Verse Quotes

The power of verse stems from an indefinable harmony between when it says and what it is. ~ Paul Valery

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

I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence Was there ever a more galling verse in the Bible? ~ Sue Monk Kidd

The vast majority of free verse is ghastly. Utterly ghastly. No one reads it. No one listens to it. ~ Felix Dennis

So how can a poet-an intelligent, serious poet-write mystical verse now? The poetry of Adam Zagajewski provides the beginning of an answer to this question. ~ Adam Kirsch

I will now teach my son Increase (and others of my children) the way of raising a lesson out of every verse in his reading of the Bible; and of turning it into a Prayer; and engage him (and them) unto a daily Course in reading the Bible in such a way ~ Cotton Mather

I love this planet because Inspiration comes from everywhere. I named one of my books after a verse in a song I heard in my friend's car. ~ Mahmoud Shaker

Brod was a brilliant intellectual with exceptional energy; a generous man willing to do battle for others; his attachment to Kafka was warm and disinterested. The only problem was his artistic orientation: a man of ideas, he knew nothing of the passion for form; his novels (he wrote twenty of them) are sadly conventional; and above all: he understood nothing at all about modern art.
Why, despite all this, was Kafka so fond of him? What about you-do you stop being fond of your best friend because he has a compulsion to write bad verse? ~ Milan Kundera

Can you just imagine the two of them next year at the Phi Delta Carnation Ball?" Laura Grace asks, clapping her hands together.
Daddy looks confused. "The two of who?"
"Why, Ryder and Jemma, of course." Mama pats him on the hand. "You remember the Carnation Ball--it's the first Phi Delta party of the year. They have to go together, right, Laura Grace?"
She nods. "We've been waiting all our lives for this."
Mama finally glances my way and sees my scowl. "Aw, honey. We're just teasing, that's all."
This sort of teasing has been going on my entire life--second verse, same as the first. It's gotten real old, real fast.
"May I be excused?" I ask, pushing back from the table.
"You go on and finish your dinner," Laura Grace says, entirely unperturbed. "We'll stop teasing. I promise."
"It's okay. I'm done. It was delicious, thanks. I just need to get some air, that's all. I'm getting a bit of a headache."
Laura Grace nods. "It's this heat--way too hot for September." She waves a hand in my direction. "Go on, then. Ryder, why don't you go get Jemma some aspirin or something."
I glance over at Ryder, and our eyes meet. I shake my head, hoping he gets the message. "No, it's fine. I'm…uh…I've got some in my purse."
"Go with her, son," Mr. Marsden prods. "Be a gentleman, and get her a bottle of water to take outside with her."
Ugh. I give up. My escape plot is now ruined.
Wordlessly, Ryder rises from the table and stalks out ~ Kristi Cook

The Last Toast

I drink to our demolished hose,
to all this wickedness,
to you, our loneliness together,
I raise my glass -

And to the dead-cold eyes,
the lie that has betrayed us,
the coarse, brutal world, the fact
that God has not saved us.

1934 ~ Anna Akhmatova

Who all in raptures their own works rehearse, And drawl out measur'd prose, which they call verse. ~ Charles Churchill

The rudiment of verse may, possibly, be found in the spondee. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

You can throw the whole weight of your anxieties upon him, for you are his personal concern. ~ J.B. Phillips

Faith greatly shaped America's role in the world. We are a country that embodies the Bible verse from Luke chapter 12, verse 48 "From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded." ~ Marco Rubio

He made a pit and digged it. He was cunning in his plans and industrious in his labors. He stooped to the dirty work of digging. He did not fear to soil his own hands. He was willing to work in a ditch if others might fall therein. What mean things men will do to wreak revenge on the godly. They hunt for good men as if they were brute beasts - they that will not give them the fair chase afforded to the hare or the fox, but must secretly entrap them because they can neither run them down nor shoot them down. Our enemies will not meet us to the face for they fear us as much as they pretend to despise us. But let us look on to the end of the scene. The verse says he has fallen into the ditch that he has made. Ah, there he is. Let us laugh at his disappointment. Lo, he is himself the beast. He has hunted his own soul. The chase has brought him a goodly victim. So should it ever be. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

