American Poet Quotes

Emily Dickinson

Robert Frost

Jack Kerouac

Walt Whitman

W. H. Auden

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Joseph Brodsky

Summary riposte
To the dreary wail
There's no knowing what
Love is all about.
Poets know a lot.

I tasted - careless - then -
I did not know the Wine
Came once a World - Did you?
Oh, had you told me so -
This Thirst would blister - easier - now

Emily Dickinson

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

A love astounds us or a pain consumes us and we forget that we glow on our own.

The saints differ from us in their exuberance, the excess of our human talents. Moderation is not their secret. It is in the wildness of their dreams, the desperate vitality of their ambitions, that they stand apart from ordinary people of good will.

Phyllis McGinley

One could not live without delicacy, but when / I think of love I think of the big, clumsy-looking / hands of my grandmother, each knuckle a knob...

I love the friendly faces of old sorrows;
I have no secrets that they do not know.

Karle Wilson Baker

They ask me to remember but they want me to remember their memories and I keep on remembering mine

Lucille Clifton

To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.

The self is no mystery, the mystery is / That there is something for us to stand on

Nature repeats herself, or almost does: repeat, repeat, repeat, revise, revise, revise.

Elizabeth Bishop

I am fevered with the sunset, I am fretful with the bay, For the wander-thirst is on me And my soul is in Cathay.

Language that tells us, through a more or less emotional reaction,
something that can not be said.

Edwin Arlington Robinson

Only those of our poets who kept solidly to the Shakespearean tradition achieved any measure of success. But Keats was the last great exponent of that tradition, and we all know how thin, how lacking in charm, the copies of Keats have become.

People hit the sauce in a big way all winter. Amidst blizzards they wrestle unsuccessfully with the dark comedy of their lives, laughter trapped in their frigid gizzards. Meanwhile, the mercury just plummets, like a migrating duck blasted out of the sky by some hunter in a cap with fur earflaps.

The hoop dancer dances within what encircles him, demonstrating how the people live in motion within the circling spirals of time and space. They are no more limited than water and sky. At green corn dance time, water and sky come together, in Indian time, to make rain.

Paula Gunn Allen

Though Duty's face is stern, her path is best: They sweetly sleep who die upon her breast.

Is it for miracles
We live? I like it when the morning sun lights up my room Like a yellow jelly bean, an inner glow. May mutters: "Why ask questions?" or, "What are the questions you wish to ask?"

Incense smokes, and love takes care,
In her blue bed the virgin died;
The fire broods, the day falls,
The Angel, sisters, knocks on the door.

When we are not physically starving, we have the luxury to realize psychic and emotional starvation.

Cherríe Moraga

We also ascend dazzling and tremendous as the sun,
We found our own O my soul in the calm and cool of the daybreak.

Each thing lives according to its kind; the heart by love, the intellect by truth, the higher nature of man by intimate communion with God.

Edwin Hubbell Chapin

As long as the hummingbird had not abandoned the land, somewhere there were still flowers, and they could all go on.

Leslie Marmon Silko

I'm sorry I cannot say I love you when you say you love me. The words, like moist fingers, appear before me full of promise but then run away to a narrow black room that is always dark, where they are silent, elegant, like antique gold, devouring the thing I feel.

Real friendships among men are so rare that when they occur they are famous.