Quotes by Women Poets

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

Kate Cruise O'Brien

Time has the same effect on the mind as on the face; the predominant passion and the strongest feature become more conspicuous from the others retiring.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

The north! the north! from out the north What founts of light are breaking forth, And streaming up these evening skies, A glorious wonder to our eyes!

Hannah Flagg Gould

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.

The light died out and left the sky,
We sighed and rose and said good-bye,
We had forgotten — He and I,
That he was dead, that I must die.

Agnes Mary Frances Duclaux

Death stops the body's work, the soul's a journeyman.

Natasha Trethewey

I saw the radiant Queen of Night
Walking in brightness through the sky...

Charlotte Elliott

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

War rages on the teeming earth;
The hot and sanguinary fight
Begins with each new creature's birth:
A dreadful war where might is right;
Where still the strongest slay and win,
Where weakness is the only sin.

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

Only yield when you must, never "give up the ship," but fight on to the last "with a stiff upper lip!

Green pastures are before me, which yet I have not seen;
Bright skies will soon be o'er me, where the dark clouds have been.
My hope I cannot measure, my path to life is free,
My Savior has my treasure, and He will walk with me.

Anna Laetitia Waring

There is only one proper way to wear a beautiful dress: to forget you are wearing it.

Delphine de Girardin

Uniformity, in its motives, its goals, its far-ranging consequences, is the natural enemy of poetry, not to mention the enemy of trees, the soil, the exemplary life therein.

Carolyn D. Wright

I was raised to feel that doing nothing was a sin. I had to learn to do nothing.

The length of a meeting rises with the square of the number of people present.

Eileen Shanahan

Poetry, I'm returning to it, never leaves me. It's my genre completely. In poetry I contemplate myself exuberantly. It's my unique strength. Force of gravity, electric and magnetic energy; in my own way, to make a synthesis.

Nicole Brossard

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

The walks put on their summer liveries,
And all things else did hold like similes:
The trees with leaves, with fruits, with flowers clad,
Embrac'd each other, seeming to be glad.

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

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

Caroline Anne Southey

None of us ever escape the first few years of our lives. They make a mould into which we are cast, and though it may be broken, and we turned loose, some remnant of it, some intangible evil or lovely thing or both, will remain with us, like the odor to a flower, or the smoothness to a piece of ivory. It is part of the immortality of youth.

Lizette Woodworth Reese

Since I have felt the sense of death,
Since I have borne its dread, its fear — Oh, how my life has grown more dear
Since I have felt the sense of death!
Sorrows are good, and cares are small,
Since I have known the loss of all.

Imagination is the bridge between
the things we know for sure
and the things we need to believe
When our world becomes unbearable.

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