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

You even called me stupid in your verse, and I'm almost agreeing, for where stupidity is involved, you are quite an expert, friend. ~ Franz Grillparzer

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

Make a mistake in the interpretation of one of Shakespeare's plays, falsely scan a piece of Spenserian verse, and there is unlikely to be an entailment of eternal consequence; but we cannot lightly accept a similar laxity in the interpretation of Scripture. We are dealing with God's thoughts: we are obligated to take the greatest pains to understand them truly and to explain them clearly. ~ D. A. Carson

It is beyond a doubt that everyone should have time for some special delight, if only five minutes each day to seek out a lovely flower or cloud or star, or learn a verse to brighten another's dull task. What is the use of such terrible diligence as many tire themselves out with, if they always postpone their exchanges of smiles with Beauty and Joy to cling to irksome duties and relations? ~ Helen Keller

The charms of money are distinctly under-represented in literature. There are no songs or poems extolling its virtues. This seems on the face of it strange. The claims of money to be celebrated in verse might well seem to be no less than those of faithful dogs, beautiful women, or jugs of wine. ~ Celia Green

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

Leave not a foot of verse, a foot of stone, A Page, a Grave, that they can call their own; But spread, my sons, your glory thin or thick, On passive paper, or on solid brick. ~ Alexander Pope

We see through a glass, darkly." The verse surprised him. He hadn't picked up a Bible in a year, yet he knew the phrase came from the New Testament. He knew it went on to say that one day everything would be clear. One day believers would know without a shadow of a doubt, and one day they would be in the presence of God. ~ Janice Cantore

Although their access to scholarly tools was primitive compared to what is available in our day, their method of biblical interpretation was in some ways more sophisticated and certainly more psychologically astute, in that they were better able to fathom the complex, integrative, and transformative qualities of revelation. Their approach was far less narcissistic than our own tends to be, in that their goal when reading scripture was to see Christ in every verse, and not a mirror image of themselves. ~ Donald Miller

If a man call himself Rasta today, by next week that is him speaking prophecy. He don't have to be too smart either, just know one or two hellfire and brimstone verse from the Bible. Or just claim it come from Leviticus since nobody ever read Leviticus. This is how you know. Nobody who get to the end of Leviticus can still take that book seriously. Even in a book full of it, that book is mad as shit. Don't lie with man as with woman, sure I can run with that reasoning. But don't eat crab? ~ Marlon James

Well, the gold fish in the bowl lay upside down bloating
Full in the sky and the plains were bleached white with skeletons
Various species grouped together according
To their past beliefs
The only way they ever all got together was
Not in love but shameful grief ~ Don Van Vliet

Follow, poet, follow right To the bottom of the night, With your unconstraining voice Still persuade us to rejoice; With the farming of a verse Make a vineyard of the curse, Sing of human unsuccess In a rapture of distress; In the deserts of the heart Let the healing fountain start, In the prison of his days Teach the free man how to praise. ~ W. H. Auden

When you left
you left behind a field
of silent flowers
under a sky
full of unstirred clouds...you left
a million butterflies
mid-silky flutters

You left like midnight rain
against my dreaming ears

Oh and how you left
leaving my coffee scentless
and my couch comfortless

leaving upon my fingers
the melting snow of you

you left behind
a calendar full of empty days
and seasons full of aimless wanders

leaving me alone
with an armful of sunsets

your reflection behind
in every puddle
your whispers
upon every curtain
your fragrance
inside every petal

you left your echoes in between
the silence of my eyes

Oh and how you left
leaving my sands footless
and my shores songless

leaving me with windows full of
moistened moonlight

nights and nights
of only a half-warmed soul

and when you left...
you left behind a lifetime
of moments untouched

the light of a million stars
unshed

and when you left
you somehow
left my poem...unfinished.



