Poets Quotes

“depth and substance.
the two most exquisite qualities.
be it in a poem
or a person.”
― Sanober Khan

“The little poets sing of little things:
Hope, cheer, and faith, small queens and puppet kings;
Lovers who kissed and then were made as one,
And modest flowers waving in the sun.

The mighty poets write in blood and tears
And agony that, flame-like, bites and sears.
They reach their mad blind hands into the night,
To plumb abysses dead to human sight;
To drag from gulfs where lunacy lies curled,
Mad, monstrous nightmare shapes to blast the world.

MUSINGS

[click on the thumbnail by Jack "King" Kirby]”
― Robert E. Howard

“At the edge of madness you howl diamonds and pearls.”
― Aberjhani, Journey through the Power of the Rainbow: Quotations from a Life Made Out of Poetry

“When there's a moon the shadows in the house grow larger;
invisible hands draw back the curtains,
a pallid finger writes forgotten words on dust
of the piano...”
― Yannis Ritsos, The Fourth Dimension

“Again I resume the long
lesson: how small a thing
can be pleasing, how little
in this hard world it takes
to satisfy the mind
and bring it to its rest.”
― Wendell Berry, Sabbaths

“Hope is a most beautiful drug.”
― Jeremy Mercer, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.

“Freud thought that a psychosis was a waking dream, and that poets were daydreamers too, but I wonder if the reverse is not as often true, and that madness is a fiction lived in like a rented house”
― William Gass

“I am filled time and again
with a heart-aching wonder
when I think

of the fire
and frost of memories

of the everlastingness
of love

the solace
of family
and the power
of prayer.”
― Sanober Khan, Turquoise Silence

“A single poem, alone
can turn tides
scatter galaxies
and burst forth with rivers
from paradise.”
― Sanober Khan, A Thousand Flamingos

“I'd spent way more years worrying about how to look like a poet -- buying black clothes, smearing on scarlet lipstick, languidly draping myself over thrift-store furniture -- than I had learning how to assemble words in some discernible order.”
― Mary Karr, Lit

“Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once
As quick as foxes on the hill;”
― Wallace Stevens, The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play

“Heaven deliver us, what's a poet? Something that can't go to bed without making a song about it.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Busman's Honeymoon

“Battle for the sake of honor may be a fine thing for bards to sing of, but it is no way to preserve one's homeland”
― Jacqueline Carey, Kushiel's Chosen

“An owl sound wandered along the road with me.
I didn't hear it--I breathed it into my ears.”
― William Stafford

“Arrival in the world is really a departure and that, which we call departure, is only a return.”
― Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun

“We don’t know anything about silent sages, buried knowledge, the eye of the mute poet, serene seers, yet how many talkative destroyers, prophets and ideologues, teachers and beautifiers there are on the other side.”
― Dejan Stojanovic, The Shape

“A change of style is a change of meaning.”
― Wallace Stevens

“Is it possible that the Pentateuch could not have been written by uninspired men? that the assistance of God was necessary to produce these books? Is it possible that Galilei ascertained the mechanical principles of 'Virtual Velocity,' the laws of falling bodies and of all motion; that Copernicus ascertained the true position of the earth and accounted for all celestial phenomena; that Kepler discovered his three laws—discoveries of such importance that the 8th of May, 1618, may be called the birth-day of modern science; that Newton gave to the world the Method of Fluxions, the Theory of Universal Gravitation, and the Decomposition of Light; that Euclid, Cavalieri, Descartes, and Leibniz, almost completed the science of mathematics; that all the discoveries in optics, hydrostatics, pneumatics and chemistry, the experiments, discoveries, and inventions of Galvani, Volta, Franklin and Morse, of Trevithick, Watt and Fulton and of all the pioneers of progress—that all this was accomplished by uninspired men, while the writer of the Pentateuch was directed and inspired by an infinite God? Is it possible that the codes of China, India, Egypt, Greece and Rome were made by man, and that the laws recorded in the Pentateuch were alone given by God? Is it possible that Æschylus and Shakespeare, Burns, and Beranger, Goethe and Schiller, and all the poets of the world, and all their wondrous tragedies and songs are but the work of men, while no intelligence except the infinite God could be the author of the Pentateuch? Is it possible that of all the books that crowd the libraries of the world, the books of science, fiction, history and song, that all save only one, have been produced by man? Is it possible that of all these, the bible only is the work of God?”
― Robert G. Ingersoll, Some Mistakes of Moses

“GIVING - Applied tithing is so rewarding. When you give away your time, talent, and treasures you create a huge shift in your prosperity consciousness. So start where you are as you reach for where it is you want to be.”
― Lisa Washington

“poets. have
the toughest job
in the universe-

of turning silence
into eloquence.”
― Sanober Khan

“A pear should come to the table popped with juice,
Ripened in warmth and served in warmth. On terms
Like these, autumn beguiles the fatalist.”
― Wallace Stevens, The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play

“Only the poet or the saint can water an asphalt pavement in the confident anticipation that lilies will reward his labour.”
― Somerset maugham, The Moon And Sixpence

“The life we’re given is on a thread, so wear it well.”
― Benny Bellamacina, The King of Rhyme

“The same word we love and hate, leaves in different directions, taking different paths.”
― Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun

“I had no more alphabet
than the journeying of the swallows,
the pure and tiny water
of the small, fiery bird
that dances rising from the pollen.”
― Pablo Neruda, Full Woman, Fleshly Apple, Hot Moon: Selected Poems

“A smiling lie is a whirlwind, easy to enter, but hard to escape.”
― Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun

“Sound unbound by nature becomes bounded by art.”
― Dejan Stojanovic

“For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word or a verse and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem. The men of more delicate ear write down these cadences more faithfully, and these transcripts, though imperfect, become the songs of the nations.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Poet

“Inside is where we meet everyone else; it's on the outside that we are truly alone.”
― Charles Simic

“God has it in for the poets, that's obvious, but the Bombaywallahs hold a special place in his dispensation.”
― Jeet Thayil, The Book of Chocolate Saints