Quotes by Women Poets

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

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.

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

Unnoticed, the passage has occurred; as I brood, autumn dusk dewdrops fall on my pillow. The voices of insects and the deer by the fence, as one, disturb me to tears this autumn dusk.

Princess Shikishi

Since the journey is a metaphor - the most ambiguous and seductive of metaphors, we tell ourselves - it can also be born of immobility. There is no need to drag our bodies around so much, all dressed up. It's hot, there are flies, diseases. It is enough to close our eyes, seated on a chair in the shade, to float on the waves of imagination. Isn't that what books are there for?

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

Natasha Trethewey

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.

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

You can't drive to the coastline. You can only drive so close to the white chalky cliff and then you have to get out and dive.

Joyelle McSweeney

I had a perfect confidence, still unshaken, in books. If you read enough you would reach the point of no return. You would cross over and arrive on the safe side. There you would drink the strong waters and become addicted, perhaps demented - but a Reader.

Helen Bevington

Various random experiments, cut-ups, fold-ins, juxtapositions, timed writings of other kinds, the "objects assignment" which involves dream, adventure, ancestry. Writing outside, writing on moving vehicles. Looking at paintings in the grand museums of the world in a proscribed way.Little strategies to keep the lalita - play or dance - going. Sometimes it's lonely you know, just you and your own imagination.

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

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.

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

Meredith Stricker

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

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

Claudia Rankine

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

Why are you not where you belong? / A black hat on a hook says nothing. / Ashes mirror ashes / In a mirroring window.

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

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.

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

Cecil Frances Alexander