exploration and description of Man. Your Miss Forelle is a noble soul. Ever since I looked upon my first copy of that exquisitely sensitive literary quarterly she edits, I have failed to understand what she sees in you. To be sure," IZK-99 mused, "the relationship is not unlike that between the nun and the Diesel engine in Regret for Two Doves, but still… At any rate, if Miss Forelle has finally told you to go soak your censored head in expurgated wastes and then put the unprintable thing in an improbable place, I for one heartily approve.

Tunny, who was no mamma's boy - he had worked his way through college as a whale herder and bossed construction gangs on Mars - was so appalled by the robot's language that he could only whisper, "She did not. She said nothing of the sort."

I did not mean it literally," IZK-99 explained. "I was only quoting the renunciation scene in Gently Come Twilight. By Stichling, you know - almost as sensitive a writer as Brochet. ~ Poul Anderson

There have been many most excellent poets that have never versified, and now swarm many versifiers that need never answer to the name of poets. ~ Philip Sidney

Very few people are accepted as creative: A few painters, a few poets - one in a million. This is foolish! Every human being is a born creator. Watch children and you will see: all children are creative. By and by, we destroy their creativity. ~ Rajneesh

But that so many scholars are barbarians does not much matter so long as a few of them are ready to help with their specialized knowledge the few independent thinkers, that is to say the poets, who try to to keep civilization alive. ~ Robert Graves

I don't like the word 'poetry,' and I don't like poetry readings, and I usually don't like poets. I would much prefer describing myself and what I do as: I'm kind of a curator, and I'm kind of a night-owl reporter. ~ Tom Waits

This night shalt thou know the favour of the Gods, and behold on Parnassus those dreams which the Gods have through ages sent to earth to show that they are not dead. For poets are the dreams of Gods, and in each and every age someone hath sung unknowingly the message and the promise from the lotosgardens beyond the sunset. ~ H.P. Lovecraft

A township where one primitive forest waves above, while another primitive forest rots below, - such a town is fitted to raise not only corn and potatoes, but poets and philosophers for the coming ages. In such a soil grew Homer and Confucius and the rest, and out of such a wilderness comes the Reformer eating locusts and wild honey. ~ Henry David Thoreau

I think she must have lived where all the sad poets live, in that secret place where everything hurts all the time. ~ Ross Thomas

A local butcher offered me money to put in my next book a portrayal of a customer he didn't like that would make him ashamed to show his face in the town. It was like the tradition of the Gaelic poets, who were paid money to write in derision about people. ~ John McGahern

It is discovered an extraordinary similarity between Nietzsche and the Hindu-Aryan Rishi, visionary poets of the Vedas.

They also thought the ideas from outside to inside: they 'appeared' to them. Rishi means 'he who sees'. See an Idea, express it, or try to express it. The job of the Rishis has been fulfilled for millennia and the vision of the Vedas was revised, elaborated, in subsequent visions, in scholastics, in doctrinal buildings and sophisticated verifications, through centuries.

In any case, he, who preached not to subtract anything that life offers as Will of Power, as possession, increasing its power, lived chaste, like a yoga, always looking for the highest tensions of the soul, climbing always, more and more lonely, to be able to open up to that style of thinking, where the Ideas could possess him as the most authentic expression of life, as his 'pulse', hitting him in the center of the personal being, or of the existence there accumulated, and that he called, long before Jung and any other psychologist, the Self, to differentiate it from the conscious and limited self, from the rational self.

Let's clarify, then. What Nietzsche called thinking is something else, Nietzsche did not think with his head (because 'synchronistically' hurt) but with the Self, with all of life and, especially, 'with the feet'. 'I think with my feet,' he said, 'because I think walking, climbing. ~ Miguel Serrano

It may well be on such a night of clouds and cruel colors that there is brought forth upon the earth such a portent as a respectable poet. You say you are a poet of law; I say you are a contradiction in terms. I only wonder there were not comets and earthquakes on the night you appeared in this garden. ~ G.K. Chesterton

I believe in being a poet in all moments of life. Being a poet means being human. I know some poets whose daily behavior has nothing to do with their poetry. In other words, they are only poets when they write poetry. Then it is finished and they turn into greedy, indulgent, oppressive, shortsighted, miserable, and envious people. Well, I cannot believe their poems ~ Forugh Farrokhzad

I guess what inspires me most is the desire to draw out feelings that feel best expressed on the written page by really good authors, and I'm not a really good author. I feel like my job as a filmmaker is to eff the ineffable, to take feelings that only poets could describe with words and try to project them on the screen for viewers to feel. I don't think I've succeeded once but in the act of trying I've come up with all these other results which sometimes intrigue me. ~ Guy Maddin

