Tumblr Poems Quotes

the philosophical cure
to anxiety
is not optimism
but rather pessimism.

optimism says
"the world is beautiful
and there's no reason to be sad."

pessimism says
"look at all these countries
waging wars
let's go get some ice cream
and just listen to some sad records. ~ Juansen Dizon

Self-Restoration

You will
heal not
in a way
that you
are acceptable
to other people.

You will
heal in a way
that you are acceptable
to yourself. ~ Juansen Dizon

Of course, he showed me this one afternoon when he was skipping class. When trolls cut classes, you think they are losers. When the beautiful and/or reasonably erudite do the same thing to sit on the library steps and read poetry, you think they are on to something deep. You see only deep brown wavy hair and strong legs, well honed by years of Ultimate Frisbee. You see that book of T. S. Eliot poems held by the hand with the long, graceful fingers, and you never stop to think that it shouldn't take half a semester to read one book of poems ... that maybe he is not so much reading as getting really high every morning and sleeping it off on the library steps, forcing the people who actually go to class to step or trip over him. ~ Maureen Johnson

Poems Should Speak [10w]
Poems should speak to you, for you,
not around you. ~ Beryl Dov

Our real poems are already in us / and all we can do is dig. / We can work for years and never find them / or miss them when they stare us in the face. ~ Jonathan Galassi

We write about love like we should be bound in padded rooms. ~ Kevin Fuller

You see them in the mercury
light of water, the expanding
orbs of silver where trout
breathe. You hear
them in the sleepy kiss
of rainfall on pine
needles, smell them
as if they were snow
to the west. ~ Ken Craft

And everyone wants to read the poem
we're afraid to write. ~ Kelli Russell Agodon

Few young poets [are] testing their poems against the ear. They're writing for the page, and the page, let me tell you, is a cold bed. ~ Stanley Kunitz

Poems have ideas. The ideas of poems come out of their emotions and their emotions are carried on images. ~ E.L. Doctorow

Let me be the drink in your cup. I know how to intoxicate you. ~ J.A. ANUM

Sometimes my helpless blood runs numb and, if only for a second, I forget how frail bones can be. ~ Taylor Patton

I started writing poems, and when I first tried prose, I wrote bad articles and essays and columns, and I didn't have a handle on it. I didn't go to a school that really taught you how to write that stuff. ~ Eileen Myles

The Internet is a fad that is full of Tumbling and children who write explicit fan fiction pornography based upon my boyfriend's books. They should be outside playing with pinecones or hula hoops or whatever it is children do these days, not talking about a fictional threesome that will never happen. ~ T.J. Klune

O Deus Ego Amo Te

Oh God, I love Thee mightily,
Not only for Thy saving me,
Nor yet because who love not Thee
Must burn throughout eternity.
Thou, Thou, my Jesu, once didst me
Embrace upon the bitter Tree.
For me the nails, the soldier's spear,
With injury and insult, bear-
In pain all pain exceeding,
In sweating and in bleeding,
Yea, very death, and that for me
A sinner all unheeding!
O Jesu, should I not love Thee
Who thus hast dealt so lovingly-
Not hoping some reward to see,
Nor lest I my damnation be;
But as Thyself hast loved me,
So love I now and always Thee,
Because my King alone Thou art,
Because, O God, mine own Thou art! ~ Robert Hugh Benson

I loved them in the way one loves at any age - if it's real at all - obsessively, painfully, with wild exaltation, with guilt, with conflict; I wrote poems to and about them; I put them into novels (disguised of course); I brooded upon why they were as they were, so often maddening, don't you know? I wrote them ridiculous letters. I lived with their faces. I knew their every gesture by heart. I stalked them like wild animals. I studied them as if they were maps of the world - and in a way, I suppose they were." She had spoken rapidly, on the defensive ... if he thought she didn't know what she was talking about! "Love opens the doors into everything, as far as I can see, including and perhaps most of all, the door into one's own secret, and often terrible and frightening, real self. ~ May Sarton

a silent night. - the most eloquent poem i have ever read. ~ Sanober Khan

We are accustomed to understand art to be only what we hear and see in theaters, concerts, and exhibitions, together with buildings, statues, poems, novels. . . . But all this is but the smallest part of the art by which we communicate with each other in life. All human life is filled with works of art of every kind - from cradlesong, jest, mimicry, the ornamentation of houses, dress, and utensils, up to church services, buildings, monuments, and triumphal processions. It is all artistic activity. So that by art, in the limited sense of the word, we do not mean all human activity transmitting feelings, but only that part which we for some reason select from it and to which we attach special importance. ~ Leo Tolstoy

Until the blood from my pen runs dry, I shall worship the Greek body, the Greek mind, and the Greek soul.
Until my tears land upon Greek soil, I shall forever live in exile. ~ Pietros Maneos

What poems are doing is counterbalancing the mainstream tenor of our culture, which is to do, to be active, to be energetic and to prove one's self… and one of the messages underlying all poems that move us is that we have nothing at all to prove ~ Jane Hirshfield

I'm very aware of the presence of a reader, and that probably is a reaction against a lot of poems that I do read which seem oblivious to my presence as a reader. ~ Billy Collins

