Quotes by Women Poets

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.

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

Charlotte Elliott

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

Forever seeking, never found,
In this wide varied scene;
Sole object of unceasing search,
While in this low terrene.
Yet vain the search, if in the heart
Some lurking passion dwell;
For this will hang with cypress wreath
Retirement's secret cell.
In vain the outward scene is calm,
In vain the world we fly;
If thou, in pure religion's garb,
Thy friendly aid deny.

But the summits of poetry are mysteries; they are shiftingly veiled, and those who catch the glimpses see different aspects of the transcendental; but they have seen something, and they come down with the glory lingering on them.

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

Take earth for your own large room and the floor of earth carpeted with sunlight and hung round with silver wind for your dancing place.

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

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

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!

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

Delphine de Girardin

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 flowers withered,
Their color faded away,
While meaninglessly I spent my days in the world And the long rains were falling.

That which we look on with unselfish love
And true humility is surely ours,
Even as a lake looks at the stars above
And makes within itself a heaven of stars.

Mary Gardiner Brainard

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

There's no friend like someone who has known you since you were five.

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.

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

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

Why did I buy it? What was I thinking? It's all wrong. Tacky, but not in a good way. It looks suburban. It spells housewife. Too nurturing. I don't even have kids. No one will take me seriously. It must have been the lighting. I was in a hurry. I don't even want to return it. Just get it out of here. Throw it away.

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

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