Teenage Poetry Quotes

My poetry had the same functional origin and the same formal configuration as teenage acne. ~ Umberto Eco

Madman drummers, bummers, Indians in the summer with a teenage diplomat. In the dumps with the mumps as the adolescent pumps his way into his hat. ~ Bruce Springsteen

A tree
doesn't know it's a tree.
It doesn't know how pretty its flowers are,
or how beautiful they smell,
or how soft and sweet its fruit is,
It can't feel how warm I am with my arms around it.
It can't hear me when I tell it these things.
It doesn't know anything.
I'm glad you're not a tree. ~ Craig Silvey

Italian is the language of song. German is good for philosophy and English for poetry. French is best at precision; it has a rigour to it. ~ Maurice Druon

Contrasts
The windows of my poetry are wide open on the boulevards and in the shop windows
Shine
The precious stones of light
Listen to the violins of the limousines and the xylophones of the linotypes
The sketcher washes with the hand-towel of the sky
All is color spots
And the hats of the women passing by are comets in the conflagration of the evening
Unity
There's no more unity
All the clocks now read midnight after being set back ten minutes
There's no more time.
There's no more money.
In the Chamber
They are spoiling the marvelous elements of raw material
("Contrasts") ~ Blaise Cendrars

Sweet to me your voice, said Caolcrodha Mac Morna, brother to sweet-worded sweet-toothed Goll from Sliabh Riabhach and Brosnacha Bladhma, relate then the attributes that are to Finn's people.

[...]

I will relate, said Finn. Till a man has accomplished twelve books of poetry, the same is not taken for want of poetry but is forced away. No man is taken till a black hole is hollowed in the world to the depth of his two oxters and he put into it to gaze from it with his lonely head and nothing to him but his shield and a stick of hazel. Then must nine warriors fly their spears at him, one with the other and together. If he be spear-holed past his shield, or spear-killed, he is not taken for want of shield-skill. No man is taken till he is run by warriors through the woods of Erin with his hair bunched-loose about him for bough-tangle and briar-twitch. Should branches disturb his hair or pull it forth like sheep-wool on a hawthorn, he is not taken but is caught and gashed. Weapon-quivering hand or twig-crackling foot at full run, neither is taken. Neck-high sticks he must pass by vaulting, knee-high sticks by stooping. With the eyelids to him stitched to the fringe of his eye-bags, he must be run by Finn's people through the bogs and the marsh-swamps of Erin with two odorous prickle-backed hogs ham-tied and asleep in the seat of his hempen drawers. If he sink beneath a peat-swamp or lose a hog, he is not accepted of Finn's people. For five days he must sit on ~ Flann O'Brien

My restless heart
Is now trying to find you
In all the places we went

When I kept you so near to me
Why did you choose to go far ~ Jyoti Patel

It always felt as though there were a shaken beehive living in my chest. I could never rest. ~ Stacy Morris

Poetry increases the feeling for reality. ~ Wallace Stevens

The beautiful you is not the color of your skin

Or the texture of your hair.

The beautiful you is not how tall or short you are

The beautiful you is not rather you're skinny or overweight by society standards

The beautiful you is not the degrees you have obtain

Or the size of your bank accounts.

The beautiful you, has nothing to do with where you're from, or religious beliefs

Nor the car you drive or the house you live in.

The beautiful you is not the price tag of what you wear

The beautiful you has nothing do with how eloquent you speak

The beautiful you is your kindness and compassion toward others

The beautiful you is your tolerance and patience

The beautiful you is your ability to love and forgive

The beautiful you don't rush to judge what you don't understand

The beautiful you is always seeking to evolve into its higher self

That is the beautiful you and that is what the world needs

The beautiful you is what defines our Humanity

The Beautiful you, Be that Always! ~ Micheline Jean Louis

The ocean-blue bowl won't
refuse to bruise, won't hold it back
from the gaping earth-wounds.
There will still come
water, chill wind and happy
goosebumps,
and in the utmost corners of oaks,
leaves laughing. ~ Bryana Johnson

Of all the poetry written in our generation, Frost's is most likely to stand the test of time ~ Lewis Gannett

Be near me now,
My tormenter, my love, be near me -
At this hour when night comes down,
When, having drunk from the gash of sunset, darkness comes
With the balm of musk in its hands, its diamond lancets,
When it comes with cries of lamentation,
with laughter with songs;
Its blue-gray anklets of pain clinking with every step.
At this hour when hearts, deep in their hiding places,
Have begun to hope once more, when they start their vigil
For hands still enfolded in sleeves;
When wine being poured makes the sound
of inconsolable children
who, though you try with all your heart,
cannot be soothed.
When whatever you want to do cannot be done,
When nothing is of any use;
- At this hour when night comes down,
When night comes, dragging its long face,
dressed in mourning,
Be with me,
My tormenter, my love, be near me. ~ Faiz Ahmad Faiz

My life has had a lot of fits and starts: before I studied literature at all I was a musician, and began undergrad as a conservatory student. I started studying literature in my third year of college, when I took a poetry course with James Longenbach that was pretty extraordinary. It changed my life. ~ Garth Greenwell

These vignettes I sketch for you - what are they? watercolors ..yes and dreams blurred with tears ... ~ John Geddes

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 is the most intimate of all writing. I want to speak first from me to myself and then from me to you. ~ Ellen Bass

Blessed are you who circled desire with a blade, and the garden with fiery swords, and heaven and earth with a word. ~ Leonard Cohen