But then, poets are almost always wrong about facts. That's because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth: which is why the truth they speak is so true that even those who hate poets by simple natural instinct are exalted and terrified by it.
No: that's wrong. It's because you dont dare to hope, you are afraid to hope. Not afraid of the extent of hope of which you are capable, but that you - the frail web of bone and flesh snaring that fragile temeritous boundless aspirant sleepless with dream and hope - cannot match it; as Ratliff would say, Knowing always you wont never be man enough to do the harm and damage you would do if you were just man enough. - and, he might add, or maybe I do it for him, thank God for it. Ay, thank God for it or thank anything else for it that will give you any peace after it's too late; peace in which to coddle that frail web and its unsleeping ensnared anguish both on your knee and whisper to it: There, there, it's all right; I know you are brave. ~ William Faulkner

I think there's probably always been visions and voices, and these were variously ascribed to the divine or demonic or the muses. I think many poets still feel they depend on an inner voice, or a voice which tells them what to do. ~ Oliver Sacks

We Poets in our youth begin in gladness; But thereof come in the end despondency and madness. ~ William Wordsworth

I wanted to write the most beautiful poem but that is impossible; the world has written its own. ~ Dejan Stojanovic

The inspiration of a single book has made preachers, poets, philosophers, authors, and statesmen. On the other hand, the demoralization of a single book has sometimes made infidels, profligates, and criminals. ~ Orison Swett Marden

Isn't it interesting that all of the biblical prophets and psalmists were poets? ~ Eugene H. Peterson

for all I can really do is
stand here
in September's rain
savoring…
soaking it all in
slipping..
and simply
holding on to poetry
for dear life. ~ Sanober Khan

I nipped into this sanctuary late this afternoon and soon heard the dying footfalls of closing time. From now on, my only effort will be to dodge the night watchman. Poets can dodge. ~ John Collier

Ocean waters..oceans deep..Serious poets never sleep. ~ Sally-Ann Roberts

Poets and kings are but the clerks of Time,
Tiering the same dull webs of discontent,
Clipping the same sad alnage of the years. ~ Edwin Arlington Robinson

N artistic atmosphere does not create artists a literary atmosphere does not create literators; poets and painters spring up where there was never a verse made or a picture seen. This suggests that God is no more idle now than He was at the beginning, but that He is still and forever shaping the human chaos into the instruments and means of beauty. ~ William Dean Howells

Like hungry guests, a sitting audience looks / Plays are like suppers; poets are the cooks / The founder's you; the table is this place / The carvers we; the prologue is the grace / Each act a course, each scene, a different dish. ~ George Farquhar

Love is not fashionable anymore; the poets have killed it. ~ Oscar Wilde

The poem is an act beyond paraphrase because what is being said is always inseparable from the way it is being said. Osip Mandelstam suggested that if a poem can be paraphrased, then the sheets haven't been rumpled, poetry hasn't spent the night. The words are an (erotic) visitation, a means to an end, but also an end in and of themselves. The poets is first of all a language worker. A maker. A shaper of language. ~ Edward Hirsch

They say poets write mostly for themselves; if anyone else likes it, well and good, if not, it doesn't matter; certainly, not to me. ~ Tom Glazer

Those for whom the world is not enough: saints, conquerors, poets, and all lovers of books. ~ Joseph Joubert

Everyone rushes wherever his instincts impel him, the populace swarms like insects over a corpse, poets pass by without having the time to sculpt their thoughts, hardly have they scribbled their ideas down on sheets of paper than the sheets are blown away; everything glitters and everything resounds in this masquerade, beneath its ephemeral royalties and its cardboard scepters, gold flows, wine cascades, cold debauchery lifts her skirts and jigs around…horror! horror! and then there hangs over it all a veil that each one grabs part of to hide himself the best he can. Derision! Horror – horror! ~ Gustave Flaubert

Looking back on my life, I'd say I am grateful to my two sons for having brought me up. It could not have been easy - for them or for their father. For me it was a "Poetry Workshop," a way of doing poetry by another means (in no sense a continuation of Iowa) - as well as the sort of upbringing I never got from my mother.

As luck would have it, I had a poet, a classical poet, for a mother. She didn't write free verse; she wrote poetry until the last years of her life in the classical Chinese style. So a lot of work was done for me - when you imbibe Tang and Sung poets with a mother who chanted verses on the balcony in the moonlight. ~ Wong May

Darkness is the womb from which a poet is born. ~ Ged Thompson Liverpool Poet

God is a cloud from which rain fell. ~ Dejan Stojanovic

Sometimes the greatest love is not found in the dramatic scenes that poets and writers immortalize. Often, the greatest manifestations of love are the simple acts of kindness and caring we extend to those we meet along the path of life. ~ Joseph B. Wirthlin

We like to admit to only that which already glows, although it is nobler to support brightness before it glows, not afterwards. ~ Dejan Stojanovic

He utilizes
form for a striking lecture;
young poets shiver

inexperience,
but thaw over their own work,
fertilize magic. ~ Kristen Henderson

I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death. ~ John Keats

Universities are filled with poets and novelists conducting demure and careful lives in imitation of Eliot and Forster and those others who (through what seems to be have been discretion) made it. ~ Gore Vidal

Poets create a beautiful blue sky where you can fly with wings of imagination and find yourself again and again. ~ Debasish Mridha

I actually chafe at describing myself as masculine. For one thing, masculinity itself is such an expansive territory, encompassing boundaries of nationality, race, and class. Most importantly, individuals blaze their own trails across this landscape. And it's hard for me to label the intricate matrix of my gender as simply masculine.

