Poet Quotes

When liberty, this austere goddess,
Comes down to console people on earth;
That she finds them seated, in their heavy troubles,
On a ground cracked a thousand and four hundred years ago,
Her work which everywhere encounters a rebellious ground
Is very laborious before emerging beautiful

Auguste-Marseille Barthélemy

It's horrifying how fast time flies. It's cold. No rain today. A strong wind. Walked around a lot, slept a lot. I've been sleeping 12–14 hours a day. Maybe that's why time is galloping by so fast.

You can't drive to the coastline. You can only drive so close to the white chalky cliff and then you have to get out and dive.

Joyelle McSweeney

Man is born, eats, procreates, and dies This sequence of events alike applies To horses, herring, crocodiles, and flies.

Joseph Simon Newman

Poems, like dreams, have a visible subject and an invisible one. The invisible one is the one you can't choose, the one that writes itself. Not a message that comes at the end of the poem, more like a pathological condition that deforms every word – a resonance, a manner of speaking, a nervous tic, a pressure. And this invisible subject only shows up when you're speaking the language that you speak when no one is there to correct or applaud you. Remembering that language is the whole skill of writing well.

The wild geese—the wild geese,—'tis long since they flew,
O'er the billowy ocean's bright bosom of blue.

Michael Joseph Barry

For a woman to be a lesbian in a male-supremacist, capitalist, misogynist, racist, homophobic, imperialist culture, such as that of North America, is an act of resistance.

The Devil is a Five-headed
Snake, says the father.
The son says, Nay, it's a Six-headed one. And then their hearts burn
with hate for each others —
and they live apart for many years.

Subramanya Bharathi

As a favor to me
Let's not talk any more about old dances.
I have an entire world on the tip of my tongue.

The writer who is a mother should, I think, record everything she can: make notes, keep journals, take photographs, use a tape recorder, and remind herself that there is a subject so incalculably vast significance to humanity, about which virtually nothing is known because writers have not been mothers.

Alicia Ostriker

It's true, the grave is more powerful than a lover's eyes. An open grave, with all its magnets. And I say this to you, you who when you smile make me think of the beginning of the world.

Vicente Huidobro

Alas! Am I born for this,
To wear this slavish chain?
Deprived of all created bliss,
Through hardship, toil and pain!

George Moses Horton

There's nothing in the world (that is in Trinity) To make us poets happy; — I detest Your Hebrew, Greek and heathenish Latinity, And Mathematics are a bore at best.

John Moultrie (poet)

The leafless orchard
Is alone day and night
With his pure and sad silence.

Mehdi Akhavan-Sales

The first few glasses of beer were a revelation; they flushed my veins with happiness; they washed away all cares and shyness and worries. I remember thinking to myself, If I could have two pints of beer every afternoon, life would be a great happiness.

George Mackay Brown

Those two wholesome defects of the French people, malice and curiosity, both of which are essential to its greatness.

The within is ceaselessly becoming the without. From the state of a man's heart doth proceed the conditions of his life; his thoughts blossom into deeds, and his deeds bear the fruitage of character and destiny.

An albatross wheeling in circles, Sails with a wing to the clouds and a wing to the touch of the billow...

Sidney Royse Lysaght

Words are the gateway to reality, the means by which we engage with the objective truth beyond ourselves.

Ye generous maids, revenge your sex's wrong; Let not the mean destroyer e'er approach Your sacred charms. Now muster all your pride, Contempt and scorn, that, shot from Beauty's eye, Confounds the mighty impudent, and smites The front unknown to shame.

This wind you hear is the birth of memory
when the moment hatches in time's womb
there will be no art talk, the only poem
you will hear will be the spearpoint pivoted
in the punctured marrow of the villain; the
timeless native son dancing like crazy to
the retrieved rhythms of desire
fading
in-
to
memory.

Keorapetse Kgositsile

Memories are smoke
lips we can't kiss
hands we can't hold
will never be
enough for us.

Kamau Brathwaite

I know you—a glance, and what you are
Sits-by-the-fire in my heart.
My Limousine-Lady knows you, or
Why does the slant-envy of her eye mark
Your straight air and radiant inclusive smile?
Guilt pins a fig-leaf; Innocence is its own adoring.

Since the journey is a metaphor - the most ambiguous and seductive of metaphors, we tell ourselves - it can also be born of immobility. There is no need to drag our bodies around so much, all dressed up. It's hot, there are flies, diseases. It is enough to close our eyes, seated on a chair in the shade, to float on the waves of imagination. Isn't that what books are there for?

For ivy climbs the crumbling hall To decorate decay.

Philip James Bailey