(Published in Taj Mahal Review Vol.11
Number 1 June 2012) ~ Sanober Khan

He was a noisy robust little man with a gleam of real talent concealed in the messy obscurity of his verse. But because he did his best to shock people with his monstrous mass of otiose words (he was the inventor of the "submental grunt" as he called it), his main output seems now so nugatory, so false, so old-fashioned (super-modern things have a queer knack of dating much faster than others) that his true value is only remembered by a few scholars who admire the magnificent translations of English poems made by him at the very outset of his literary career, - ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Children read to learn - even when they are reading fantasy, nonsense, light verse, comics or the copy on cereal packets, they are expanding their minds all the time, enlarging their vocabulary, making discoveries - it is all new to them. ~ Joan Aiken

Many years ago while serving as a full-time missionary, I had the privilege of meeting Elder Bruce R. McConkie. He was a new General Authority and had come to tour our mission. My companion and I were assigned to drive him from Missoula to Butte, Montana. As we talked along the way, one of us asked him, "How can we know whom we should marry?" To our surprise, his response was quick and certain.

He asked us to turn to the 88th section of the Doctrine and Covenants, 40th verse, which reads: "For intelligence cleaveth unto intelligence; wisdom receiveth wisdom; truth embraceth truth; virtue loveth virtue; light cleaveth unto light; mercy hath compassion on mercy and claimeth her own; justice continueth its course and claimeth its own; judgment goeth before the face of him who sitteth upon the throne and governeth and executeth all things."

We showed some consternation. Elder McConkie explained to us that if we were men who loved the truth, we would be attracted to others who loved the truth. If we were men of virtue, we would attract others who were virtuous. If we loved light and justice and mercy, we would be attracted to a person who loved these qualities. He then said, "If you are men who love truth and virtue, go and find a young lady with these attributes, and then proceed to fall in love. ~ L. Aldin Porter

Orpheus chose to be the leader of mankind. Ah, not even Orpheus had attained such a goal, not even his immortal greatness had justified such vain and presumptuous dreams of grandeur, such flagrant overestimation of poetry! Certainly many instances of earthly beauty--a song, the twilit sea, the tone of the lyre, the voice of a boy, a verse, a statue, a column, a garden, a single flower--all possess the divine faculty of making man hearken unto the innermost and outermost boundaries of his existence, and therefore it is not to be wondered at that the lofty art of Orpheus was esteemed to have the power of diverting the streams from their beds and changing their courses, of luring the wild beasts of the forest with tender dominance, of arresting the cattle a-browse upon the meadows and moving them to listen, caught in the dream and enchanted, the dreamwish of all art: the world compelled to listen, ready to receive the song and its salvation. However, even had Orpheus achieved his aim, the help lasts no longer than the song, nor does the listening, and on no account might the song resound too long, otherwise the streams would return to their old courses, the wild beasts of the forest would again fall upon and slay the innocent beasts of the field, and man would revert again to his old, habitual cruelty; for not only did no intoxication last long, and this was likewise true of beauty's spell, but furthermore, the mildness to which men and beasts had yielded was only half of the in ~ Hermann Broch

The dying swan, when years her temples pierce, In music-strains breathes out her life and verse, And, chanting her own dirge, tides on her wat'ry hearse. ~ Phineas Fletcher

So you find Miss Mercer beautiful?"
The buzzing in Spencer's head formed the words, "'She walks in beauty like the night/Of cloudless climes and starry skies.'"
"My God, now you're quoting poetry."
Had he said that aloud? Bloody hell. Spencer brandished his empty mug at his brother. "I always quote verse when I'm foxed."
"You must be very foxed to quote that idiot Byron. Or very impressed by Miss Mercer's looks. ~ Sabrina Jeffries

New York Times v. Sullivan was about the suppression of speech in the South [during the 1960s]. Today's version of suppression is just another verse of the same song. ~ Gilbert S. Merritt, Jr.

