Quotes by Women Poets

You know, they say that there is a part
of the human chest that it you strike it hard enough,
it makes the person's heart explode. This sounds like
such a lie that I have to believe it's the truth. If I were
science, I'd never tell anyone where this place is.
If I were science, I'd have named this place after you.

Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz

I love the sweet linnet, the lark, and the thrush, And the gold-throated blackbird with a song in each bush ; The finch and the robin, I love everyone, But not the pied magpie that's walking alone.

Katharine Tynan

Well, but the joy to see my works in print!
Myself too pictur'd in a mezzo-tint!

Mary Jones (poet)

If you will tell me why the fen appears impassable, I then will tell you why I think that I can cross it if I try.

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

My mother raises rare blooms
and waters them with tea
her birth waters sang like rivers
my mother is now me.

Now that Fate
Has brought me what so long, I so desired,
It is too late,
I am too tired.

Expression, child of soul! I fondly trace
Thy strong enchantment, when the poet's lyre,
The painter's pencil cathch thy sacred fire,
And beauty wakes for thee her touching grace

Helen Maria Williams

University students are rarely able to cope with universals and death is the most embarrassing universal.

Kate Cruise O'Brien

Restless, incautious, I want to talk violence,
Speak wild poems, hush, be still, pray grace
Taken forever; and after, lie long in the dense
Dark of your embrace, asleep between earth and space.

If the doctors cure
then the sun sees it.
If the doctors kill
then the earth hides it.
The doctors should fear arrogance
more than cardiac arrest.

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

Genevieve Taggard

I keep my clocks a little fast / so time won't take me by surprise.

This is the divine moment when we can hold the fairest blossom of spring in one hand and the sweetest flowers of early summer in the other.

Patience Strong

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

Meredith Stricker

Learn the particular strength of the Fibonacci series, a balanced spiraling outward of shapes, those golden numbers which describe dimensions of sea shells, rams' horns, collections of petals and generations of bees.

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

It is hard work to give life to new characters every single day. It is not as if I am God. I am just a tired, middle-aged woman trying to keep going.

If I can't have love, if I can't find peace, / Give me a bitter glory.

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

I am called "Venus Hottentot."
I left Capetown with a promise
of revenue: half the profits
and my passage home: A boon!
Master's brother proposed the trip;
the magistrate granted me leave
I would return to my family
a duchess, with watered-silk
dresses and money to grow food.

Elizabeth Alexander (poet)

I like people who possess either deep mastery or deep empathy, but not as much as I like those who possess both.

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

Adrienne Monnier

Where did feelings go when they disappeared? Did they leave a chemical trace somewhere in our minds, so that if we could look inside ourselves we would see via the patterns of neurons some of the important things that had happened to us in our lifetimes?

You should speak out because if you don't, it's going to harm you.

Claudia Rankine