Quotes Tagged "poetry"

Secretly, deep down, everybody on Earth believes they can write poetry, apart from the members of the Poets' Guild, who know they can't.

You are that one breath. that puts all the remaining breaths. back into my body.

Dear to me is sleep: still more, being made of stone, While pain and guilt still linger here below, Blindness and numbness--these please me alone; Then do not wake me, keep your voices low.

Poetry makes nothing happen.

But words are things, and a small drop of ink,       Falling like dew, upon a thought, produces That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think;       ’T is strange, the shortest letter which man uses Instead of speech, may form a lasting link       Of ages; to what straits old Time reduces Frail man, when paper — even a rag like this, Survives himself, his tomb, and all that’s his.

loneliness can fly a helicopter through a cut-out shape of a helicopter the same size as the helicopter and that's it's only skill and it isn't good enough but it's still amazing.

The poem must resist the intelligence Almost successfully.

Poetry is an abstraction bloodied.

Balm of the summer night, balm of the ordinary, imperial joy and sorrow of human existence, the dreamed as well as the lived— what could be dearer than this, given the closeness of death?

There’s gold, and it’s haunting and haunting; It’s luring me on as of old; Yet it isn’t the gold that I’m wanting So much as just finding the gold. It’s the great, big, broad land ’way up yonder, It’s the forests where silence has lease; It’s the beauty that thrills me with wonder, It’s the stillness that fills me with peace.

Silver hidden in the gold, Young man hidden in the old, Laughing lord with weeping eyes, Bring king and ring before sunrise! -Hilarion, The Great and Terrible Quest

At Blackwater Pond At Blackwater Pond the tossed waters have settled after a night of rain. I dip my cupped hands. I drink a long time. It tastes like stone, leaves, fire. It falls cold into my body, waking the bones. I hear them deep inside me, whispering oh what is that beautiful thing that just happened?

How weightless words are when nothing will do.

Fascists always attack minorities, Which is an irony, 'Cos fascists are a minority.

Ars Poetica A poem should be palpable and mute As a globed fruit, Dumb As old medallions to the thumb, Silent as the sleeve-worn stone Of casement ledges where the moss has grown— A poem should be wordless As the flight of birds. A poem should be motionless in time As the moon climbs, Leaving, as the moon releases Twig by twig the night-entangled trees, Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves, Memory by memory the mind— A poem should be motionless in time As the moon climbs. A poem should be equal to: Not true. For all the history of grief An empty doorway and a maple leaf. For love The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea— A poem should not mean But be.

I am—yet what I am none cares or knows; My friends forsake me like a memory lost: I am the self-consumer of my woes— They rise and vanish in oblivious host, Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes And yet I am, and live—like vapours tossed Into the nothingness of scorn and noise, Into the living sea of waking dreams, Where there is neither sense of life or joys, But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems; Even the dearest that I loved the best Are strange—nay, rather, stranger than the rest.

I write, write and write but I can't find words that define what I feel inside.

Welcome, thou kind deceiver! Thou best of thieves: who, with an easy key, Dost open life, and, unperceived by us, Even steal us from ourselves.

Sometimes, a child will go under while their parent is watching, and they don’t even know anything is wrong. My mom asks if everything’s okay, and I say of course. Drowning is a quiet, desperate thing.

I have been here before, But when or how I cannot tell: I know the grass beyond the door, The sweet keen smell, The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.