Peter Porter Quotes

14 Sourced Quotes

An old art spreading rumours about / Paradise, it begs outside the gates / Of the gods: the active gods come out.

Peter Porter
A professional
is one who believes he has
invented breathing.

Peter Porter
Somewhere at the heart
of the universe sounds the
true mystic note: Me.

Peter Porter
Love without sex is still the most efficient form of hell known to man.

Peter Porter
When I dream of God I see
A Massacre of Cats. Why
should they insist on their own
language and religion, who
needs to purr to make his point?
Death to all cats! The Rule
of Dogs shall last a thousand years!

Peter Porter
Poetry is either language lit up by life or life lit up by language.

Peter Porter
Nobody feels well after his fortieth birthday
But the convalescence is touched by glory.

Peter Porter
The channels of our lives are blocked,
The hand is stopped upon the clock,
No one can say why hearts will break
And marriages are all opaque:
A map of loss, some posted cards,
The living house reduced to shards,
The abstract hell of memory,
The pointlessness of poetry.

Peter Porter
Language of the liberal dead speaks
From the soil of Highgate, tears
Show a great water table is intact.
You cannot leave England, it turns
A planet majestically in the mind.

Peter Porter
It is Australian innocence to love The naturally excessive and be proud Of a thoroughbred gelding who ran fast.

Peter Porter
Much have I traveled in the realms of gold for which I thank the Paddington and Westminster Public Libraries.

Peter Porter
We cannot know what John of Leyden felt
Under the Bishop's tongs – we can only
Walk in temperate London, our educated city,
Wishing to cry as freely as they did who died
In the Age of Faith. We have our loneliness
And our regret with which to build an eschatology.

Peter Porter
Redeemers always reach the world too late.
God dies, we live; God lives, we die. Our fate.

Peter Porter
In Australia
Inter alia,
Mediocrities
Think they're Socrates.

Peter Porter