Roman Poetry Quotes

Celebrate my heart, at ease or on fire, in my usual featherbrained way.

Horace, Roman Poet
Ode I-6, 23 BCE ~ Vivian Swift

I hate and I love. And if you ask me how, I do not know: I only feel it, and I am torn in two. ~ Catullus

These hands will never go away
they will scoop you up at anytime
anytime that you want to be loved ~ April Nichole

This is why tyrants of all stripes, infernal servants, have such deep-seated hatred for the nomads - this is why they persecute the Gypsies and the Jews, and why they force all free peoples to settle, assigning the addresses that serve as our sentences.
What they want is to create a frozen order, to falsify time's passage. They want for the days to repeat themselves, unchanging, they want to build a big machine where every creature will be forced to take its place and carry out false actions. Institutions and offices, stamps,newsletters, a hierarchy, and ranks, degrees, applications and rejections, passports, numbers, cards, elections results, sales and amassing points, collecting, exchanging some things for others.
What they want is to pin down the world with the aid of barcodes, labelling all things, letting it be known that everything is a commodity, that this is how much it will cost you. Let this new foreign language be illegible to humans, let it be read exclusively by automatons, machines. That way by night, in their great underground shops, they can organize reading of their own barcoded poetry.

Move. Get going. Blesses is he who leaves. ~ Olga Tokarczuk

Milton, Madam, was a genius that could cut a Colossus from a rock; but could not carve heads upon cherry-stones. ~ Samuel Johnson

Learning to program has no more to do with designing interactive software than learning to touch type has to do with writing poetry ~ Ted Nelson

it is the violent poetry of times, written int he bllod of the youth ~ Linda Mendoza

I grew up under Roman rule, although I didn't see many Romans until I was ten. The Romans mostly stayed in the fortress city of Sepphoris, an hour's walk north of Nazareth. That's when Joshua and I saw a Roman soldier murdered, but I'm getting ahead of myself. For now, assume that the soldier is safe and sound and happy wearing a broom on his head. ~ Christopher Moore

Out in this profane city,
sometimes sidewalks
seem the only cement that connects us,
pressed by the sacred strangers
we will never touch. ~ B.J. Ward

Poetry colors beings, objects, landscapes and sensations with a kind of new and particular light, which is in fact that of the poet's emotions. ~ Anne Hebert

I visited many places,
Some of them quite
Exotic and far away,
But I always returned to myself. ~ Dejan Stojanovic

Autumn
The passion
Is still flourishing in the branches
Yellow funny and daring red
The sun warms even in the days
Where the fog
Stubbornly in the morning
From a distance
A woodpecker knocks
Impermanence
Is the enemy of beauty ~ Kristian Goldmund Aumann

Poetry is important. No less than science, it seeks a hold upon reality, and the closeness of its approach is the test of its success. ~ Babette Deutsch

Though [Abraham Lincoln] never would travel to Europe, he went with Shakespeare's kings to Merry England; he went with Lord Byron poetry to Spain and Portugal. Literature allowed him to transcend his surroundings. ~ Doris Kearns Goodwin

What is your heart worth?
What about your time?
What holds your heart, holds your attention.
What holds your attention, holds your time.
What holds your time, holds your life.
And if it's possessions that holds these things,
It will demand it all. ~ Eric Overby

Here's how I used to think
you made a book:
a poet comes along,
mouth half open, inspired,
then suddenly the idiot bursts into song -
fancy that! ~ Vladimir Mayakovsky

I believe
in love at first sight
but I will always believe
that the people
we love
we have loved before.
Many, many, many times before
and when we stumble
through grace and circumstance
and that brilliant illusion of choice
to finally meet them again,
we feel it faster
each time through.
The one glance
that set life alight
is two sets of two eyes
staring through the layers
of lifetimes and stolen glances
and first kisses and hands held;
the brace against the weight
and unrelenting tide
of waiting.
I believe
in love at first sight
but am not burdened with the misconception
that it's a first sight
at all. ~ Tyler Knott Gregson

My definition of poetry (if I were forced to give one) would be this: words that have become deeds. ~ Robert Frost

The Roman jurisprudence has the longest known history of any set of human institutions. ~ Henry James Sumner Maine

With Shakespeare and poetry, a new world was born. New dreams, new desires, a self consciousness was born. I desired to know to know myself in terms of the new standards set by these books. ~ Peter Abrahams

Poetry is not simply a fashion of expression: it is the form of expression absolutely required by a certain class of ideas. Poetry, indeed, may be distinguished from Prose by the single circumstance, that it is the utterance of whatever in man cannot be perfectly uttered in any other than a rhythmical form: it is useless to say that the naked meaning is independent of the form: on the contrary, the form contributes essentially to the fullness of the meaning. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

You may be able
to fly to heaven with my love.
But for real, my love is only
a cheap wine.
Seriously,
Only God's love is the precious wine.
And She even
gives it to everyone.
For free! ~ Subhan Zein

A cool white, wintry light glazed the buildings on the highest hill: Will's memorial, the unsightly chimney from the hospital, the modernist cathedral in Clifton. The jumble of styles and eras lent the city the semblance of a medieval Roman town. Laura drove the long way round, up past the Clifton Suspension Bridge, strung like an a engineer's dream over a river sinking into the mud. Leigh Woods was on the far side, the trees dark, bereft of leaves, clawing at the sky. ~ Sanjida Kay

