Poetry Quotes · Page 537

The job of the poet (a job which can't be learned) consists of placing those objects of the visible world which have…

— Jean Cocteau

“She reads his poems gratefully in her small Mississippi town. It's an undramatic life, yet these past months she seems to have…

— Beth Ann Fennelly

“Oftentimes in denying yourself pleasure you do but store the desire in the recesses of your being. Who knows but that which…

— Kahlil Gibran

“All dies! and not alone The aspiring trees and men and grass; The poets' forms of beauty pass, And noblest deeds they…

— Herman Melville

I didn't start writing songs, honestly, until I started making my album. I was always doing poetry, but I never thought I…

— Alessia Cara

It really takes growing up to treasure the specialness of being different. Now I understand that I've gotten to enjoy things that…

— Sonia Sotomayor

The universal pervasion of ugliness, hideous landscapes, vile noises, foul language...everything. Unnatural, broken, blasted; the distortion of the dead, whose unburiable bodies…

— Wilfred Owen

Since poetry is infinitely valuable, I do not understand why it should be more valuable than this or that which is also…

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

“In the uproar, the confusion of accents and inflections how will you hear me when I open my mouth? Look for me,…

— Li-Young Lee

Let us face a pluralistic world in which there are no universal churches, no single remedy for all diseases, no one way…

— Jacques Barzun

Most of the poems I write go through forty versions and then stay in a file on my computer. I'm not very…

— Nick Laird

Religion, like poetry, is not a mere idea, it is expression. The self-expression of God is in the endless variety of creation;…

— Rabindranath Tagore

Speaking as an outsider is the most authentic voice for a poet. Poets who have one hundred thousand or one million readers…

— Kim Hyesoon

With vocal and choral music, first and foremost, it's the text. Not only do I need to serve the text, but the…

— Eric Whitacre

Poetry restores language by breaking it, and I think that much contemporary writing restores fantasy, as a genre of writing in contrast…

— Michael Cisco

“Any clear thing that blinds us with surprise, your wandering silences and bright trouvailles, dolphin let loose to catch the flashing fish...…

— Robert Lowell

Usually I read several books at a time - old books, new books, fiction, nonfiction, verse, anything - and when the bedside…

— Vladimir Nabokov

“If you were destined to be a poet, then you won't brainstorm for lines that rhymes. If you were destined to be…

— Michael Bassey Johnson

“No sun—no moon! No morn—no noon— No dawn— No sky—no earthly view— No distance looking blue— No road—no street—no "t'other side the…

— Thomas Hood

“along with the rest of our helpless world; and, O, if you could, you would, where lovers walked, sell off trees and…

— Carol Ann Duffy

“One cannot say that a major poet writes better poems than a minor; on the contrary the chances are that, in the…

— W.H. Auden

In the French language, there is a great gulf between prose and poetry; in English, there is hardly any difference. It is…

— Victor Hugo

Writing poetry is talking to oneself; yet it is a mode of talking to oneself in which the self disappears; and the…

— Richard Wilbur

Beginning a poem, the poet as a rule doesn't know the way it's going to come out, and at times, he is…

— Joseph Brodsky

Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to…

— Kurt Vonnegut

When you are under the power of sexual desire, anger and worldly attachment, or a greedy miser in love with your wealth;…

— Sri Guru Granth Sahib

“Eighteenth-century German poet and philosopher, Wolfgang Von Goethe wrote: Nature understands no jesting; she is always true, always serious, always severe; she…

— Verusha Singh

“Will gave a short, disbelieving laugh. "It's true," he said. "I am no hero." "No," Tessa said. "You are a person, just…

— Cassandra Clare

The world's history is a divine poem, of which the history of every nation is a canto, and every man a word.…

— James A. Garfield

Nobody knows that in reading we are re-living our temptations to be a poet. All readers who have a certain passion for…

— Gaston Bachelard

“the flight which the poet makes over the face of the earth and then, as if he had been ordained to re-enact…

— Henry Miller

Sometime in the last 50,000 years, before 12,000 years ago, a kind of paradise came into existence. A situation in which men…

— Terence McKenna

“Delvig's best poem is the one he dedicated to Pushkin, his schoolmate, in January 1815. A boy of sixteen, prophesying in exact…

— Vladimir Nabokov

A poem, necessarily, sits at a register that's different from our usual conversational voices. You have to listen more actively to get…

— Tracy K. Smith

Depending on who I am talking about or who's talking through me - if the person is a kind of hip-hop, or…

— Maya Angelou

“There is an universal tendency amongst mankind to conceive all beings like themselves, and to transfer to every object those qualities, with…

— David Hume

“Protect your heart from thoughtless people who have no regard for the damage they cause. For they are reckless in their pursuit…

— Liz Newman

“Living is the opposite of poetry. Poetry is the recollection of living, or, more often than not, the lament of having not…

— P.S. Baber

I create my subjects somehow visualizing them in my style. I start as a poet, put the colors and composition down on…

— Fernando Botero

“In times of old when I was new And Hogwarts barely started The founders of our noble school Thought never to be…

— J.K. Rowling