Time Poetry Quotes

I read a little bit of nonfiction and a lot of poetry. I think of poetry as my shot of whiskey when I don't have time to savor a whole bottle of wine. ~ Alice McDermott

One night, I lay awake for hours, just terrified. When the dawn finally came up - the comfortable blue sky, the familiar world returning - I could think of no other way to express my relief than through poetry. I made a decision there and then that it was what I wanted to do. Every time I pulled a wishbone, it was what I asked for. ~ Alice Oswald

I don't look on poetry as closed works. I feel they're going on all the time in my head and I occasionally snip off a length. ~ John Ashbery

I think the first time I really heard poetry was in the schoolyard. Just the little limericks that kids say when they're jumping rope and playing games. I think that's the first time I heard rhyming words - I don't know if I'd call that the definitive poetry, but that's when I heard rhyming words said and not necessarily sung. ~ Jill Scott

Poetry always runs away from you - it's very difficult to grasp it, and every time you read it, depending on your conditions, you will have a different grasp of it. Whereas with a novel, once you have read it, you have grasped it. ~ Abbas Kiarostami

When I was young, I read everything I could lay my hands on, but the Scots in my storybooks spent their time fighting glorious battles, rowing across lochs, or escaping over moors of purple heather. Even those Scots were hard to find. For at school, we recited poetry according to the set texts the teachers taught us. ~ Theresa Breslin

Drink in the moon as though you might die of thirst. ~ Sanober Khan

As the sky prepares to settle its tired, aching feet
into the night's velvet slippers

I settle, into my armchair, soaking the teabag,
of my thoughts, into warm liquidy stars. ~ Sanober Khan

Most of my life is in the past.
There goes some more of it.

I taught my sheep how to fight lions
so I would have more time ~ Chad Sweeney

For me, movies and television are interesting because they are the dominant storytelling form of our time. My first love will always be fiction, and especially novels, but I'm a writer ... I write poetry and essays and criticism and I'd love to write a whole play, and sometimes I even write scripts. ~ Jess Walter

Poetry is not an esoteric art cultivated by dreamy young men in open collars and with wispy beards. Its finest masters have always been men and women of outstanding energy and great, though by no means common, sense. Poetry is the most economical way of saying certain things that cannot be said in any other way. At its most intense it expresses better than other forms of literature whatever is left of us when we are not involved in instinct-following, surviving, competing, or problem-solving. Its major property is not, as some suppose, beauty. It is power. It is the most powerful form of communication. It does the most work per syllable, operating on a vast field - that of our emotions. It gains its efficiency from the use of certain levers - rhythm, music, rhyme, metaphor, and many more - for which other forms of communication are less well adapted. Some poetry, especially modern poetry, is difficult. But just as our ears have accustomed themselves to difficult music, so our understanding, if we are willing to make an effort, can accustom itself to the most condensed and superficially strange verse. At one time poetry was as democratic an art as the novel is nowadays. It can be so again, if we are willing to make it so. ~ Clifton Fadiman

I write all the time - I write poetry, I love to write. ~ Colin Quinn

I liked to write from the time I was about 12 or 13. I loved to read. And since I only spoke to my brother, I would write down my thoughts. And I think I wrote some of the worst poetry west of the Rockies. But by the time I was in my 20s, I found myself writing little essays and more poetry - writing at writing. ~ Maya Angelou

I love to compare different time frames. Poetry can evoke the time of the subject. By a very careful choice of words you can evoke an era, completely throw the poem into a different time scale. ~ Robert Morgan

But for me, being an editor I've been an editor of all kinds of books being an editor of poetry has been the way in which I could give a crucial part of my time to what I love most. ~ Peter Davison

Poetry, for me, is the answer to, 'How does one stay sane when private lives are being ransacked by public events?' It's something that hangs over your head all the time. ~ Lisel Mueller

'Words and Music' on Radio 3 is always a treat. Actors read passages of poetry and prose interspersed with music, and nobody tells you what it is. Later you can look it up online, but at the time you can't cheat. ~ Claire Tomalin

You know, people speak in poetry all the time. They just don't realize it. ~ Sherman Alexie

No holy place existed without us then,
no woodland, no dance, no sound.
Beyond all hope, I prayed those timeless
days we spent might be made twice as long.
I prayed one word: I want.
Someone, I tell you, will remember us,
even in another time. ~ Sappho

The foremost watchman on the peak announces his news. It is the truest word ever spoken, and the phrase will be th fittest, most musical, and the unerring voice of the world for that time. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

