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Poetry Quotes

A man who knows how little he knows is well, a man who knows how much he knows is sick. If, when you...

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See it was like this when we waltz into this place.A couple of papish cats is doing an Aztec two-ste...

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Recipe For Happiness Khaborovsk Or Anyplace'One grand boulevard with treeswith one grand cafe in sun...

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Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations.

I am awaitingperpetually and forevera renaissance of wonder

Don't patronize the chain bookstores. Every time I see some author scheduled to read and sign his bo...

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I am waiting for the war to be fought which will make the world safe for anarchy

Picture of Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Lawrence FerlinghettiA Coney Island of the Mind

Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone.

Poetry is a naked woman, a naked man, and the distance between them.

Decide if a poem is a question or a declaration, a meditation or an outcry.

We have seen the best minds of our generation destroyed by boredom at poetry readings.

Picture of Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Lawrence FerlinghettiWild Dreams of a New Beginning

I think the term poet is a very exalted term and should be applied to a man at the end of his work. ...

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At first first nothing will happen to usand later on it will happen to us again.

Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.

I heard of a manwho says words so beautifullythat if he only speaks their namewomen give themselves ...

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so much of the world is plunged in darkness and chaos...So ring the bells that still can ringForget ...

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It was a dance of masks and every mask was perfect because every mask was a real face and every face...

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first of all nothing will happen and a little laternothing will happen again

Show me slowly what I onlyknow the limits ofDance me to the end of love

Picture of Leonard Cohen
Leonard CohenLeonard Cohen: Poems and Songs

Dear friend, I have searched all nightthrough each burnt paper,but I fear I will never findthe formu...

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I walk through the old yellow sunlightto get to my kitchen tablethe poem about melying there with th...

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Picture of Leonard Cohen
Leonard CohenThe Energy of Slaves

Who could have foretoldthe heart grows oldfrom touching others

Picture of Leonard Cohen
Leonard CohenThe Energy of Slaves

Deprivation is the mother of poetry.

Picture of Leonard Cohen
Leonard CohenThe Favorite Game

There is a crack, a crack, in everything. That's how the light gets in.

Rocket shipsare excitingbut so are roseson a birthday.

Picture of Leonard Nimoy
Leonard NimoyCome Be With Me: A Collection of Poems

For each of us is A separate miracleIn a collective miracleBrought together For a momentBy a group ...

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Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than se...

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Painting is mute poetry, and poetry is blind painting

Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;All mimsy were the borogoves,And ...

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One! two! and through and throughThe vorpal blade went snickersnack!He left it dead, and with its he...

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The cloning of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from Science, along with beha...

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. . . chasing after words like trying to grab the tails of comets.

Ye stars! which are the poetry of heaven!

A man of eighty has outlived probably three new schools of painting, two of architecture and poetry ...

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I come from a short fiction background, and my mom is a poet, so I've always read poetry; I've alway...

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I would admit that poetry is something more than mere communication and that if that 'something more...

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Their ghosts are gagged, their books are library flotsam,Some of their names - not all - we learnt i...

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The Apache don't have a word for love," he said. "Know what they both say at the marriage? The squaw...

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September has come, it is hersWhose vitality leaps in the autumn,Whose nature prefersTrees without l...

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World is suddener than we fancy it.

Picture of Louis MacNeice
Louis MacNeiceCollected Poems of Louis MacNeice

But glad to have sat underThunder and rain with you,And grateful tooFor sunlight on the garden.

Picture of Louis MacNeice
Louis MacNeiceCollected Poems of Louis MacNeice

won't you celebrate with mewhat i have shaped intoa kind of life? i had no model.born in babylonboth...

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It is probably always disastrous not to be a poet.

How long your closet held a whiff of you,Long after hangers hung austere and bare.I would walk in an...

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Picture of Madeleine L'Engle
Madeleine L'EngleThe Ordering of Love: The New and Collected Poems of Madeleine L'Engle

We cannot always cry at the right timeand who is to say which time is right?

Picture of Madeleine L'Engle
Madeleine L'EngleThe Ordering of Love: The New and Collected Poems of Madeleine L'Engle

You are never too old to become younger!

Rational intelligence is dangerous and leads to ratiocination. The painter is a medium who doesn't r...

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Here the children have a custom. After the celebration of evil they take those vacant heads that sho...

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A truth should exist,it should not be usedlike this. If I love youis that a fact or a weapon?

There is the staircase,there is the sun.There is the kitchen,the plate with toast and strawberry jam...

