Quotes by Women Poets

Alone! Alone! No beacon, far or near! No chart, no compass, and no anchor stay!

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

The writer who is a mother should, I think, record everything she can: make notes, keep journals, take photographs, use a tape recorder, and remind herself that there is a subject so incalculably vast significance to humanity, about which virtually nothing is known because writers have not been mothers.

Alicia Ostriker

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!

Had I a husband or a house, and all that longs thereto
Myself could frame about to rouse as other women do,
But til some household cares me tie
My books and pen I will apply.

Isabella Whitney

That enchantment that I lightly took
Out of the lovely April is for ever.

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

It is easier, of course, to find dignity in one's solitude. Loneliness is solitude with a problem. Can blue solve the problem, or can it at least keep me company within it?-No, not exactly. It cannot love me that way; it has no arms. But sometimes I do feel its presence to be a sort of wink-Here you are again, it says, and so am I.

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.

From marrying in haste, and repenting at leisure;
Not liking the person, yet liking his treasure:
Libera nos.

Elizabeth Thomas

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

The spirit of the year, like bacchant crowned, With lighted torch goes careless on his way; And soon bursts into flame the maple's spray, And vines are running fire along the ground.

Edith M. Thomas

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

Kate Cruise O'Brien

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