A definition of poetry can only determine what poetry should be and not what poetry actually was and is; otherwise the most concise formula would be: Poetry is that which at some time and some place was thus named. ~ Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

When you think intensely and beautifully, something happens. That something is called poetry. If you think that way and speak at the same time, poetry gets in your mouth. If people hear you, it gets in their ears. If you think that way and write at the same time, then poetry gets written. But poetry exists in any case. The question is only: are you going to take part, and if so, how? ~ Robert Bringhurst

In my opinion, the most significant works of the twentieth century are those that rise beyond the conceptual tyranny of genre; they are, at the same time, poetry, criticism, narrative, drama, etc. ~ Juan Goytisolo

I guess we'll become an archeological find, funded by some alien at some distant time ~ P.J. Bayliss

I would like to spend more time with Spanish poetry. I know French better than Spanish, but Spanish was my first language, and my father spoke it to us. ~ Helen Vendler

Part of Eve's Discussion
It was like the moment when a bird decides not to eat from your hand,
and flies, just before it flies, the moment the rivers seem to still
and stop because a storm is coming, but there is no storm, as when
a hundred starlings lift and bank together before they wheel and drop,
very much like the moment, driving on bad ice, when it occurs to you
your car could spin, just before it slowly begins to spin, like
the moment just before you forgot what it was you were about to say,
it was like that, and after that, it was still like that, only
all the time. ~ Marie Howe

My obsession with time informs my poetry so completely it is hard for me to summarize it. We want time to pass, for new things to happen to us, we want to hold on to certain moments, we don't want our lives to end. ~ John Barton

When the rose's flash to the sunset
Reels to the wrack and the twist,
And the rose is a red bygone,
When the face I love is going
And the gate to the end shall clang,
And it's no use to beckon or say, "So long"
Maybe I'll tell you then
some other time. ~ Carl Sandburg

Women have burnt like beacons in all the works of all the poets from the beginning of time. ~ Virginia Woolf

Done with the whole dark
& the insect dirge
under blue lit lamps.
Done trying to remember

June, first stars & August
when I was Penelope
when I was Eurydice
when July was missing

& I was my own dull shade. ~ Emily Skaja

I'd always loved poetry and I'd always loved writing music and composing music, but I hadn't thought of putting the two together until around that time. ~ Bruce Cockburn

I blinked my eyes
and in an instant,
decades had passed. ~ John Mark Green

I realised I'd spent a lot of time in my poetry trying to find a way of talking about that whereof we cannot speak. ~ John Burnside

I think that the job of poetry, its political job, is to refresh the idea of justice, which is going dead in us all the time. ~ Robert Hass

One of my greatest joys is poetry. I read it almost every day, and I've even taken a stab at writing some of my own. A poem I wrote for my mother when she was dying really helped me get through that hard time. ~ Maria Shriver

I was kind of an outcast in school 'cause I always kept to myself and was writing poetry and then going on tour with my brother band all the time, so kids didn't know what to make of me. ~ Christina Perri

I read as much poetry as time allows and circumstance dictates: No heartache can pass without a little Dorothy Parker, no thunderstorm without W. H. Auden, no sleepless night without W. B. Yeats. ~ J. Courtney Sullivan

If I'm not around
I hope you'll remember me
and together we will hold on to our favorite song. ~ Sanober Khan

Listeners are kind of ambushed ... if a poem just happens to be said when they're listening to the radio. The listener doesn't have time to deploy what I call their 'poetry deflector shields' that were installed in high school - there's little time to resist the poem. ~ Billy Collins

Poetry takes place in time. It is a durational. Things take place in sequence. ~ Edward Hirsch

If your teachers suggest that your poems are sentimental, that is only half of it. Your poems probably need to be even more sentimental. Don't be less of a flower, but could you be more of a stone at the same time? ~ Mary Ruefle

Pray that the summer mornings are many when with such pleasure, with such joy you will enter ports seen for the first time ~ Constantinos P. Cavafis

My words will be my legacy, etched in heartfelt honesty upon the pages of time. ~ Callum McLaughlin

Poetry is often generations in advance of the thought of its time. ~ Louise Bogan

Fiction is supposed to be immersive and supposed to be entertaining and narrative, so structures have to be buried a little bit. If they come foregrounded too much, it stops being fiction and starts being poetry - something more concrete and out of time. ~ Eleanor Catton

Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly. ~ T. S. Eliot

Romance like a ghost escapes touching; it is always where you are not, not where you are. The interview or conversation was prose at the time, but it is poetry in the memory. ~ George William Curtis

If you can grasp those two truths - you are made in His image and dependent on Him - you will discover a great dignity and at the same time a profound humility. ~ Colin S. Smith

A new consciousness is developing which sees the earth as a single organism and recognizes that an organism at war with itself is doomed. We are one planet. One of the great revelations of the age of space exploration is the image of the earth finite and lonely, somehow vulnerable, bearing the entire human species through the oceans of space and time. ~ Carl Sagan

Are we goldfish in a bowl
doomed eternally
to swim around our little world and think it is the sea?
and that we are the masters? ~ Bernie Morris

Venusians have different values. They value love, communication, beauty, and relationships. They spend a lot of time supporting, helping, and nurturing one another. Their sense of self is defined through their feelings and the quality of their relationships. They experience fulfillment through sharing and relating. ~ John Gray

It is a foible of our human nature that when we have an extremely unpleasant experience, it gives us a peculiar satisfaction if it is "the biggest" of its disagreeable kind that has happened since the world began. During a heat wave, for instance, we are very pleased if the papers announce that it is "the highest temperature reached since the year 1881," and we feel a little resentment towards the year 1881 for having gone us one better. Or if our ears are frozen till all the skin peels off, it fills us with a certain happiness to learn that "it was the hardest frost recorded since 1786." It is just the same with wars. The war in progress is either the most righteous or the bloodiest, or the most successful, or the longest, since such and such a time; any superlative whatever always affords us the proud satisfaction of having been through something extraordinary and record-breaking. ~ Karel Capek

Drugs, sex, Satan, and power, Eve mused. A religious war? Hadn't humans fought and died for beliefs since the dawn of time? Animals fought for territory; people fought for territory as well. And for gain, for passion, for beliefs. For the hell of it. ~ J.D. Robb

The 'New York Honk,' as it was called, was the most fashionable accent an American male could have at that time, namely, the spring of 1963. One achieved it by forcing all words out through the nostrils rather than the mouth. It was at once virile ... and utterly affected. Nelson Rockefeller had a New York Honk. ~ Tom Wolfe

I do not hold God ransom to my success; whatever is his will is my way. I stand by moments; I do not stand by time. ~ Akshay Kumar

I can see why we need fellows who know how to light fires," Bluth said. "But I don't see why we need people to use fancy words."
"Shhhh," Shallan said. "Don't say that so loudly. If the lighteyes hear, they might stop wasting their time making up new words, and instead start interfering with the business of honest men. ~ Brandon Sanderson

After a time Ara had to do her chores, leaving me on the porch with a fresh infusion of tea to drink, her garden to look at, and her words to consider.
Not that I got very far. There were too many questions. Like: Where did those guards go? Azmus had overcome one, but I didn't remember having seen any more. Then there were the unlocked doors. The one to my cell could be explained away, but not the outside one. If there was a conspiracy, was Azmus behind it? Or someone else--and if so, who; and more importantly, to what end?
It was just possible that those dashing aristos had contrived my escape for a game, just as a cruel cat will play with a mouse before the kill. Their well-publicized bet could certainly account for that. The wager would also serve very nicely as a warning to ordinary people not to interfere with their prey, I thought narrowly.
Which meant that if I'd left any clue to my trail, I had better move on. Soon. ~ Sherwood Smith

As for thinking time versus writing time, well, that's up to you. But - and I wish it were otherwise - books don't get written by thinking about them, they get written by writing them. And that's when you make discoveries about what you're writing. That's when you get the happy accidents. ~ Neil Gaiman

I knew from the time I was a young girl that I was destined to be a writer. I'm incredibly stubborn. The more someone tells me I can't do something, the harder I work to prove them wrong. My father's nickname for me when I was growing up was 'Hardhead.' ~ Lori Wilde

This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy. ~ Douglas Adams

Start with something simple and small, then expand over time. If people call it a 'toy' you're definitely onto something. ~ Aaron Levie

Fogs are like dreams that feed the soul, and without their mysterious embrace, childhood, courtship, poetry and the composition of music become all the more difficult. ~ Michael Leunig

The hardest thing to accept about the passage of time is that the people who mattered most to us are all wrapped up in parenthesis ~ John Irving

I fell asleep at my desk many times. This was when working on events - virtually every one I've done in the last 5 years. I was not confronting the writing of speeches. In fact, I was not wanting to confront what I was doing at the time - being irresponsible ... I am now known for falling asleep. This has happened 50 times in the last 5 years and probably 20 times at my desk in the last 2 years. ~ Mike Rinder