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You fit into melike a hook into an eyea fish hookan open eye

UPYou wake up filled with dread.There seems no reason for it.Morning light sifts through the window,...

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Though I knew how this failure would hurt you, I had to fold like a grey moth and let go.You could n...

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They were wrong about the sun.It does not go down into the underworld at night.The sun leaves merely...

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from under the ground, from under the waters,they clutch at us, they clutch at us,we won’t let go.

Picture of Margaret Atwood
Margaret AtwoodMorning in the Burned House

The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty.

Where do the words gowhen we have said them?

Picture of Margaret Atwood
Margaret AtwoodProcedures For Underground

with shrunken fingerswe ate our oranges and bread,shivering in the parked car;though we know we had ...

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Picture of Margaret Atwood
Margaret AtwoodProcedures For Underground

Then there's the twoof us. This wordis far too short for us, it has onlyfour letters, too sparseto f...

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Picture of Margaret Atwood
Margaret AtwoodSelected Poems: 1966-1984

No wires tender even as nervescan transmit the impact ofour seasons, our catastropheswhile we are cl...

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Picture of Margaret Atwood
Margaret AtwoodThe Animals in That Country

If he had known unstructured space is a delugeand stocked his log house-boat with all the animals ev...

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SPRING POEMIt is spring, my decision, the earthferments like rising breador refuse, we are burningla...

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Kill what you can't savewhat you can't eat throw outwhat you can't throw out buryWhat you can't bury...

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To Have Without Holding:Learning to love differently is hard,love with the hands wide open, lovewith...

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Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

TO VICTOR HUGO OF MY CROW PLUTO “Even when the bird is walking we know that it has wings.”—VICTOR HU...

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Poetry...... a place for the genuine,Hands that can grasp, eyesthat can dilate, hair that can rise

Picture of Marianne Moore
Marianne MooreComplete Poems

In the days of Prismatic Colornot in the days of Adam and Eve, but when Adam was alone; when there w...

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TO A GIRAFFE If it is unpermissible, in fact fatal to be personal and undesirable to be literal—detr...

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ROSEMARY Beauty and Beauty’s son and rosemary— Venus and Love, her son, to speak plainly— born of th...

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... imaginary gardens with real toads in them ...... if you demand on one hand,the raw material of p...

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Picture of Marianne Moore
Marianne MooreComplete Poems

I love the writers of my thousand books. It pleases me to think how astonished old Homer, whoever he...

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Picture of Marilynne Robinson
Marilynne RobinsonWhen I Was a Child I Read Books

Don't you know no one can escapethe power of creatures reaching outwith breath alone?

One should write only those books from whose absence one suffers. In short: the ones you want on you...

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Picture of Marina Tsvetaeva
Marina TsvetaevaEarthly Signs: Moscow Diaries

I opened my veins. Unstoppablylife spurts out with no remedy.Now I set out bowls and plates.Every bo...

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The boys were amazed that I could make such a poem as that out of my own head, and so was I, of cour...

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Only in thoughtful dialogue with what it says can this fragment of thinking be translated. However, ...

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Picture of Martin Heidegger
Martin HeideggerEarly Greek Thinking: The Dawn of Western Philosophy

The war to preserve the privilege of mythmaking

Poetry is the least imposition on silence in a world of chatter.

Even the most political poem is an act of faith.

the stars began to burnthrough the sheets of clouds,and there was a new voicewhich you slowlyrecogni...

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Will you walk into my parlour?" said the Spider to the Fly

Picture of Mary Howitt
Mary HowittThe Spider and the Fly

Athletes take care of their bodies. Writers must similarly take care of the sensibility that houses ...

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Still, what I want in my lifeis to be willingto be dazzled—to cast aside the weight of factsand mayb...

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Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Language is rich, and malleable. It is a living, vibrant material, and every part of a poem works in...

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You do not have to be good.You do not have to walk on your kneesfor a hundred miles through the dese...

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I know many lives worth living.

To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.

Sometimes I dreamthat everything in the world is here, in my room, in a great closet, named and orde...

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The Fourth Sign of The Zodiac (Part 3) by Mary OliverI know, you never intended to be in this world....

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I went down not long agoto the Mad River, under the willowsI knelt and drank from that crumpled flow...

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Poetry is a life-cherishing force.

DogfishI wantedThe past to go away, I wantedTo leave it, like another country; I wantedMy life to cl...

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Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes...

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Picture of Mary Oliver
Mary OliverA Poetry Handbook