The dialogue Tommy composed for the flower shop scene, which flies back and forth like some sort of postmodern 'Who's on First?' sketch, has the super-compresed density of experimental verse:

Hi
Can I help you
Yeah can I have a dozen roses please
Oh hi Johnny I didn't know it was you here you go
That's me how much is it
That'll be eighteen dollars
Here you go keep the change hi doggie
You're my favorite customer
Thanks a lot bye
Bye bye ~ Greg Sestero

When the prophet read this verse: If God wishes to guide anyone, He expands his breast for Islam (6 : 125), he was asked as to the meaning of expansion of breast and he said: This is light. When it is cast into heart, it expands. He was asked: Has it got any sign? The Prophet replied: Yes, to be separate from this world of deceit, to turn to the hereafter and to prepare for death before it actually comes. ~ Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali

...only when a man dies can his life acquire a beginning, middle, and an end: up until then we are constantly unfinished, even the midpoint cannot be located. So only the final word finds the middle word and this, in a way becomes a verse--one's death explains oneself. ~ Colum McCann

Verse in itself does not constitute poetry. Verse is only an elegant vestment for a beautiful form. Poetry can express itself in prose, but it does so more perfectly under the grace and majesty of verse. It is poetry of soul that inspires noble sentiments and noble actions as well as noble writings. ~ Victor Hugo

Make the verses flow together. If a following verse has nothing to do with the previous, you may lose our listener/reader. You want a smooth flow to hear or read, and it's easier to memorize. ~ Margaret Atwood

I dabbled in verse and it became my life ~ Patrick Kavanagh

The Verse-Refrain form starts with a context before the topic that the Refrain is talking about happens. ~ Ryan Cayabyab

Ethics based on this faultily quoted verse have changed nothing in post-Gandhi India, save the color of its administration. From a hungry man's point of view, though, it's all the same who makes him hungry. I submit that he may even prefer a white man to be responsible for his sorry state if only because this way social evil may appear to come from elsewhere and may perhaps be less efficient than the suffering at the hand of his own kind. With an alien in charge, there is still room for hope, for fantasy.
Similarly in post-Tolstoy Russia, ethics based on this misquoted verse undermined a great deal of the nation's resolve in confronting the police state. What has followed is known all too well: six decades of turning the other cheek transformed the face of the nation into one big bruise, so that the state today, weary of its violence, simply spits at that face. As well as at the face of the world. ~ Joseph Brodsky

If you're going to love a poet you should know this. Our words are our truths. Our blood hums with verse. We break easily. Our words save us. Our stanzas keep us alive. If we loved you at all, we loved you truly. And you will never leave us but live under our skin and beneath the tips of our fingers and in the ink spill on blank page.
Because poetry, like some love, is forever. ~ Jeanette LeBlanc

Natural, hell! What was it Chaucer Said once about the long toil that goes like blood to the poems making? Leave it to nature and the verse sprawls, Limp as bindweed, if it break at all Life's iron crust Man, you must sweat And rhyme your guts taut, if you'd build Your verse a ladder. ~ R.S. Thomas

This is a fault incident to all those who presume to translate books of verse into another language. For, however much care they take and however much ability they employ, they can never equal the quality of the original. ~ Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

The basic line in any good verse is cadenced ... building it around the natural breath structures of speech. ~ Kenneth Rexroth

I left smiles on your wordless lips
The night roads- dismal and narrow,
dream's path remains shadowy wide
as our lone hearts felt that arrow

From the Poem 'My Tomorrow ~ Munia Khan

THE greatest of English dramatists except Shakespeare, the first literary dictator and poet-laureate, a writer of verse, prose, satire, and criticism who most potently of all the men of his time affected the subsequent course of English letters: such was Ben Jonson, and as such his strong personality assumes an interest to us almost unparalleled, at least in his age. Ben Jonson came of the stock that was centuries after to give to the world Thomas Carlyle; for Jonson's grandfather was of Annandale, over the Solway, whence he ~ Ben Jonson

