Quotes about poetry

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“Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during a moment.”

“And medecine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love: these are what we stay alive for.”

“At night too, she puzzled the mystery of her desperate need of kindness. As other girls prayed for handsomeness in a lover, or for wealth, or for power, or for poetry, she had prayed fervently: let him be kind.”

“I may turn out an intellectual, but I'll never write anything but mediocre poetry.”

“Poetry and art are the breath of life to her.”

“What you have to realize when you write poetry, or if you love poetry, is that poetry is just naturally the greatest god damn thing that ever was in the whole universe”

“Great Music, it said, and Great Poetry would like quieten Modern Youth down and make Modern Youth more Civilized. Civilized my syphilised yarbles.”

“Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever.”

“I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests.”

“Great poetry needs no interpreter other than a responsive heart.”

“The blood jet is poetry,
There is no stopping it.”

“The second was some rather bad poetry, but it was short, and I forced my way through by gritting my teeth and occasionally closing one eye so as not to damage the entirety of my brain.”

“I am in the middle of it: chaos and poetry; poetry and love and again, complete chaos. Pain, disorder, occasional clarity; and at the bottom of it all: only love; poetry. Sheer enchantment, fear, humiliation. It all comes with love”

“I had read a Tale of Two Cities and found it up to my standards as a romantic novel. She opened the first page and I heard poetry for the first time in my life… her voice slid in and curved down trough and over the words. She was nearly singing.”

“Do you believe a man can truly love a woman and constantly betray her? Never mind physically but betray her in his mind, in the very "poetry of his soul". Well, it's not easy but men do it all the time.”

“The aim of poetry and the poet is finally to be of service, to ply the effort of the individual into the larger work of the community as a whole.”

“A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else can be only a footnote.”

“We are surrounded by poetry on all sides…”

“I am not sure that the discovery of love is necessarily more exquisite than the discovery of poetry.”

“I have defined poetry as a 'passionate pursuit of the Real.”

“There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry –
This Traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of Toll –
How frugal is the Chariot
That bears a Human soul.”

“No one wants to read poetry. You have to make it impossible for them to put the poem down--impossible for them to stop reading it, word after word. You have to keep them from closing the book.”

“Poetry and art and knowledge are sacred and pure.”

“Poetry is life distilled.”

“In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite”

“don’t write out of what I know; I write out of what I wonder. I think most artists create art in order to explore, not to give the answers. Poetry and art are not about answers to me; they are about questions.”

“The real poetry and beauty in life comes from an intense relationship with reality in all its aspects. Realism is in fact the ideal we must aspire to, the highest point of human rationality.”

“I think it was Milosz, the Polish poet, who when he lay in a doorway and watched the bullets lifting the cobbles out of the street beside him realised that most poetry is not equipped for life in a world where people actually die. But some is.”

“Another power I don't have," said Lissa ruefully.
I grinned. "Hey, I have yet to meet any spirit user who can throw a punch like you can. That was poetry in motion, Liss." She groaned.”

“I am angry that I starved my brain and that I sat shivering in my bed at night instead of dancing or reading poetry or eating ice cream or kissing a boy…”

“On the meridian of time, there is no injustice: there is only the poetry of motion creating the illusion of truth and drama.”

“I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.”

“Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.”

“Poetry is prose bewitched, a music made of visual thoughts, the sound of an idea.”

“You can woo a girl with a poem, but you can't hold onto her with a poem. Not even with a poetry movement.”

“I have my books and my poetry to protect me”

“Poetry is an echo asking a shadow to dance.”

“To me, poetry is somebody standing up, so to speak, and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment”

“Poetry, the best of it, is lunar and is concerned with the essential insanities. Journalism is solar (there are numerous newspapers named The Sun, none called The Moon) and is devoted to the inessential.”

“she thought it was the misfortune of poetry, to be seldom safely enjoyed by those who enjoyed it completely; and that the strong feelings which alone could estimate it truly, were the very feelings which ought to taste it but sparingly.”

“(…) the translator of prose is the slave of the author and the translator of poetry is his rival.”

“Gender is the poetry each of us makes out of the language we are taught.”

“We have seen the best minds of our generation destroyed by boredom at poetry readings.”

“To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape.”

“Science is the poetry of the intellect and poetry the science of the heart's affections.”

“Men had always been the reciters of poetry in the desert.”

“Poetry is what happens when nothing else can.”

“The reason we go to poetry is not for wisdom, but for the dismantling of wisdom”

“Deprivation is the mother of poetry.”

“This is perhaps the most noble aim of poetry, to attach ourselves to the world around us, to turn desire into love, to embrace, finally what always evades us, what is beyond, but what is always there – the unspoken, the spirit, the soul.”

