American Poet Quotes

Emily Dickinson
Robert Frost
Jack Kerouac
Walt Whitman
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
W. H. Auden
Joseph Brodsky

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

Robert Frost
Robert Frost
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
Emily Dickinson
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is stoned to death.

Joan D. Vinge
Joan D. Vinge
I am like a table
that eats its own legs off
because it's fallen
in love with the floor.

And the faith that grows out of questioning is stronger than the faith born of blind acceptance. It can withstand the shocks of circumstance. Only he who questions the universe and questions it in utter honesty can grow in his comprehension of the truth.

Three hundred years we slaved,
We slave and suffer yet;
Though flesh and bone rebel,
They tell us to forget!

By the power of eloquence old truth receives a new habit; though its essence be the same, yet its visage is so altered that it may currently pass and be accepted as a novelty.

The splendor of Silence,—of snow-jeweled hills and of ice.

The candid camera is the greatest liar in the photographic family.... It is anarchic, naïve, and superficial.

Lincoln Kirstein
Lincoln Kirstein
Chemistry having its equations beyond our range of inequation.

If you have enough breath to complain about anything, you have more than enough reason to give thanks about something.

Where is the heart that doth not keep,
Within its inmost core,
Some fond remembrance hidden deep,
Of days that are no more?

the Revolution aint dead
its tired,
and jest resting.

I believe if I should die,
And you should kiss my eyelids where I lie
Cold, dead, and dumb to all the world contains,
The folded orbs would open at thy breath,
And from its exile in the Isles of Death
Life would come gladly back along my veins.

And you, whiner, who wastes your time
Dawdling over the remorseless earth,
What evil, what unspeakable crime
Have you made your life worth?

My son called to me that God was inside his red fire engine. He wanted to show me. I did move as fast as I could, spilling like water through the kitchen door into a summer day, but God had left by the time I got there. My son smiled, told me I'd missed him by seconds.

Live blindly and upon the hour. The Lord,
Who was the Future, died full long ago.
Knowledge which is the Past is folly.

In the morning I get out of bed, I brush my teeth, I wash my face, I get dressed in the clothes I like best. I want to be good to myself.

How can I appreciate light from an aging
sun shining through new configurations neither pine
nor ash? How can I extol the nuturing
fragrances from the spires, the spicules
of a landscape not yet formed or seeded?

We are striving to forge our union with purpose.
To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters, and conditions of man.

Amanda Gorman
Amanda Gorman
Right here in our bodies, in our defense of our right to experience joy, in the refusal to abandon the place where we have been most completely invaded & colonized, in our determination to make the bombed & defoliated lands flower again and bear fruit, here where we have been most shamed is one of the most radical & sacred places from which to transform the world.

If history is a record of survivors, Poetry shelters other voices.

Susan Howe
Susan Howe
I need to feel that the language in my poems is alive, in the sense of talking on the phone to a friend sharing gossip.

Uniformity, in its motives, its goals, its far-ranging consequences, is the natural enemy of poetry, not to mention the enemy of trees, the soil, the exemplary life therein.

Carolyn D. Wright
Carolyn D. Wright
A weapon that comes down as still
As snowflakes fall upon the sod;
But executes a freeman's will,
As lightning does the will of God;
And from its force nor doors nor locks
Can shield you,—'t is the ballot-box.

John Pierpont
John Pierpont