The commonest error made in relation to poetry is that it consists simply in verse-making. Many confound the casket of meter and rhyme with the jewel of thought which it encloses, and, perhaps, in some instances, after close investigation, they have found the casket empty and turned away with feelings of disappointment and disgust. ~ Orson F. Whitney

There is indeed a poetical attitude to be adopted towards all things, but all things are not fit subjects for poetry. Into the secure and sacred house of Beauty the true artist will admit nothing that is harsh or disturbing, nothing that gives pain, nothing that is debatable, nothing about which men argue. He can steep himself, if he wishes, in the discussion of all the social problems of his day, poor-laws and local taxation, free trade and bimetallic currency, and the like; but when he writes on these subjects it will be, as Milton nobly expressed it, with his left hand, in prose and not in verse, in a pamphlet and not in a lyric. This exquisite spirit of artistic choice was not in Byron: Wordsworth had it not. In the work of both these men there is much that we have to reject, much that does not give us that sense of calm and perfect repose which should be the effect of all fine, imaginative work. But in Keats it seemed to have been incarnate, and in his lovely ODE ON A GRECIAN URN it found its most secure and faultless expression; in the pageant of the EARTHLY PARADISE and the knights and ladies of Burne-Jones it is the one dominant note. It is to no avail that the Muse of Poetry be called, even by such a clarion note as Whitman's, to migrate from Greece and Ionia and to placard REMOVED and TO LET on the rocks of the snowy Parnassus. Calliope's call is not yet closed, nor are the epics of Asia ended; the Sphinx is not yet silent, nor the fountain of Castaly dry. For art i ~ Oscar Wilde

You now have learned enough to see That Cats are much like you and me And other people whom we find Possessed of various types of mind. For some are sane and some are mad And some are good and some are bad And some are better, some are worse - But all may be described in verse. ~ Garrison Keillor

But Jesus wanted the crowd to know, look, 'John's (the baptist) the one who got this whole thing started.' In verse ten He says, 'This is the one about whom it is written, 'I'll send my messenger ahead of you who will prepare Your way before You.' Jesus says, 'If it wasn't for John, I wouldn't even be here performing these miracles.' ~ Steven Furtick

Jase and I asked Mia what she wanted to do before her surgery. "How about a family party?" she suggested. So the invitation went out. It's interesting when you mention to family members that they are going to be on TV--schwoom, they are there. As Willie said, "I didn't know we had this much family."
Mia had always heard the funny stories about Jase wrestling with his brothers and cousins growing up, particularly how cousin Amy beat up Willie, so that's what she requested for the special entertainment. As Jase said, "It's the ultimate redneck dinner theater." A wrestling ring was delivered, and the warmup act was the Robertson boys clowning around, performing their best wrestling moves. Willie surprised everyone with guest professional wrestlers, including Jase's favorite, "Hacksaw" Jim Duggan.
I felt kind of bad for them, wearing only their little wrestling pants, while the rest of us were bundled up in winter coats. Yes, it was January, but it was unusually cold in Louisiana--about twenty degrees. The wrestlers had to keep moving fast; otherwise, they would have frozen to death!
At the end of the party, Mia took the stage between Jase and Willie, thanking everyone for coming and then sharing from her heart: "My favorite verse is Psalm 46:10: 'Be still, and know that I am God!' God is bigger than all of us, and He is bigger than any of your struggles, too." I think I can say that there was hardly a dry eye in the crowd. Going into her surgery, Mia was being bra ~ Missy Robertson

There's U and I in universe! Uni = One, Verse = Spoken Sentence, so one spoken sentence created you and I! ~ Reed Abbitt Moore

With this blistering salvo of poetic gutshots Lawson has proven himself Bizarro's true bard, its mad laureate. Switching from dark whimsy to retina-blast shock to political outrage without missing a beat, The Troublesome Amputee is a powerful collection of pitch-black verse. ~ Jeremy Robert Johnson