My heart beats more for a raw, average vulgar art, which doesn't live between sleepy fairy-tale moods and poetry but rather concedes a direct entrance to the fearful, commonplace, splendid and the average grotesque banality in life. ~ Max Beckmann

Cut quarrels out of literature, and you will have very little history or drama or fiction or epic poetry left. ~ Robert Staughton Lynd

I like to chant a couple of lines of poetry into the ozone layer every day or so, another caller says. ~ Carol Shields

Nothing is inanimate; what is the rest is our interpretation. ~ Dejan Stojanovic

you belong to me but I do not own you ~ Spoken Silence

If Erik existed and lived life in despair,
We wish him to know we are here and we care. ~ E.A. Bucchianeri

Books were everywhere in their large apartment. Histories, biographies, novels, studies on Quebec antiques, poetry. Placed in orderly bookcases. Just about every table had at least one book on it, and oftern several magazines. And the weekend newspapers were scattered on the coffee table in the living room, in front of the fireplace. If a visitor was the observant type, and made it further into the apartment to Gamache's study, he might see the story the books in there told. ~ Louise Penny

Lord Bacchus, can you hear me? Nod if you can hear me."
Bacchus dropped his hands and nodded.
"You have never killed a Druid all by yourself, and you never will. Only with hordes of Bacchants and Roman legionnaires and the aid of Minerva have you ever managed to slay a single one of us. Your lackeys may get me eventually, and I know that I will never be able to slay you, but admit to yourself now that you, alone, will never prove my equal. The earth obeys me, son, not some petty god of grape and goblet." I switched to English for a postscript, "So suck on that, bitch. ~ Kevin Hearne

Petre's commitment to Roman Catholicism combined with her openness to mental and moral subjectivism formed a rare alchemy among early twentieth-century Catholics. Her exposure to thinkers like Nietzsche did not strip her of her faith. She argued that despite Nietzsche's professed atheism, his life and thought offered much for Catholics to admire. His was a 'strenuous,' 'suffering,' 'unselfish' 'life militant' marked by 'purity, integrity, [and] utter unworldliness.' Despite being the sweetheart of libertine artists and writers, Nietzsche criticized the decadence and pessimism of modern aesthetics. Likewise, the goal of his celebration of free will and his critique of sin was not an orgiastic 'self-abandonment, but ... strong self-possession; a mastering of one's own life and conduct' and a recognition that true contrition is not legislated from without but cultivated from within a deep reverence for the 'mysterious laws of our being.' Petre insisted that in Nietzsche, Catholics could find a fellow seeker of moral strenuousness: 'There is to be here no dilettantism, but sheer hard work. ~ Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

Those who lead us to our sacred selves walk not before us, but beside. ~ Heather K. O'Hara

Boys don't like
smart girls
they like
push-around-in-a-cart
kinda girls
target-for-their-dart
kinda girls
meat-for-their-shark
kinda girls ~ Casey Renee Kiser

Every day I try to fight my own
brokenness. But once you are forgotten,
it's not so bad: a heart broken
joins another chorus. ~ Sally Wen Mao

The only gift is a portion of thyself ... the poet brings his poem; the shepherd his lamb ... ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Dear Life,

I have been living alone for the last four years. I am familiar with my loneliness. And sometimes I feel like a soldier who can survive without love or poetry too! I am used to leading this hard life!

Yours sincerely,
Mr. Writer ~ Avijeet Das

The poet doesn't invent. He listens. ~ Jean Cocteau

In fact a lot of them I think are absolute baloney. Those Charles Olsens and people like that. At first I was interested in seeing what they were up to, what they were doing, why they were doing it. They never moved me in the way that one is moved by true poetry. ~ Norman MacCaig

We are only allowed to live
due to some colossal misunderstanding. ~ Jeramy Dodds

Maybe some people are only ever meant to be missed. ~ Meg Flores

Nearly everybody in San Francisco writes poetry. Few San Franciscans would admit this, but most of them would rather like to have their productions accidentally discovered. ~ Stella Benson

Then, after picking up his papers, Pierre began: "A beautiful woman can be the downfall of a gentleman . . . but the uplift of a beggar! ~ Ted Anthony Roberts

There are men who can write poetry, and there are men who can read balance sheets. The men who can read balance sheets cannot write. ~ Henry R. Luce

It may be safely affirmed that there neither is, nor can be, any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition ... They both speak by and to the same organs; the bodies in which both of them are clothed may be said to be of the same substance, their affections are kindred, and almost identical, not necessarily differing even in degree; Poetry sheds no tears "such as Angels weep," but natural and human tears; she can boast of no celestial ichor that distinguishes her vital juices from those of prose; the same human blood circulates through the veins of them both. ~ William Wordsworth

How does a poet know when a poem is ended? Because it lies flat, taut; nothing can be added or subtracted. How does a woman know when a marriage is over? Because of the way her life suddenly shears off in just two directions: past and future. ~ Carol Shields

Poetry is a way of expressing your thoughts, feelings, and your emotions, it's how you go through life in your own special way of livin ~ Erie Morgan

I keep dying and hoping you notice me. But you're too busy living. ~ F.K. Preston

When it over, I want to say:all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was a bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular,and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.
from When the death comes ~ Mary Oliver

Chess has this in common with making poetry; that the desire for it comes upon the amateur in gusts. ~ A.A. Milne

That's what I want, that kind of recklessness where the poem is even ahead of you. It's like riding a horse that's a little too wild for you, so there's this tension between what you can do and what the horse decides it's going to do. ~ Li-Young Lee