Quotes by Women Poets

Emily Dickinson

Anna Akhmatova

Nadine Gordimer

Margaret Atwood

Wisława Szymborska

Amanda Gorman

Marina Tsvetaeva

Five minutes! Zounds! I have been five minutes too late all my life-time!

When all is said and done, monotony may after all be the best condition for creation.

Lady Margaret Sackville

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

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is stoned to death.

My desk, most loyal friend
thank you. You've been with me on
every road I've taken.
My scar and my protection.

Marina Tsvetaeva

Abstract art: a construction site for high fashion, for advertising, for furniture.

Adrienne Monnier

I do this in my long poems. I have to move between one thing and another and this oscillation is the way I find out what I'm trying to say

From all the offspring of the earth and heaven love is the most precious.

Oh, hear Him within you speaking this infinite love, moving like some divine and audible leaven, lifting the sky of the soul with expansions of light, shaping new heights and new depths, and, at your stir of assent, spreading the mountains with flame, filling the hollows with Heaven.

The world turns softly
Not to spill its lakes and rivers.

Did I, my lines intend for public view,How many censures, would their faults pursue,Some would, because such words they do affect,Cry they're insipid, empty, uncorrect.And many, have attained, dull and untaught,The name of wit, only by finding fault.True judges, might condemn their want of wit,And all might say, they're by a woman writ.

Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea

The more a thing is torn,
the more places it can connect.

Meredith Stricker

There are rituals not structures for being a poet, drinking too much, taking too many drugs, being a lady chaser, having your nervous breakdown, being irresponsible about money.

The hoop dancer dances within what encircles him, demonstrating how the people live in motion within the circling spirals of time and space. They are no more limited than water and sky. At green corn dance time, water and sky come together, in Indian time, to make rain.

Paula Gunn Allen

Do no sinful action, speak no angry word; ye belong to Jesus, children of the Lord.

Cecil Frances Alexander

We are no more content to plod along the beaten paths - and so marriage must go the way of God.

We talked about and that has always been a puzzle to me
why American men think that success is everything
when they know that eighty percent of them are not
going to succeed more than to just keep going and why
if they are not why do they not keep on being
interested in the things that interested them when
they were college men and why American men different
from English men do not get more interesting as they
get older.

The light would show (if it could harden)
Eternities of kitchen garden

Far as distress the soul can wound
'Tis pain in each degree;
Bliss goes but to a certain bound,
Beyond is agony.

Frances Greville

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

Though we all day with care our work attend,
Such is our fate, we know not when 'twill end.
When evening's come, you homeward take your way;
We, till our work is done, are forced to stay.

Some day your head won't find my lap so easily. Trust is a habit you'll soon break.

It is so seldom that a young fellow has any inclination for the company of an old man...

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

Summer is delicately made.
While it is, it is ceasing.

Genevieve Taggard