It is not lies or a lack of loyalty that ends a relationship. It is the agonizing truth that one person feels in their heart on a daily basis. It is realizing that you are coping and not living. It is the false belief that there is a verse, quote, phrase or talk that will magically make you feel content, complete or not care. However, it doesn't last longer than a few days, before your mind and heart goes back to what it wants. It is the moment you realize that you left without ever leaving. It is the moment you realize that fear, shame or guilt is the only thing standing in the way of the life God meant for you to live. ~ Shannon L. Alder

Oh to break loose like the chinook
salmon jumping and falling back,
nosing up to the impossible
stone and bone-crushing waterfall ...
Time to grub up and junk the year's
output, a dead wood of dry verse:
dim confession, coy revelation,
liftings, listless self-imitation,
whole days when I could hardly speak,
came pluming home unshaven, weak
and willing to read anyone
things done before and better done ... ~ Robert Lowell

Shun epic verse. ~ Bernard Cornwell

Verse should be as natural As the small tuber that feeds on muck And grows slowly from obtuse soil To the white flower of immortal beauty ~ R.S. Thomas

A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem. ~ Andre Maurois

People, like us
we feel... too deeply
consumed, in shadow
this game of chance.
Together, surviving
we unending dreamers.
People... like us. ~ Bev Flynn

I always like to think that I make movies that are like Nirvana songs. They have a slow verse and then they pop into high gear and then they go back into slow and then they pop into high gear again. ~ James Gunn

Sometimes it ain't the drunk or the sinner who needs a shovel across the rear, it's the ones who could quote you chapter and verse about grace, but don't hand it out. ~ Lisa Wingate

Just as in the second part of a verse bad poets seek a thought to fit their rhyme, so in the second half of their lives people tend to become more anxious about finding actions, positions, relationships that fit those of their earlier lives, so that everything harmonizes quite well on the surface: but their lives are no longer ruled by a strong thought, and instead, in its place, comes the intention of finding a rhyme. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

How fast we learn in the day of sorrow! Scripture shines out in a new effulgence; every verse seems to contain a sunbeam, every promise stands out in illuminated splendor; things hard to be understood become in a moment plain. ~ Horatius Bonar

Known for his prose as for his poetry. The subsequent fame of his verse is due in part to the many composers who set poems, especially those in the Book of Songs, to music. Hence his early, lyrical verse became known at the expense of his later, predominantly satirical verse, and his verse has in turn overshadowed his prose. Yet Heine's prose is as rich in humour, satire, wit, lyricism, and ~ Heinrich Heine

You can't enjoy light verse with a heavy heart. ~ Russell Baker

To be lord of space, a man must be free of all bonds to place. To be heir of all things, his heart must have no THINGS in it. He must be like him who makes things, not like one who would put everything in his pocket. He must stand on the upper, not the lower side of them. He must be as the man who makes poems, not the man who gathers books of verse. God, having made a sunset, lets it pass, and makes such a sunset no more. He has no picture-gallery, no library. What if in heaven men shall be so busy growing, that they have not time to write or to read! ~ George MacDonald

Here's a teacher who's talking about Jesus and, oh no, she quotes a bible verse, horror of horrors. The world's breaking and torched and completely messed up, but God forbid some teacher mentions Jesus. ~ Travis Thrasher

Of course, a single verse of the Holy Qur'an or a hadith moves the faithful to good actions, but volumes of books would not move an unwilling person who is like an ass carrying a load of books. ~ Muhammad Zakariyya Kandhalvi

I do have a funny perception of mine I'd like to share. Being basically a lifetime poet. I've had many people say "I don't like poetry" But they'll listen to song after song that rhymes on the end in couplets Just a thought ... ~ Stanley Victor Paskavich

Verse. Chorus. Verse.
I'm sorry. We know how it works. The world is no longer mysterious. ~ Richard Siken

I thinke it not amisse to forewarne you that you thrust as few wordes of many sillables into your verse as may be: and hereunto I might alledge many reasons: first the most auncient English wordes are of one sillable, so that the more monasyllables that you use, the truer Englishman you shall seeme, and the lesse you shall smell of the Inkehorne. ~ George Gascoigne

