Quotes by Women Poets

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

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

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

And still the aster greets us as we pass With her faint smile, - among the withered grass Beside the way, lingering as loath of heart, Like me, from these sweet solitudes to part.

Sarah Helen Whitman

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

Maybe we all want to burn off across the horizon, into space, perhaps, to take off into some unknown territory and meet ourselves out there.

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

Natasha Trethewey

When and where will another come to take your holy place?
Old man mumbling in his dotage, or crying child, unborn?

Margaret Walker

It was funny, though, the things you didn't learn about people until after they died.

Cynthia Leitich Smith

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

Thou tyrant whom I will not name,
Whom heaven and hell alike disclaim;
Abhorred and shunned, for different ends,
By angels, Jesuits, beasts and fiends!...
That wretch, if such a wretch there be,
Who hopes for happiness from thee,
May search successfully as well
For truth in whores and ease in hell.

Mehetabel Wesley Wright

If I find it painful getting out of bed in the morning, I am likely to find it harder still in five years' time. Then you have to add that, though that is undoubtedly so, it is also quite possible that you won't be there in five years.

There are other tears, bright, clear, untroubled,
Shining as the sun, untouched of care.

Zabel Sibil Asadour

There are some secrets which scarcely admit of being disclosed even to ourselves.

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

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

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

Meredith Stricker

Most of life's problems can be solved
By running fast and kicking something.

U. A. Fanthorpe

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

Mary Jones (poet)

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

Dusk over the lake,
clouds floating
heat lightning
a nightmare behind branches

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

My whole life, I had been taught to read and study, to seek understanding in knowledge of history, of cultures.

Meghan O'Rourke

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

Cecil Frances Alexander