If loving you is a sin, then let hell be my paradise. ~ Lily Fields

I don't want my poems to be sentimental, though I do acknowledge that sentiment is probably rather under-reported in a lot of people's feelings a lot of the time. ~ Andrew Motion

He moves in darkness as it seems to me
Not of woods only and the shade of trees. ~ Robert Frost

I Promise You
A message of hope from a wonderful Mother

I am here to walk you
Through this journey called life
I will look after you
Until you can do so on your own
I know you need my help for now
Yes, I assure you my lovely one
I shall hold your hand no matter what
And stand by you, even in the darkest night
Will ensure your days are bright

Indeed, the Earth can be so rough
Just like the ocean changes its tide
Fear not, for I will be on your side
With you, I will fly high
Until we go to the skies
And touch the shining stars
I will not let my scars
Stop me from being kind
To you my precious child

I will be there
Until the end
I promise you! ~ Gift Gugu Mona

Beer bottles, whiskey bottles, brown glass, green. They fell to the lawn and I'd feel serene. Adam was king to my stilted queen. ~ Kate Bernheimer

Like all art, poems are only hints and guesses that draw our attention to something larger. ~ Luci Shaw

Drop by drop rain slaps the banana leaves,

Praise whoever sketched this desolate scene:

the lush, dark canopies of the gnarled trees,

the long river, sliding smooth and white.

I lift my wine flask, drunk with rivers and hills.

My backpack, breathing moonlight, sags with poems.

Look, and love everyone.

Whoever sees this landscape is stunned. ~ Ho Xuan Huong

If the poets offered us nothing more than another make-believe world, they would be mere sellers of drugs or, at best, sweetmeats. ~ Robert Lynd

Daddy-by Nancy B. Brewer
When I used to say, speak up you are as good as they, You would just smile and say, let them have their way. When in my foolish youth, I so often disobeyed,
He would just smile and say, let her have her way. When summer passed and winter overcame. He was not afraid, never once did he say. When in the moonlight his final hour came, He just smiled and said Lord I'll go your way. ~ Nancy B. Brewer

It may be said that poems are in one way like icebergs: only about a third of their bulk appears above the surface of the page. ~ Howard Nemerov

After the fierce midsummer all ablaze
Has burned itself to ashes, and expires
In the intensity of its own fires,
There come the mellow, mild, St. Martin days
Crowned with the calm of peace, but sad with haze.
So after Love has led us, till he tires
Of his own throes, and torments, and desires,
Comes large-eyed friendship: with a restful gaze,
He beckons us to follow, and across
Cool verdant vales we wander free from care.
Is it a touch of frost lies in the air?
Why are we haunted with a sense of loss?
We do not wish the pain back, or the heat;
And yet, and yet, these days are incomplete. ~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Her thoughts were like the moon eclipsing the sun. ~ Jacqueline Simon Gunn

It was never the way she looked
always the way she was
I would have fallen in love with her
with my eyes closed. ~ Atticus Poetry

Mountain Center"
Maureen McLane


The cords are strong
a loose weave strung
between white pines.

Now I will offer
a transcript of today's news
and you'll know it

as conceptual poetry
as this hammock
is a plagiarism

of all other hammocks
in all poems & the world.
My dream of originality

a copy
of an idea
no one had.

Like everyone
"I have wasted my life."

Magpie day
mockingbird night
cuckoo mind ~ Maureen McLane

The poet can only write the poems; it takes the reader to complete the meaning. ~ Nikki Giovanni

On July 26, 1916, I announced to all my friends in America that from now on I resolved to write no more poems in the classical language, and to begin my experiments in writing poetry in the so-called vulgar tongue of the people. ~ Hu Shih

Dear eyelashes, wishbones, pennies, dandelions, wishing well, shooting stars, 11:11 and birthday candles, do your job ~ Tumblr XD

You do not insist that I love you
but how can I help it
when I hear your unbridled laughter?
How can I deny it
when I see your constellating freckles?
You do not insist that I love you
but how can I help it
when your scent shadows me at night?
How can I deny it
when your beauty attacks me in the light?
You do not insist that I love you,
but I insist that I do. ~ Kamand Kojouri

Further, accentuating all these difficulties and making them harder to bear is the world's notorious indifference. It does not ask people to write poems and novels and histories; it does not need them. It does not care whether Flaubert finds the right word or whether Carlyle scrupulously verifies this or that fact. Naturally, it will not pay for what it does not want. And so the writer, Keats, Flaubert, Carlyle, suffers, especially in the creative years of youth, every form of distraction and discouragement. ~ Virginia Woolf

Poems, for me, begin as a social engagement. I want to establish a kind of sociability or even hospitality at the beginning of a poem. The title and the first few lines are a kind of welcome mat where I am inviting the reader inside. ~ Billy Collins

I like to work with multiple sections because they lend themselves to the structure of the poem: its intensifications and arcs and closures. I feel like working with smaller units feels more natural to the way I write poems. ~ Anna Journey

I can't wait to read it, because I want to know how someone who was abused and raped as a child could grow up to write poems about being phenomenal when something so disgusting and humiliating has happened to her. (Kendra's words upon learning about Maya Angelou and her books I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Phenomenal Woman) ~ Kamichi Jackson