Common Quote by Mary Ruefle

The world is so great and rich, and life so full of variety, that you can never lack occasions for poems.

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

If everybody became a poet the world would be much better. We would all read to each other.

— Nikki Giovanni

“Considering the ways in which so many of us waste our time, what would be wrong with a world in which everybody were writing…

— Ted Kooser

“Poetry excites innate emotions and perceptions that let you create a new world where you have never visited and no one else can enter.”

— Debasish Mridha

“The poet lives and writes at the frontier between deep internal experience and the revelations of the outer world. There is no going back…

— David Whyte

“Poetry can be a peculiar gateway, Will. It can be a way into all kinds of things that don’t seem to have a way…

— Will Willingham

I always say that a poet loves the world, and the prose writer needs to create an alternative world.

— Mary Karr

All the world can be found in poetry. All you need to see and hear. All the moments, good and bad, joyous and sad.

— Patricia MacLachlan

“Poets aren't poets because of the way they write, they are poets because of the way they see the world.”

— Brandon Gene Petit

There are very few great poets in the world.

— Tahar Ben Jelloun

poets are privileged to utter more than they can always quite explain, bringing up from the mind's unplumbed depths tokens of the nature of…

— Vernon Lee

Poets are the only people to whom love is not only a crucial, but an indispensable experience, which entitles them to mistake it for…

— Hannah Arendt