That verse many times, but it never had any effect ~ Norman Vincent Peale

The only part of the evening I really enjoyed was when Lord Pomtinius told me a limerick about an adulterous abbot."
"Don't you dare repeat it!" her sister ordered. Georgiana had never shown the faintest wish to rebel against the rules of propriety. She loved and lived by them.
"There once was an adulterous abbot," Olivia teased, "as randy-"
Georgiana slapped her hands over her ears. "I can't believe he told you such a thing! Father would be furious if he knew."
"Lord Pomtinius was in his cups," Olivia said. "Besides, he's ninety-six and he doesn't care about decorum any longer. Just a laugh, now and then."
"It doesn't even make sense. An adulterous abbot? How can an abbot be adulterous? They don't even marry."
"Let me know if you want to hear the whole verse," Olivia said. "It ends with talk of nuns, so I believe the word was being used loosely. ~ Eloisa James

Truth shines the brighter clad in verse. ~ Jonathan Swift

For what else is tragedy than the portrayal in tragic verse of the sufferings of men who have attached high value to external things? [27] ~ Epictetus

It was Edward Lear who created the original limerick, and is credited with A Book of Nonsense (1846). Apparently, he did this to amuse his clients' children while they were waiting for their parents' having portraits painted. Edward Lear was an artist first and a poet last. How strange then that we remember him mostly for limericks?
Since writing many of these little jocular verses, I have noticed a strange effect that keeps you reading: each time you read one limerick, you just cannot help reading the next, especially when they are nicely set out on a page. I am particularly proud of my lim-sagas, of which only two are contained in this book, but I consider them the best of my collection. ~ Bernie Morris

Meanwhile the indefiniteness remains, and the limits of variation are really much wider than any one would imagine from the sameness of women's coiffure and the favorite love-stories in prose and verse. ~ George Eliot

O deaf and mute
and blind and beautiful and interminable rose
who into time, attar and verse transmute ~ Cecilia Meireles

April is the cruelest month.' So begins T.S. Eliot's 1922 masterpiece, a 434-line poem titled 'The Waste Land.' Until my employment as a trail maintenance worker, this had simply been a line on a page, albeit a line fraught with metaphorical import and potential. Now I saw it for what it was - a big fat lie - because Eliot grew up in St. Louis and no one forgets what a Missouri summer is like. If the Nobel laureate had been truthful with himself, the opening verse would start out, 'June's a bitch. ~ Michael Gurnow

When you are reading your Scriptures in this way - it matters not whether you have read little or much - if a verse stands out and hits you and arrests you, do not go on reading. Stop immediately, and listen to it. It is speaking to you, so listen to it and speak to it. Stop reading at once, and work on this statement that has struck you in this way. ~ D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

John Milton (December 9, 1608 – November 8, 1674) was an English poet, prose polemicist, and civil servant for the English Commonwealth. Most famed for his epic poem Paradise Lost, Milton is celebrated as well for his eloquent treatise condemning censorship, Areopagitica. Long considered the supreme English poet, Milton experienced a dip in popularity after attacks by T.S. Eliot and F.R. Leavis in the mid 20th century; but with multiple societies and scholarly journals devoted to his study, Milton's reputation remains as strong as ever in the 21st century. Very soon after his death – and continuing to the present day – Milton became the subject of partisan biographies, confirming T.S. Eliot's belief that "of no other poet is it so difficult to consider the poetry simply as poetry, without our theological and political dispositions…making unlawful entry." Milton's radical, republican politics and heretical religious views, coupled with the perceived artificiality of his complicated Latinate verse, alienated Eliot and other readers; yet by dint of the overriding influence of his poetry and personality on subsequent generations - particularly the Romantic movement - the man whom Samuel Johnson disparaged as "an acrimonious and surly republican" must be counted one of the most significant writers and thinkers of all time. Source: Wikipedia ~ John Milton

