Poetry Quotes

If I could take your troubles I would toss them into the sea, But all these things I'm finding Are impossible for me. I cannot build a mountain Or catch a rainbow fair, But let me be what I know best, A friend that is always there.

First they came for the Jews, but I did nothing because I'm not a Jew. Then they came for the socialists, but I did nothing because I'm not a socialist. Then they came for the Catholics, but I did nothing because I'm not a Catholic. Finally, they came for me, but by then there was no one left to help me.

Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.

All poets, all writers are political. They either maintain the status quo, or they say, 'Something's wrong, let's change it for the better.'

The truth is... everything counts. Everything. Everything we do and everything we say. Everything helps or hurts; everything adds to or takes away from someone else.

I am no poet, but if you think for yourselves, as I proceed, the facts will form a poem in your minds.

If you deconstruct Greece, you will in the end see an olive tree, a grapevine, and a boat remain. That is, with as much, you reconstruct her.

Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.

You never wish on shooting stars. You wish on the ones that have the courage to shine where they are.

Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.

It is the lava of the imagination whose eruption prevents an earthquake.

It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.

Poetry is plucking at the heartstrings, and making music with them.

Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.

Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin Dance me through the panic 'til I'm gathered safely in Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove Dance me to the end of love

Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.

War: a massacre of people who don't know each other for the profit of people who know each other but don't massacre each other.

Write, form a rhizome, increase your territory by deterritorialization, extend the line of flight to the point where it becomes an abstract machine covering the entire plane of consistency.

Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone.

I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time. They are in opposition. In science you want to say something that nobody knew before, in words which everyone can understand. In poetry you are bound to say ... something that everyone knows already in words that nobody can understand. Commenting to him about the poetry J. Robert Oppenheimer wrote.

I am looking for a poem that says Everything so I don't have to write anymore.

One of the ridiculous aspects of being a poet is the huge gulf between how seriously we take ourselves and how generally we are ignored by everybody else.

Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes.

There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it

In this poor body, composed of one hundred bones and nine openings, is something called spirit, a flimsy curtain swept this way and that by the slightest breeze. It is spirit, such as it is, which led me to poetry, at first little more than a pastime, then the full business of my life. There have been times when my spirit, so dejected, almost gave up the quest, other times when it was proud, triumphant. So it has been from the very start, never finding peace with itself, always doubting the worth of what it makes.

Whatever is not stone is light

One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.

When the tea is brought at five o'clock And all the neat curtains are drawn with care, The little black cat with bright green eyes Is suddenly purring there.

He who has rejected his demons badgers us to death with his angels

Silence is a sounding thing, To one who listens hungrily

United States: the country where liberty is a statue.

The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps... so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash or thunder in.

A speech is poetry: cadence, rhythm, imagery, sweep! A speech reminds us that words, like children, have the power to make dance the dullest beanbag of a heart.

They swayed about upon a rocking horse, And thought it Pegasus.

I was a late bloomer. But anyone who blooms at all, ever, is very lucky.

I think of my peace paintings as one long poem, with each painting being a single stanza.

Forests may be gorgeous but there is nothing more alive than a tree that learns how to grow in a cemetery.

I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

Let no-one say the past is dead, the past is all about us and within.

The author of haiku should be absent, and only the haiku present.

For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

Writing was a political act and poetry was a cultural weapon.

A poet must never make a statement simply because it is sounds poetically exciting; he must also believe it to be true.

To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.

You I am sure will forgive me for sincerely remarking that you might curb your magnanimity and be more of an artist, and 'load every rift' of your subject with ore.

Poetry is the language of intensity. Because we are going to die, an expression of intensity is justified.

Always be a poet, even in prose.

Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do.

If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.

Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.