Poetry
Quotes - life's not a paragraph
“How
do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I
love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My
soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For
the ends of being and ideal grace.
I
love thee to the level of every day's
Most
quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I
love thee freely, as men strive for right.
I
love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I
love thee with the passion put to use
In
my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I
love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With
my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,
Smiles,
tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I
shall but love thee better after death.”
―
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese
“If
you love me, Henry, you don’t love me in a way I understand.”
―
Richard Siken, Crush
“Lovers
and madmen have such seething brains,
Such
shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More
than cool reason ever comprehends.
The
lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are
of imagination all compact:
One
sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That
is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees
Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The
poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth
glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And
as imagination bodies forth
The
forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns
them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A
local habitation and a name.”
―
Shakespeare William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
“Poetry,
she thought, wasn't written to be analyzed; it was meant to inspire without
reason, to touch without understanding.”
―
Nicholas Sparks, The Notebook
“I
went down to the river,
I
set down on the bank.
I
tried to think but couldn't,
So I
jumped in and sank.”
―
Langston Hughes
“life's
not a paragraph
And
death i think is no parenthesis”
―
E.E. Cummings
“Late
Fragment
And
did you get what
you
wanted from this life, even so?
I
did.
And
what did you want?
To
call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved
on the earth.”
―
Raymond Carver, A New Path to the Waterfall
“With
me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.”
―
Edgar Allan Poe
“A
Word is Dead
A
word is dead
When
it is said,
Some
say.
I
say it just
Begins
to live
That
day.”
―
Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
“If
I can see pain in your eyes then share with me your tears. If I can see joy in
your eyes then share with me your smile.”
―
Santosh Kalwar
“The
Uses Of Sorrow
(In
my sleep I dreamed this poem)
Someone
I loved once gave me
a
box full of darkness.
It
took me years to understand
that
this, too, was a gift.”
― Mary
Oliver, Thirst
“I
am too alone in the world, and yet not alone enough
to
make every moment holy.
I am
too tiny in this world, and not tiny enough
just
to lie before you like a thing,
shrewd
and secretive.
I
want my own will, and I want simply to be with my will,
as
it goes toward action;
and
in those quiet, sometimes hardly moving times,
when
something is coming near,
I
want to be with those who know secret things
or
else alone.
I
want to be a mirror for your whole body,
and
I never want to be blind, or to be too old
to
hold up your heavy and swaying picture.
I
want to unfold.
I
don’t want to stay folded anywhere,
because
where I am folded, there I am a lie.
and
I want my grasp of things to be
true
before you. I want to describe myself
like
a painting that I looked at
closely
for a long time,
like
a saying that I finally understood,
like
the pitcher I use every day,
like
the face of my mother,
like
a ship
that
carried me
through
the wildest storm of all.”
―
Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God
“Still,
what I want in my life
is
to be willing
to
be dazzled—
to
cast aside the weight of facts
and
maybe even
to
float a little
above
this difficult world.”
―
Mary Oliver
“It
was at that age
that
poetry came in search of me.”
―
Pablo Neruda, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
“He
was my North, my South, my East and West,
My
working week and my Sunday rest,
My
noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I
thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.”
― W.
H. Auden, Collected Poems
“I
lean to you, numb as a fossil. Tell me I'm here.”
―
Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems
“I
discover myself on the verge of a usual mistake.”
―
Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
“Green
was the silence, wet was the light,
the
month of June trembled like a butterfly.”
―
Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets
“My
imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and
exiles me from it.”
―
Ursula K. Le Guin
“The
Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves
on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall
lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor
all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.”
―
Omar Khayyám
“When
you part from your friend, you grieve not;
For
that which you love most in him may be clearer in his absence, as
the
mountain to the climber is clearer from the plain.”
―
Khalil Gibran, The Prophet
