Poet Quotes
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I prefer poems that occupy an imaginative sphere. When I lived in Cincinnati, I was occasionally referred to as an "Ohio Poet;" this made me uneasy, not only because I think of myself as a generally American poet but also because I like to think I write out of the country of my own mind.
Cate Marvin
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Where are the leaders?' Sapphique asked. 'In the fortresses,' the swan replied. 'And the poets?' 'Lost in dreams of other worlds.' 'And the craftsmen?' 'Forging machines to challenge the darkness.' 'And the Wise, who made the world?' The swan lowered its black neck sadly. 'Dwindled to crones and sorcerers in towers.
Catherine Fisher
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To the poet, his travels, his adventures, his loves, his indignations are finally resolved in verse, and this, in the end becomes his permanent, indestructible life.
William Jay Smith
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Constancy will always be the genius of love, the indication of that strength which constitutes the poet. A man should possess all women in his wife, like those squalid poetasters of the seventeenth century who made fair Irises and dazzling Chloes of their lowly Manons.
Honore de Balzac
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All poetry has to do is to make a strong communication. All the poet has to do is listen. The poet is not an important fellow. There will also be another poet.
Stevie Smith
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The only advice [for new writers and poets] I can offer is to be yourself: not the self someone else wants you to be, but the self you are. Enjoy yourself and your life. But most of all travel and eat. That's how we learn.
Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni, Jr.
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Through the ingenuousness of her age beamed an ardent mind, a mind not of the women but of the poet; she did not please, she intoxicated.
Alexandre Dumas
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a person hoping to become a poet must have the capacity of thinking of several things at a time.
Vladimir Nabokov
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In some ways painters have been more important in my life than writers. Painters teach you how to see—a faculty that usually isn’t highly developed in poets. Whether you take a walk in the woods with a painter, or go to a museum with one, through them you notice shapes, colors, harmonies, relationships that enhance your own seeing.
Carolyn Kizer
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If I can only be known as one thing, then, well, I guess it would be poet and performer and teacher.
Juan Felipe Herrera
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Well, you could almost say, I suppose, that the scientist seeks what is similar between any two days, or bluebirds, or glaciers. And the poet seeks what is different. The artist seeks to celebrate the unique.
Terence McKenna
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The poet may say or sing, not as things were, but as they ought to have been; but the historian must pen them, not as they ought to have been, but as they really were.
Miguel de Cervantes
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Truth is far and flat, and fancy is fiery; and truth is cold, and people feel the cold, and they may wrap themselves against it in fancies that are fiery, but they should not call them facts; and, generally, poets do not; they are shrewd, they feel the cold, too, but they know a hawk from a handsaw, a fact from a fancy, as none knows better.
Stevie Smith
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The nature of rumor is well known to all. It was your own poet who said: 'Rumor, an evil surpassing all evils in speed.'
Tertullian
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Let the poet dream his dreams. Yet, the poet must look at the world; must enter into other men's lives; must look at the earth and the sky, must examine the dust in the street; must walk through the world and his mirror.
William Baziotes
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Coleridge received the Person from Porlock
And ever after called him a curse,
Then why did he hurry to let him in?
He could have hid in the house.
Stevie Smith