“I've got mixed feelings about poetry cause done well poetry is fantastic. But not many people are capable of doing it well. I think you should have some kind of license to perform poetry. A poetic license perhaps.”

“Whoever doesn't live in poetry cannot survive here on earth.”

“It is the hour to be drunken! To escape being the martyred slaves of time, be ceaselessly drunk. On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.”

“Listen, real poetry doesn't say anything; it just ticks off the possibilities. Opens all doors. You can walk through anyone that suits you.”

“Though [Abraham Lincoln] never would travel to Europe, he went with Shakespeare’s kings to Merry England; he went with Lord Byron poetry to Spain and Portugal. Literature allowed him to transcend his surroundings.”

“I am two fools, I know,
For loving, and for saying so
In whining poetry.”

“The inmost spirit of poetry, in other words, is at bottom, in every recorded case, the voice of pain – and the physical body, so to speak, of poetry, is the treatment by which the poet tries to reconcile that pain with the world.”

“I don't always understand poetry!'

'You don't always understand it? Timms, I never understand it. But learn it now, know it now and you will understand it… whenever.”

“Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge - it is as immortal as the heart of man.”

“Writer’s block results from too much head. Cut off your head. Pegasus, poetry, was born of Medusa when her head was cut off. You have to be reckless when writing. Be as crazy as your conscience allows.”

“Poetry is not the most important thing in life… I'd much rather lie in a hot bath reading Agatha Christie and sucking sweets.”

“Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry.”

“What she lacks in poetry she makes up for in venom”

“I - will have poetry in my life. And adventure. And love. Love above all.”

“There is a kind of poetry, bad and good, in everything, everywhere we look.”

“Poetry is my life, my postmark, my hands, my kitchen, my face.”

“How does the ordinary person come to the transcendent? For a start, I would say, study poetry. Learn how to read a poem. You need not have the experience to get the message, or at least some indication of the message. It may come gradually. (92)”

“Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.”

“PHOSPHORESCENCE. Now there's a word to lift your hat to… to find that phosphorescence, that light within, that's the genius behind poetry.”

“I could do with a bit more excess. From now on I'm going to be immoderate--and volatile--I shall enjoy loud music and lurid poetry. I shall be rampant.”

“Poetry and prison have always been neighbors.”

“I'm only interested in poetry.”

“The purpose of the poetry is not to dazzle us with an astonishing thought, but to make one moment of existence unforgettable and worthy of unbearable nostalgia.”

“breathe in experience breathe out poetry”

“Explanations are such cheap poetry.”

“Poetry should… should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance".”

“Some of the greatest poetry is revealing to the reader the beauty in something that was so simple you had taken it for granted.”

“Shaw… has a woman ever asked you to write a poem for her?"
"Good God, no," Gideon replied with a snicker. "Shaws don't write poetry. They pay others to write it for them and then take the credit for it.”

“Poetry is the deification of reality.”

“I find I cannot exist without Poetry”

“Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.”

“There is a line of poetry, a sentence in a fable, a word in an essay, by which my existence is justified; find that line, and immortality is assured.”

“Yes, I read. I have that absurd habit. I like beautiful poems, moving poetry, and all theof that poetry. I am extraordinarily sensitive to those poor, marvelous words left in our dark night by a few men I never knew.”

“But you hate poetry!
Yes, but you make me want to write it.”

“Quiet Prayer:
As long as the sun shall rise goes the old lovers vow. But we are children of a scientific age & have no time for poetry. Still, I offer a quiet prayer of thanks for the sunlight each time I see your face.”

“The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized. This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are, until the poem, nameless and formless-about to be birthed, but already felt. That distillation of experience from which true poetry springs births thought as dream births concept, as feeling births idea, as knowledge births (precedes) understanding.”

“But it isn't easy,' said Pooh. 'Because Poetry and Hums aren't things which you get, they're things which get you. And all you can do is to go where they can find you.”

“When power leads men towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.”

“If you want to annoy a poet, explain his poetry.”

“That's it? That's your big goodbye?" Eve asked.
Claire looked at Eve mystified. "I think I need guy CliffNotes."
"Guys aren't deep enough to need CliffNotes."
"What were you waiting for, flowery poetry?" Shane snorted. "I hugged. I'm done.”

“Prose: words in their best order; poetry: the best words in the best order.”

“The purpose of poetry is to remind us / how difficult it is to remain just one person…”

“The loss of these tastes [for poetry and music] is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.”

“Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.”

“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. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotion know what it means to want to escape from these.”

“Each of us has his own alphabet with which to create poetry.”

“Like poetry, fashion does not state anything. It merely suggests”

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

“[Poetry] is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.”