20th-century Poet Quotes

Pablo Neruda
Jack Kerouac
W. H. Auden
Joseph Brodsky
Allen Ginsberg
Nadine Gordimer
André Breton

My desk, most loyal friend
thank you. You've been with me on
every road I've taken.
My scar and my protection.

Marina Tsvetaeva
Marina Tsvetaeva
Words want to find chimes with each other, things want to connect.

I ask permission to be like everybody else,like the rest of the world and what's more, like anybody else:I beg you, with all my heart,if we are talking about me, since we are talking about me,please resist blasting the trumpet during my visitand resign yourselves to my quiet absence.

Pablo Neruda
Pablo Neruda
Try not to turn your life into a race, least of all an obstacle race.

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is stoned to death.

Joan D. Vinge
Joan D. Vinge
A slow psalm of two nations
Mourning a common pain
—Hebrew and Arabic mingling
Their silver-rooted vine;
Olives and roses falling
To sweeten Palestine.

There's no friend like someone who has known you since you were five.

Life is a slow suicide, and it is happening to every intellectual.

Papiamentu is our soul. The language is the only thing that distinguishes us from other nations. We must propagate Papiamentu at schools, at home, in the church, the university, worldwide and up into the heaven, so that we will not lose our soul. Do you share this feeling?

Frank Martinus Arion
Frank Martinus Arion
And upsidedown in the earth a dead man walks upon my soles when I walk.

Bill Knott (poet)
Bill Knott (poet)
Infinite is a meaningless word: except – it states / The mind is capable of performing / an endless process of addition.

ABOMUNISTS JOIN NOTHING BUT THEIR HANDS OR LEGS, OR OTHER SAME.

The theme of Death is to Poetry what Mistaken Identity is to Drama.

Dannie Abse
Dannie Abse
O, she walked unaware of her own increasing beauty
That was holding men's thoughts from market or plough,

That enchantment that I lightly took
Out of the lovely April is for ever.

Léonie Adams
Léonie Adams
We consider the artist a special sort of person. It is more likely that each of us is a special sort of artist.

Elsa Gidlow
Elsa Gidlow
Wires instead of veins. that's what writers are made of. We get these electric demands & if we don't co-operate, we don't get to go to sleep. wired. Coffee nerves without the coffee.

then bite the tongue out by the root…
and chew, never swallow.
This is not sex, remember;
you are eating the sea.

Euryalus, is it
the gods who put this fire in our minds,
or is it that each man's relentless longing
becomes a god to him?

The combination of song, prayer, and poetry is a natural form of expression for many Navajo people. A person who is able to 'talk beautifully' is well thought of and considered wealthy...

Luci Tapahonso
Luci Tapahonso
Meningitis. It was a word you had to bite on to say it. It had a fright and a hiss in it.

The clouds roll on. Silent as sleepwalkers the clouds keep coming from infinity bank behind bank and line after line, and change colors on the earth.

Chemistry having its equations beyond our range of inequation.

Ask a glass of water why it pities
the rain. Ask the lunatic yard dog why it tolerates the leash.

Someone spoke to me last night,
told me the truth. Just a few words,
but I recognized it.
I knew I should make myself get up,
write it down, but it was late,
and I was exhausted from working
all day in the garden, moving rocks.

Dorianne Laux
Dorianne Laux