Poet Quotes

The planted seed consigned to common earth,
Disdains to moulder with the baser clay;
But rises up to meet the light of day,
Spreads all its leaves, and flowers, and tendrils forth;
And, bathed and ripened in the genial ray,
Pours out its perfume on the wandering gales,
Till in that fragrant breath its life exhales.

Anne Lynch Botta

Letters, from absent friends, extinguish fear, Unite division, and draw distance near; Their magic force each silent wish conveys, And wafts embodied though, a thousand ways: Could souls to bodies write, death's pow'r were mean, For minds could then meet minds with heav'n between.

Oh I'm in love with the janitor's boy,
And the janitor's boy loves me;
He's going to hunt for a desert isle
In our geography.

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.

At length corruption, like a general flood (So long by watchful ministers withstood), Shall deluge all; and avarice, creeping on, Spread like a low-born mist, and blot the sun.

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

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.

Hugh Antoine d'Arcy

Clear and simple in white and gold, Meadows blossom, of sunlit spaces, - The field is full as it well can hold And white with the drift of the ox-eye daisies!

Dora Read Goodale

Oh! somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright,
The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light,
And somewhere men are laughing and somewhere children shout;
But there is no joy in Mudville — mighty Casey has "struck out."

Pity for him who one day looks upon
his inward sphinx and questions it. He is lost.

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.

You think you got something big to say? Something momentous? Or is it what you had to memorize in order to escape the men with lightning in their eyes?

Whoever he was who first depicted Amor as a boy, don't you think it was a wonderful touch? He was the first to see that lovers live without sense.

Little brown boy,
Slim, dark, big-eyed,
Crooning love songs to your banjo
Down at the Lafayette—Gee, boy, I love the way you hold your head,
High sort of and a bit to one side,
Like a prince, a jazz prince.

In loss itself I find assuagement: having lost the treasure, I've nothing to fear.

Juana Inés de la Cruz

Take, O boatman, thrice thy fee,—
Take, I give it willingly;
For, invisible to thee,
Spirits twain have crossed with me.

We have, each of us, nothing.
We will give it to each other.

Carolyn Forché

In principle, should the laborers have the produce of their labor? I do not hesitate to say: No! although I know that a multitude of workers will cry out. Look, proletarians, cry out, shout as much as you like, but then listen to me: No, it is not the product of their labors to which the workers have a right. It is the satisfaction of their needs, whatever the nature of those needs. To have the possession of the product of our labor is not to have possession of that which is proper to us, it is to have property in a product made by our hands, and which could be proper to others and not to us. And isn't all property theft?

Joseph Déjacque

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.

Solace of the night sky,
the hardly moving
face of the clock.

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.

Deborah Garrison

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

The more uniform a man's voice, step, manner of conversation, handwriting--the more quiet, uniform, settled, his actions, his character.

Johann Kaspar Lavater

I, a Laconian dog, can bite again: Yes, I can make the Daunian tiger flee, Much more a bragging, foul-mouth'd whelp like thee.

Henry Kirke White

Let man's soul be a sphere, and then, in this, The intelligence that moves, devotion is.