20th-century Poet Quotes

Mind is a most delicate evidence. Not a soul has seen it yet.

Richard Eberhart

Farewell sadness
Good-day sadness
You are inscribed in the lines of the ceiling.

Sex suppressed will go berserk, But it keeps us all alive. It's a wonderful change from wives and work And it ends at half past five.

All the things we hide in water
Hoping we won't see them go.
Forests growing under water
Press against the ones we know.

My precious child, I love you and will never leave you
Never, ever, during your trials and testings.
When you saw only one set of footprints,
It was then that I carried you.

Margaret Fishback

If they don't depend on true evidence, scientists are no better than gossips.

Penelope Fitzgerald

Dawn crept over the Downs like a sinister white animal, followed by the snarling cries of a wind eating its way between the black boughs of the thorns. The wind was the furious voice of this sluggish animal light that was baring the dormers and mullions and scullions of Cold Comfort Farm.

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

Everyone enjoys stories of double lives and secret identities. Children have Superman; intellectuals have Wallace Stevens.

If you're a writer, you can make the death of a canary stand for the whole mystery of death.

Nadine Gordimer

Much that is natural, to the will must yield.
Men manufacture both machine and soul,
And use what they imperfectly control
To dare a future from the taken routes.

When we put words together - adjective with noun, noun with verb, verb with object - we start to talk to each other.

Its blasphemy enabled man to break free from the Bible and Koran with their life-denying fundamentalists and hell fire such fanatics love to fan.

Pig sit still in the strainer
I must have my Pig tea

Without you ghost ferries would cross the Mersey manned by skeleton crews

The strangest of our powers
Is the courage to live
Knowing that we will die,
Knowing nothing more true.

Everything that I write is a kind of battle won—or lost—against silence and incoherence.

And the elephant sings deep in the forest-maze
About a star of deathless and painless peace
But no astronomer can find where it is.

I love the process of being taken from where I am to somewhere else.

Josephine Jacobsen

Art is not self-expression while, for me, 'confessional poetry' is almost a contradiction in terms.

Elizabeth Jennings