Quotes about poetry

“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.”

“But I know for a fact that had I had a father, I'd have some discipline. I'd have more confidence. Your mother cannot calm you down the way a man can. Your mother can't reassure you the way a man can. My mother couldn't show me where my manhood was. You need a man to teach you how to be a man. When I was young I was quiet, withdrawn. I read a lot, wrote poetry, kept a diary. I watched TV all day. I stayed in front of the television. It was when I was in front of the TV by myself, being alone in the house by myself, having to cook dinner by myself, eat by myself. Just being by myself and looking at TV, at families and all these people out there in this pretend world. I knew I could be part of it if I pretended too, So early on I just watched and emulated … and I just thirsted for that. I thought if I could be and act like those characters, act like those people, I could have some of their joy. If I could act like I had a big family I wouldn't feel as lonely.”

“I have no advice for anybody; except to, you know, be awake enough to see where you are at any given time, and how that is beautiful, and has poetry inside. Even places you hate.”

“Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises…”

“We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry.”

“Pure mathematics is in its way the poetry of logical ideas.”

“Poetry, it's one of the most pretty nicknames we give to life.”

“If a poem hasn't ripped apart your soul; you haven't experienced poetry.”

“one can never be sure whether it's good poetry or bad acid”

“Painting is poetry which is seen and not heard, and poetry is a painting which is heard but not seen.”

“Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.”

“… and then, I have nature and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough?”

“Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.”

“Don't use the phone. People are never ready to answer it. Use poetry.”

“Poetry is a lyrical insinuation. Often, its melodic subtlety kisses the subconscious mind.”

“Only in Russia poetry is respected – it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?”

“Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking.”

“If I had my life to live over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week.”

“We were clever enough to turn a laundry list into poetry.”

“The beauty, the poetry of the fear in their eyes. I didn't mind going to jail for, what, five, six hours? It was absolutely worth it.”

“Real poetry, is to lead a beautiful life. To live poetry is better than to write it.”

“Perfect purity is possible if you turn your life into a line of poetry written with a splash of blood.”

“Poetry is what gets lost in translation.”

“Poetry is written with tears, fiction with blood, and history with invisible ink.”

“The poetry of earth is never dead.”

“Music is the universal language of mankind — poetry their universal pastime and delight.”

“It was at that age
that poetry came in search of me.”

“Of all I have ever seen or learned, that book seems to me the noblest, the wisest, and the most powerful expression of man's life upon this earth — and also the highest flower of poetry, eloquence, and truth. I am not given to dogmatic judgments in the matter of literary creation, but if I had to make one I could say that Ecclesiastes is the greatest single piece of writing I have ever known, and the wisdom expressed in it the most lasting and profound.”

“The art has to make it on its own, without explanations, and it’s the same for poetry. If the poem or the painting has to be explained, then it’s a failure in communication.”

“All the seven deadly sins are peccadilloes but without three of them, Pride, Lust, and Sloth, poetry might never have been born.”

“Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.”

“Poetry is as necessary to comprehension as science. It is as impossible to live without reverence as it is without joy.”

“He drove his mind into the abyss where poetry is written.”

“Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends. --Bernard, The Waves”

“The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion, — all in one.”

“Poetry is an awareness of the world, a particular way of relating to reality.”

“I was just reading some poetry, and it talked about how things start as one thing and change into another, and I just thought, what a great concept for a song.”

“Our tragic age demands poetry of courage and not whimpers about the inevitable end of all maya.”

“Whatever can be done while poetry and philosophy are separated has been done and accomplished. So the time has come to unite the two.”

“Dismissing poetry is dismissing the glory of the imagination. Teaching English to adolescents for twenty years gives me the authority to say, "Kill the imagination and you kill the soul. Kill the soul and you're left with a listless, apathetic creature who can become hopeless or brutal or both. Kill the metaphor and you kill desire; the image magnetizes the movement of the energy." I will make this clear as I speak. The tax money that is being withdrawn from arts programs in schools will be spent on prisons.”

“I realized that it was not by wisdom that poets write their poetry, but by a kind of nature or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets; for these also say many beautiful things, but do not know anything of what they say.”

“Language is at the heart of poetry and it is difficult to commandeer words which elicit no personal echo. Of what we can speak, we need not be silent.”

“Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. The rest is poetry, imagination.”

“All intelligent persons also possess some larger-scale frame-systems whose members seemed at first impossibly different — like water with electricity, or poetry with music. Yet many such analogies — along with the knowledge of how to apply them — are among our most powerful tools of thought.”

“Was there no sword, nothing with which to batter down these walls, this protection, this begetting of children and living behind curtains, and becoming daily more involved and committed, with books and pictures? Better burn one’s life out like Louis, desiring perfection; or like Rhoda leave us, flying past us to the desert; or choose one out of millions and one only like Neville; better be like Susan and love and hate the heat of the sun or the frost-bitten grass; or be like Jinny, honest, an animal. All had their rapture; their common feeling with death; something that stood them in stead. Thus I visited each of my friends in turn, trying, with fumbling fingers, to prise open their locked caskets. I went from one to the other holding my sorrow — no, not my sorrow but the incomprehensible nature of this our life — for their inspection. Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends, I to my own heart, I to seek among phrases and fragments something unbroken — I to whom there is not beauty enough in moon or tree; to whom the touch of one person with another is all, yet who cannot grasp even that, who am so imperfect, so weak, so unspeakably lonely. There I sat.”

