Quotes by Women Poets

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

Cecil Frances Alexander

I keep my clocks a little fast / so time won't take me by surprise.

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

Meghan O'Rourke

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.

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

If I heard a girl crying help
I would go to save her;
But you hardly ever hear those words.
Dear children, you must try to say
Something when you are in need.
Don't confuse hunger with greed;
And don't wait until you are dead.

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

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

Oh, hear Him within you speaking this infinite love, moving like some divine and audible leaven, lifting the sky of the soul with expansions of light, shaping new heights and new depths, and, at your stir of assent, spreading the mountains with flame, filling the hollows with Heaven.

Secretly, we wish anyone we love will think exactly the way we do.

Good free verse is not at all easy to write, for there is no repetitive beat to lull the reader's critical faculty, much pattern and discipline is to be found in it, though the pattern of sounds and choice of exact words, gives it its beauty.

Marjorie Boulton

The economy of gift, of art, is fundamentally opposed to the economy of war.

Mary Rose O'Reilley

I bargained with Life for a penny, and Life would pay no more. However I begged at the evening when I counted my scanty store. For Life is a just employer, he gives you what you ask. But once you have set the wages, why, you must bear the task. I worked for a menial's hire, only to learn, dismayed, that any wage I had asked of Life, Life would have willingly paid.

Jessie Belle Rittenhouse

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

A slow psalm of two nations
Mourning a common pain
—Hebrew and Arabic mingling
Their silver-rooted vine;
Olives and roses falling
To sweeten Palestine.

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 tribal attitude said, and continues to say, that Gay people are especially empowered because we are able to identify with both sexes and can see into more than one world at once, having the capacity to see from more than one point of view at a time. And that is also an Indian way of seeing.

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

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

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