Poet Quotes

Don Carlos was one of those peaceful and indolent men who do not know how to do evil, nor to go to great lengths to do good.

Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda
Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda
When you write, you can hide behind your words. When you talk, you are up front, like the clown in the midway booth; and passersby can bean you with a ball.

Willard R. Espy
Willard R. Espy
Such things and deeds as are not written down are covered with darkness, and given over to the sepulchre of oblivion.

Ivan Bunin
Ivan Bunin
Loaded with note cards for research papers that I was hopelessly behind on, I'd enter the Public Library only to end up wandering around lost, wasting the day.

A simile is like a pair of eyeglasses, one side sees this, one side sees that, the device brings them together.

George McWhirter
George McWhirter
My mother only said: Thank God the scorpion picked on me and spared my children.

How happily, how happily, the flowers die away!
Oh! Could we but return to earth as easily as they.

I was most incorrigibly devoted to versifying, and all my spouse's wholesome admonitions had no manner of effect on me; in short, I believe this scribbling itch is an incurable disease...

You are made of bent coat hangers, honey, gravel, epoxy and handstands. I am made of lying on the floor, the same song on repeat.

Dean Young (poet)
Dean Young (poet)
The Tarot embodies symbolical presentations of universal ideas, behind which lie all the implicits of the human mind, and it is in this sense that they contain secret doctrine, which is the realization by the few of truths embedded in the consciousness of all.

A. E. Waite
A. E. Waite
The chief characteristic of folly is that it mistakes itself for wisdom.

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.

I battered the cordons around me
And cradled my wings on the breeze,
Then soared to the uttermost reaches
With rapture, with power, with ease!

I loved thee once. I'll love no more,
Thine be the grief, as is the blame;
Thou art not what thou wast before,
What reason I should be the same?

Say, boys! if you give me just another whiskey I'll be glad, And I'll draw right here a picture of the face that drove me mad. Give me that piece of chalk with which you mark the baseball score, You shall see the lovely Madeleine upon the bar-room floor.

Rain knows the earth and loves it well, for rain is the passion of the earth.

One can fall in love as often as a tree grows leaves. It is perfectly natural but not free of guilt and complications, unless one takes oneself to be a leaf.

People who didn't live pre-Internet can't grasp how devoid of ideas life in my hometown was.

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

Didn't I seize the fire of ideas and make them leap, tear, fly, sing

My poetry has become the way of my giving out what music is within me.

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.

When I had curls
I knew more girls.
I do more reading
Now my hair is receding.

If only we could touch the things of this world at their center, if we could only hear tiny leaves of birch struggling toward April, then we would know.

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?"