Poet Quotes
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I think it better that in times like these a poet's mouth be silent, for in truth we have no gift to set a statesman right.
William Butler Yeats
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A poet is a good citizen turned inside out.
William Butler Yeats
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If politicians can't do it, I want to do it. We have to do it. Artists, put it in paintings. Poets, put it in poems, novels. That's what we have to do. And I think it's so important to save the world.
Michael Jackson
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Every good poet includes a critic, but the reverse is not true.
William Shenstone
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Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and falls again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet.
Virginia Woolf
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Each poet creates an expatriate space, a slightly skewed domain where things are freshly felt because they are freshly said.
Alice Fulton
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Nay, what is worse, perhaps turn poet, which, they say, is an infectious and incurable distemper.
Miguel de Cervantes
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I remember I was very taken with a book called DreamTigers by Jorge Luis Borges. He was at the University of Texas, Austin, and they collected some of his writings and put them in a little collection. It's called DreamTigers in English, but it doesn't exist in Spanish. It's a little sampler. But that collection in English is what struck me, because in there he has his poems, and I was a poet as well as a fiction writer.
Sandra Cisneros
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Have big dreams but focus only on what you can control: your own thoughts, words and actions. This was Gandhi's way ... in the words of Buddhist poet Gary Snyder, our job is to move the world a millionth of an inch.
Eboo Patel
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There is nothing dictators hate so much as that unassailable, eternally elusive, eternally provoking gleam. One of the main reasons why the very gallant Russian poet Gumilev was put to death by Lenin's ruffians thirty odd years ago was that during the whole ordeal, in the prosecutor's dim office, in the torture house, in the winding corridors that led to the truck, in the truck that took him to the place of execution, and at that place itself, full of the shuffling feet of the clumsy and gloomy shooting squad, the poet kept smiling.
Vladimir Nabokov
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I like to mix it up, because the kind of comments you can get from a fiction writer about your poetry are going to be very different than what you'll get from a poet.
Sandra Cisneros
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I am not a nature poet. There is almost always a person in my poems.
Robert Frost
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With Ameen Rihani the matter is diametrically opposite to Alois Musil's Arabian Desert, in purpose, in point of view and, above all, in personal psychology... I have considerable admiration for Mr. Rihani as a writer, an authentic poet and a philosopher.
William Seabrook
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I look at you and you look at me and deep in our hearts know it That you weren't much of a muse, but then I weren't much of a poet...
Nick Cave
The Birthday Party
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Academia is a graveyard of poets.
Kathleen Raine
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Her pleasure in the walk must arise from the exercise and the day, from the view of the last smiles of the year upon the tawny leaves and withered hedges, and from repeating to herself some few of the thousand poetical descriptions extant of autumn-that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness-that season which has drawn from every poet worthy of being read some attempt at description, or some lines of feeling.
Jane Austen
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Anybody who instantly goes from being a poet and a graduate student to being a public figure has to be in a state of shock. First people want to praise you, and then they want to attack you. No one can prepare you for it.
Erica Jong
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[Thanatopsis] was written in 1817, when Bryant was 23. Had he died then, the world would have thought it had lost a great poet. But he lived on.
William Cullen Bryant