No verse is libre for the man who wants to do a good job. ~ Ezra Pound

Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom,' the good thief said from his cross. (Luke 23:42). There are perhaps no more human words in all of Scripture, no prayer we can pray so well. ~ Frederick Buechner

Much verse fails of being poetry because it was not written exactly at the right crisis, though it may have been inconceivably near to it. It is only by a miracle that poetry is written at all. It is not recoverable thought, but a hue caught from a vaster receding thought. ~ Henry David Thoreau

They say my verse is sad: no wonder; Its narrow measure spans Tears of eternity, and sorrow, Not mine. but man's. ~ A.E. Housman

In the art of design, color is to form what verse is to prose,
a more harmonious and luminous vehicle of the thought. ~ Anna Brownell Jameson

The poet Robert Browning caused considerable consternation by including the word twat in one of his poems, thinking it an innocent term. The work was Pippa Passes, written in 1841 and now remembered for the line "God's in His heaven, all's right with the world." But it also contains this disconcerting passage:
Then owls and bats
Cowls and twats
Monks and nuns in a cloister's moods,
Adjourn to the oak-stump pantry!
Browning had apparently somewhere come across the word twat
which meant precisely the same then as it does now
but pronounced it with a flat a and somehow took it to mean a piece of headgear for nuns. The verse became a source of twittering amusement for generations of schoolboys and a perennial embarrassment to their elders, but the word was never altered and Browning was allowed to live out his life in wholesome ignorance because no one could think of a suitably delicate way of explaining his mistake to him. ~ Bill Bryson

I am a poet
writing frenetic free verse
I am pretentious ~ Michael H. Hanson

Northern whites were more than happy at the prospect of Black people fighting in the war. A popular verse published in the newspapers of the day reflected the sentiment of many Northerners: Some say it is a burnin' shame To make the naygurs fight An' that the trade o' bein' kilt Belongs but to the white; But as for me upon me sowl, So liberal are we here, I'll let Sambo be murthered in place o' meself On every day in the year. ~ Assata Shakur

Don't call what isn't prophecy "prophecy." Don't say "the Lord told me" if you're not about to quote a Bible verse. ~ Dan Phillips

Supporting God's Scriptural ability to give or restrain man's desires, Jerry Bridges points to an amazing verse tucked away in Exodus 34:24. As Israel's people abandon their defense entirely to have a feast before Him three times per year, God says the surrounding peoples will be entirely devoid of even the logical desire to possess their land. ~ Jerry Bridges

The same is true about husbands being the "spiritual heads" of their households (not one verse says that), about Sunday and not Saturday being Christians' set-apart day of rest and worship (just ask Seventh Day Adventists), ~ Christian Smith

License and registration, please". The voice was vaguely familiar, but she was too in her own thoughts to care.
"Here you go".
Silence. Diane saw khaki pants, khaki shirt, a black leather belt, and elbows as he read her documentation, and elbows as he wrote out a ticket.
This took several minutes because, by law, police are required to describe the nature of the sunlight at the time of the infraction in verse, although meter and rhyme are optional. ~ Jeffrey Cranor

Take down the walls.
Otherwise you must live closely, in fear, building barricades against the unknown, saying prayers against the darkness, speaking verse of terror and tightness.
Otherwise you may never know hell, but you will not find heaven, either. You will not know fresh air and flying. ~ Lauren Oliver

There are so many of these mighty spirit lifters! "Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house are many mansions ... " (John 14:1, 2). "Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you ... " (verse 27). "Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee" (Isaiah 26:3). "Fear thou not; for I am with thee: be not dismayed ... " (Isaiah 41:10). ~ Norman Vincent Peale

Armenian Cognac

A bottle of cognac from Yerevan
is on my kitchen table
as closed as that history
and as silent
If I broke it down I'd lose a hundred years
of love
and if I opened it the ancestors
hanging here in black and white
would come down from the walls
to have a glass with me
I know a history that's been forgotten
and I know why that bottle of cognac
stands with such singular pride....

If I broke it now I'd lose a hundred years
of my people's history ~ Najwan Darwish