If you cannot find time to pray, ask for forgiveness. Ask to be cleansed of the sin of having no time to pray ...
It could be that Satan is pushing you into too much work so that you cannot take time to pray. ~ Corrie Ten Boom

Lo didn't have a splendid time either. He drank something Captain America gave him. Turns out the Cap imposter wasn't too noble, having spiked his booze with roofies. Nerds can be vicious too. ~ Krista Ritchie

Everyone represses everything. Do you think any of these "normal" human beings really do exactly what they want to do all the time? 'Course not. It's just the same. We're middle-class and we're British. Repression is in our veins. ~ Matt Haig

In this world things are beautiful only because they are not quite seen, or not perfectly understood. Poetry is precious chiefly because it suggests more than it declares. ~ Anthony Trollope

As you are entered with the class of Nat. philosophy, give to it the hours of lecture, but devote all your other time to Mathematics, avoiding company as the bane of all progress. ~ Thomas Jefferson

Why does IPCA use them if they're evil?" he asked, confused.
"They aren't evil. They aren't even really immoral, per se. They're amoral. They don't operate on the same level that we do. For a faerie, the only thing that matters is what they want. That's their good. Anything else is superfluous. So like how they kidnap people, not a big deal - they want the person, they take him. Or killing someone. If you live forever, how much does one mortal life matter in the scheme of things? When you exist outside time, cutting off the forty years a person has left is a non-issue. They don't even notice. ~ Kiersten White

The key is that Jesus does want to speak to us-to you-today. In your own language, just as a friend would speak. We simply need to take the time to listen. ~ Wally Armstrong

I worry about exposing him to bands like Journey, the appreciation of which will surely bring him nothing but the opprobrium of his peers. Though he has often been resistant - children so seldom know what is good for them - I have taught him to appreciate all the groundbreaking musicmakers of our time - Big Country, Haircut 100, Loverboy - and he is lucky for it. His brain is my laboratory, my depository. Into it I can stuff the books I choose, the television shows, the movies, my opinion about elected officials, historical events, neighbors, passersby. He is my twenty-four-hour classroom, my captive audience, forced to ingest everything I deem worthwhile. He is a lucky, lucky boy! And no one can stop me. ~ Dave Eggers

But it's so bloody unfair"
Walt looked at me, and I realized he was smiling. "That's my line. I've been saying that for years. Sadie, I want to be here. The past two months I've felt like I'm actually living for the first time. And getting to know you ... " He cleared his throat. He was quite attractive when he got nervous. "I started worrying about smile things. My hair. My clothes. Whether I brushed my teeth. I mean, I'm dying , and I'm worrying about my teeth."
"You have a lovely teeth. ~ Rick Riordan

I sing and drink,
giving no thought to death;
with arms outspread
I fall upon the grass,
and if, in this wide world, I come to die,
then it's certain to be
from sheer joy that I live. ~ Yevgeny Yevtushenko

I call my style, "Poetry in Motion." So I'm working on a new art to make fighting even more beautiful. ~ Bobby Green

The time will come when human drones will be ostracized from society as nobodies, as thieves of honest men's efforts, thieves of the results of honest men's labor. The coming civilization will not tolerate these thieves of society, these lazy vagabonds who do nothing but steal the products of their labor and demoralize society by their vicious example. ~ Orison Swett Marden

Si todos los rios son dulces
de donde saca sal el mar?
If all rivers are sweet
where does the sea get its salt? ~ Pablo Neruda

I do like my hair being pulled from time to time, it's like a pair of reins, innit? ~ Katie Price

People working on bigger ideas on a more protracted timeline will be more on the stealth side. They aren't releasing new PR announcements every day. The bigger the secret and the likelier it is that you alone have it, the more time you have to execute. There may be far more people going after hard secrets than we think. ~ Peter Thiel

When the media worries about what Hillary's hair looks like or what my hair looks like, that's a real problem. We have millions of people who are struggling to keep their heads above water, who want to know what candidates can do to improve their lives, and the media will very often spend more time worrying about hair than the fact that we're the only major country on earth that doesn't guarantee health care to all people. ~ Bernie Sanders

Nothing in the fact that there was a first moment in time necessitates that an external something is required to bring the universe about at that moment. ~ Sean M. Carroll