“You come from the depths of infinity
and from all directions of space-time.
Every atom in you comes
from a different star,
every cell are made
of celestial radiation.
You're the smile of
no birth and no death.
You are the Great Poetry.”

“Your friend's poetry is terrible," he said.
Clary blinked, caught momentarily off guard. "What?"
"I said his poetry was terrible. It sounds like he ate a dictionary and started vomiting up words at random.”

“Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.”

“If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?”

“Poetry is the shadow cast by our imaginations.”

“Poetry: three mismatched shoes at the entrance of a dark alley.”

“We talk so abstractly about poetry because all of us are usually bad poets.”

“She was the amoureuse of all the novels, the heroine of all the plays, the vague “she” of all the poetry books.”

“What can be explained is not poetry.”

“A grain of poetry suffices to season a century.”

“He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize”

“Everything that is dead quivers. Not only the things of poetry, stars, moon, wood, flowers, but even a white trouser button glittering out of a puddle in the street… Everything has a secret soul, which is silent more often than it speaks.”

“There is no poetry where there are no mistakes.”

“After a full belly all is poetry.”

“To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.”

“The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will.”

“Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.”

“How poetic you are," she said. "I've a notion that poetry is the highest form of self-deception.”

“There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.”

“There are two ways to dislike poetry: One is to dislike it; the other is to read Pope.”

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

“If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it's to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.”

“We are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.”

“The Girl With Many Eyes
One day in the park
I had quite a surprise.
I met a girl
who had many eyes.

She was really quite pretty
(and also quite shocking!)
and I noticed she had a mouth,
so we ended up talking.

We talked about flowers,
and her poetry classes,
and the problems she'd have
if she ever wore glasses.

It's great to know a girl
who has so many eyes,
but you really get wet
when she breaks down and cries.”

“It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road.”

“Love is poetry plus biology.”

“Poetry is an act of peace. Peace goes into the making of a poet as flour goes into the making of bread.”

“They may have been ugly. They may have been evil. But when it came to poetry in motion, the Things had all the grace and coordination of a deck-chair.”

“Poetry is a naked woman, a naked man, and the distance between them.”

“We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.”

“Prose is walking; poetry is flying”

“Who can ever say the perfect thing to the poet about his poetry?”

“Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?”

“Poetry aside, a religion is really a moral code that is expressed through legends, myths, or any type of literary device in order to establish a system of beliefs, values, and rules with which to regulate a culture or a society.”

“As I walk, I construct perfect sentences that I cannot remember later at home. I don’t know if the ineffable poetry of those sentences derived from what they were or from their never having been (written).”

“I shall have poetry in my life. And adventure. And love, love, love, above all. Love as there has never been in a play. Unbiddable, ungovernable, like a riot in the heart and nothing to be done, come ruin or rapture.”

“She lives the poetry she cannot write.”

“Poetry is a way of looking at the world for the first time.”

“There's real poetry in the real world. Science is the poetry of reality”

“Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.”

“Poetry is a sort of homecoming.”

“Our fantastic civilization has fallen out of touch with many aspects of nature, and with none more completely than with night. Primitive folk, gathered at a cave mouth round a fire, do not fear night; they fear, rather, the energies and creatures to whom night gives power; we of the age of the machines, having delivered ourselves of nocturnal enemies, now have a dislike of night itself. With lights and ever more lights, we drive the holiness and beauty of night back to the forests and the sea; the little villages, the crossroads even, will have none of it. Are modern folk, perhaps, afraid of night? Do they fear that vast serenity, the mystery of infinite space, the austerity of stars? Having made themselves at home in a civilization obsessed with power, which explains its whole world in terms of energy, do they fear at night for their dull acquiescence and the pattern of their beliefs? Be the answer what it will, to-day's civilization is full of people who have not the slightest notion of the character or the poetry of night, who have never even seen night. Yet to live thus, to know only artificial night, is as absurd and evil as to know only artificial day.”

“The Bible has noble poetry in it… and some good morals and a wealth of obscenity, and upwards of a thousand lies.”

“Only the very weak-minded refuse to be influenced by literature and poetry.”

“I am a student of life, and don't want to miss any experience. There's poetry in this sort of thing, you know--or perhaps you don't know, but it's all the same.”

“To walk quietly until the miracle in everything speaks is poetry, whether we write it down or not.”

“Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.”

“The young student sits with his head bent over his books, and his mind straying in youth's dreamland; where prose is prowling on the desk and poetry hiding in the heart.”

“I'm not against sentimentality. I think you need it. I mean, I don't think you get a true picture of people without it in writing… It's a kind of poetry, it's an emotional poetry, and, to bring it back to the literary scene, I don't think anything is true that doesn't have it, that doesn't have poetry in it.”

“That, lad," he said proudly, "was some of the worst poetry I have heard for a long time. It was offensive to the ear and a torrrture to the soul…. We'll make a gonnagle out of ye yet!”

“Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportianate, the absurd and the forbidden.”

“I have nothing to say/ and I am saying it/ and that is poetry/ as I need it.”

“Many people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose of life. To have ruined one's self over poetry is an honor.”

“All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.”