When we study Shakespeare on the page, for academic purposes, we may require all kinds of help. Generally, we read him in modern spelling and with modern punctuation, and with notes. But any poetry that is performed - from song lyric to tragic speech - must make its point, as it were, without reference back. ~ James Fenton

When a man's life becomes poetry, becomes a song, becomes a work of art, a creativity, he has become a sannyasin. Whether he knows it or not, it does not matter. The word 'sannyas' does not matter; what matters is the content. ~ Rajneesh

Poetry is the breath of beauty. ~ Leigh Hunt

An individual's torments only have meaning within his or her personal experience. Faced with the collective we are as naked and helpless as the day we were born. Our individual development depends on realizing that others cannot understand our experience. Sometimes the obstacles we meet tempt us to place our destiny in the hands of another. But we cannot live by proxy, we must take everything on our own shoulders. Then we know we are alone. We must allow this sensation to fill our being and live like abandoned children because only thus is our life in our own hands. From time to time a mirage will surface of some way of life that will free us from the feeling of abandonment; but a mirage is exactly what it will remain.

We can of course live solely within the collective, with the illusion of speaking a common language and of not being alone, but this deception can cost our lives. If we act according to the general rule, we are following a code that is not our own. Everyone must find his or her own tune, accepting the resulting abandonment by those who continue singing in concert. Great artists create modes of expression that are uniquely their own: they enter so deeply into their sense of life that preexisting modes no longer serve their purpose. They invent new ways of writing poetry, of painting and making music. ~ Aldo Carotenuto

Poetry gives us courage and sets us straight with the world. Poems are great companions and friends. ~ David Whyte

Noone knows and noone sees
we lovers doing what we please
but people stop and point at these
ten milk bottles a-turning into cheese ~ Roger McGough

A poet who makes use of a worse word instead of a better, because the former fits the rhyme or the measure, though it weakens the sense, is like a jeweller, who cuts a diamond into a brilliant, and diminishes the weight to make it shine more. ~ Horace Walpole

Poetry is a deliberate attempt to make language suggestive and imprecise. ~ Kenneth Koch

He was a maniac utterly devoted to loving me, and I loved him in return, unapologetically. ~ Melody Lee

Prose is when all the lines except the last go on to the end. Poetry is when some of them fall short of it. ~ Jeremy Bentham

It is warmer here. Can you see the light? Trust it. It is safe. It has lived a long time. It has seen much more than you. You fight a demon that you once knew but the demon is already slain. And from the corner of your eye you will see the scattered, sacred fire reform again. Settle, settle. Peace, peace ~ Donna Goddard

Poetry survives because it haunts and it haunts because it is simultaneously utterly clear and deeply mysterious; because it cannot be entirely accounted for, it cannot be exhausted. ~ Louise Gluck

Happy Readings Y'all! ~ Lia Gerber

The Latin Church, which I constantly find myself admiring, despite its occasional astounding imbecilities, has always kept clearly before it the fact that religion is not a syllogism, but a poem. It is accused by Protestant dervishes of withholding the Bible from the people. To some extent this is true; to some extent the church is wise; again to the same extent it is prosperous.
...
Rome indeed has not only preserved the original poetry of Christianity; it has also made capital additions to that poetry -- for example, the poetry of the saints, of Mary, and of the liturgy itself. A solemn high mass is a thousand times as impressive, to a man with any genuine religious sense in him, as the most powerful sermon ever roared under the big top by Presbyterian auctioneer of God. In the face of such overwhelming beauty it is not necessary to belabor the faithful with logic; they are better convinced by letting them alone.

Preaching is not an essential part of the Latin ceremonial. It was very little employed in the early church, and I am convinced that good effects would flow from abandoning it today, or, at all events, reducing it to a few sentences, more or less formal. In the United States the Latin brethren have been seduced by the example of the Protestants, who commonly transform an act of worship into a puerile intellectual exercise; instead of approaching God in fear and wonder these Protestants settle back in their pews, cross their legs, and listen t ~ H.L. Mencken

Poets, on the face of it, have either got to be easier or to write their own notes; readers have either got to take more trouble over reading or cease to regard notes as pretentious and a sign of bad poetry ~ William Empson

It is not growing like a tree
In bulk, doth make Man better be;
Or standing long an oak, three hundred year,
To fall a log at last, dry, bald, and sere:
A lily of a day
Is fairer far in May
Although it fall and die that night;
It was the plant and flower of Light.
In small proportions we just beauties see;
And in short measures life may perfect be (Ben Jonson) ~ Aidan Chambers

And a lot of poetry is putting yourself back into the state of wonder that you have before things when you're a child. It's not only a joyous wonder, it's sometimes a grief stricken wonder. ~ Edward Hirsch

Modern evangelicals like to compare holy things to soft drinks, designer clothes, [and other products in] our modern consumerist culture. The problem with this is not ... the comparison to a created thing. The problem is that it is ... bad poetry. The Bible compares God to very mundane things, but does so with poetic wonder. God shall come down like rain upon the mown grass; as showers that water the earth. ~ Douglas Wilson

'Paradise Lost' was printed in an edition of no more than 1,500 copies and transformed the English language. Took a while. Wordsworth had new ideas about nature: Thoreau read Wordsworth, Muir read Thoreau, Teddy Roosevelt read Muir, and we got a lot of national parks. Took a century. What poetry gives us is an archive, the fullest existent archive of what human beings have thought and felt by the kind of artists who loved language in a way that allowed them to labor over how you make a music of words to render experience exactly and fully. ~ Robert Hass