One thing I discovered is that the book world is vast. It's easy to walk around the store - even the room with literature and poetry, where I work most often - and feel overwhelmed. ~ Kevin Sampsell

It's about the time I was riding my Motorcycle, going down a mountain road at 150 miles an hour, playing my guitar. ~ Arlo Guthrie

There is a law in physics that applies to the soul. No two objects can occupy the same space at the same time; one thing must displace another. If your heart's crammed tight with material things and a thirst for wealth, there's no space left for God. Francis wanted a void in his life that could only be filled with Jesus. Poverty wasn't a burden for him - it was a pathway to spiritual freedom. ~ Ian Morgan Cron

My mama steps out of her dress
and drops it, an inheritance falling to my feet.
She stands alone: bathed, blooming,
burdened with nothing of this world.
Her body is naked and beautiful,
her wings gray and scorched,
her brown eyes piercing the brown of mine.
I watch her departure, her flapping wings:
She doesn't look back, not even once,
not even to whisper my name ~ Brenda Sutton Rose

I've attended many concerts where I felt let down and I was wishing it would be something else. Not that it's their duty to please me, but at the same time, I think a lot about what it's like through the eyes of the consumer, the fan. I want not to pander to the audience, but to be aware of them. ~ Trent Reznor

Usually, in any revolution people are focused on who wants to have the most power. But the most important thing is the laws that are written during that time. ~ Shirin Ebadi

Of course," mused Vikram, oblivious to Alif's noncommittal demeanor, "there were days when the world was crawling with walis and prophets who could stare right at us, but that was a long time ago. Now it's different. Now you are more interested in the veil between man and photon than the one between man and jinn."
"Good," muttered Alif, becoming uncomfortable.
"So you say, but you may think differently when you discover all roads of inquiry end in the same place. ~ G. Willow Wilson

I'm married to Kevin, a photographer whose career has put him on the campaign trail with presidential candidates and sent him on assignment to far-flung places for long periods of time. It was sometimes rough when our children were small, and I was beginning to write in earnest. ~ Nancy Horan

This scene expresses the basic situation of immaturity; lyricism is an attempt to face that situation: the individual expelled from the protected enclosure of childhood wishes to enter the world, but at the same time, because he is frightened of it, he fashions an artificial replacement world out of his own verse. He makes his poems revolve around him like the planets around the sun; he becomes the center of a small universe in which nothing is alien, in which he feels as much at home as a child inside its mother, for everything here is fashioned only from the substance of his soul. Here he can accomplish everything that is so difficult "outside;" here he can, like the student Wolker, march with a proletarian crowd to make a revolution and, like the virginal Rimbaud, lash his "little girlfriends" because that crowd and those girlfriends are not fashioned out of the hostile substance of an alien world but out of the substance of his own dreams, and they are thus he himself and do not shatter the unity of the universe he has constructed for himself. ~ Milan Kundera

you see, my whole life
is tied up
to unhappiness
it's father cooking breakfast
and me getting fat as a hog
or having no food
at all and father proving
his incompetence
again
i wish i knew how it would feel
to be free
it's having a job
they won't let you work
or no work at all
castrating me
(yes it happens to women too)

it's a sex object if you're pretty
and no love
or love and no sex if you're fat
get back fat black woman be a mother
grandmother strong thing but not woman
gameswoman romantic woman love needer
man seeker dick eater sweat getter
fuck needing love seeking woman

it's a hole in your shoe
and buying lil sis a dress
and her saying you shouldn't
when you know
all too well that you shouldn't

but smiles are only something we give
to properly dressed social workers
not each other
only smiles of i know
your game sister
which isn't really
a smile

joy is finding a pregnant roach
and squashing it
not finding someone to hold
let go get off get back don't turn
me on you black dog
how dare you care
about me
you ain't go no good sense
cause i ain't shit you must be lower
than that to care

it's a filthy house
with yesterday's watermelon
and monday's tears
cause true ~ Nikki Giovanni

sHe half-turned, and felt the familiar and very uncomfortable prickly feeling of Time slowing down around him.

Death paused in the act of running a whetstone along the edge of his scythe and gave him a nod of acknowledgment, as between one professional and another.

He put his bony digit to his lips, or rather, to the place where his lips would have been if he'd had lips.

All wizards can see Death, but they don't necessarily want to. ~ Terry Pratchett

Earth fell," said the Surgeon, "because the Will required us to atone for the sin our ancestors committed when they treated your ancestors like beasts. The quality of our poetry had nothing to do with it. ~ Robert Silverberg