To me, branding individual self-expression as simply feminine or masculine is like asking poets: Do you write in English or Spanish? The question leaves out the possibilities that the poetry is woven in Cantonese or Ladino, Swahili or Arabic. The question deals only with the system of language that the poet has been taught. It ignores the words each writer hauls up, hand over hand, from a common well. The music words make when finding themselves next to each other for the first time. The silences echoing in the space between ideas. The powerful winds of passion and belief that move the poet to write. ~ Leslie Feinberg

Warriors are poets and poems and all the loveliness here in the worlds. ~ Amiri Baraka

It is quite true, as some poets said, that the God who created man must have had a sinister sense of humor, creating him a reasonable being, yet forcing him to take this ridiculous posture, and driving him with blind craving for this ridiculous performance. ~ D.H. Lawrence

With "poets dead and gone" as Keats says in "Mermaid Tavern" they are alive and talking to us and us to them. ~ Gregory Orr

SOME YEARS, like some poets,and politicians and some lovely women, are singled out for fame far beyond the common lot, and 1929 was clearly such a year. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

In general, I would think that at present prose writers are much in advance of the poets. In the old days, I read more poetry than prose, but now it is in prose where you find things being put together well, where there is great ambition, and equal talent. Poets have gotten so careless, it is a disgrace. You can't pick up a page. All the words slide off. ~ William H Gass

The hills
like poets put on
purple thought against
the
magnificent clamor of
day
tortured
in gold ~ E. E. Cummings

We know there are poets who are chosen: by what or whom, we no more know than what lies beyond our final breath, or what caused a certain action which resulted in the fulfillment or the desecration and collapse of what we most cared for in life. ~ Franz Wright

The three states of the caterpillar, larva, and butterfly have, since the time of the Greek poets, been applied to typify the human being,
its terrestrial form, apparent death, and ultimate celestial destination. ~ Humphry Davy

Whether if you're a beginner poet or an experienced poet, poets just as other writers would like to have more readers enjoy their work. Whether if you're a poet laureate or novice, or if you're written over 1,000 poems, anytime a poet writes a poem its like their first one, beautiful in its inherent beauty. ~ Reynaldo Casison

Poets can't resist the dramatic pull of their lives and so inevitably write autobiographical verse. ~ John Barton

The scientist and engineers who are building the future need the poets to make sense of it. ~ Jason Silva

The whole world goes on and on about love. Poets spend their lives writing about it. Everyone thinks it's the most wonderful thing. But, when you mention two guys in love, they forget all that and freak out. ~ Mark A. Roeder

Once, I was a poet, and, like all poets, I spent too long in the Kingdom of Dreams. ~ Neil Gaiman

Fiction writers are fully ten times more likely to be bipolar than the general population, and poets are an amazing forty times more likely to struggle with the disorder. Based on statistics like these, psychologist Daniel Nettle writes, "It is hard to avoid the conclusion that most of the canon of Western culture was produced by people with a touch of madness." Essayist Brooke Allen does Nettle one better: "The Western literary tradition, it seems, has been dominated by a sorry collection of alcoholics, compulsive gamblers, manic-depressives, sexual predators, and various unfortunate combinations of two, three, or even all of the above. ~ Jonathan Gottschall

The poet's nature is all searching, creator and nourisher of desire; the poet is like the heart in a people's breast, a people without a poet is a mere heap of clay. If the purpose of poetry is the fashioning of men, poetry is likewise the heir of prophecy. ~ Muhammad Iqbal

let your love cover me like skin.
i want the whole world to see. ~ AVA.

CEO Vanessa Place, conceptual artist, writer, and attorney, cites the company's motto as its mantra: We are what we sell, we sell what we are - -It's not the point, it's the platform. With her international team of dedicated professional poets and artists, each of whom brings a singular aesthetic perspective to the collective corporate venture, Place makes it the company's number one priority to fully serve the higher-culture customer. Your desires are our needs.

To contact us, visit CONTACT. ~ Vanessa Place

Seize the day. Because, believe it or not, each and every one of us in this room is one day going to stop breathing, turn cold, and die. ~ Robin Williams

Not everyone who drinks is a poet. Some of us drink because we're not poets. ~ Dudley Moore