Poetry Quotes
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Against barbarity, poetry can resist only by confirming its attachment to human fragility like a blade of grass growing on a wall while armies march by.
Mahmoud Darwish
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My poems tend to be more celebratory and lyrical, and the novels so far pretty dark. Poetry doesn't seem to me to be an appropriate tool for exploring that.
John Burnside
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Eroticism is first and foremost a thirst for otherness. And the supernatural is the supreme otherness. 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.
Octavio Paz
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One can't write for all readers. A poet cannot write for people who don't like poetry.
Nathalie Sarraute
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A true account of the actual is the rarest poetry, for common sense always takes a hasty and superficial view.
Henry David Thoreau
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I spent many years of my life as an economist and demographer. I was finally distracted by writing my novels and poetry. I'm enormously happy that was the case. I feel that with writing I have found my metier.
Vikram Seth
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And how can poetry stand up against its new conditions? Its position is perfectly precarious.
John Crowe Ransom
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Poetry is an art, the easiest to dabble in, but the hardest to reach true excellence.
J. G. Stedman
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I think the first time I really heard poetry was in the schoolyard. Just the little limericks that kids say when they're jumping rope and playing games. I think that's the first time I heard rhyming words - I don't know if I'd call that the definitive poetry, but that's when I heard rhyming words said and not necessarily sung.
Jill Scott
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Only those ignorant of what poetry means will ask the question: what is it good for?
Orson F. Whitney
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As a direct line to human feeling, empathic experience, genuine language and detail, poetry is everything that headline news is not. It takes us inside situations, helps us imagine life from more than one perspective, honors imagery and metaphor - those great tools of thought - and deepens our confidence in a meaningful world.
Naomi Shihab Nye
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If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.
Rachel Carson
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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.
Pablo Neruda
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Reading poetry gives me a sense of calm, well-being, and love for humanity - the same stuff more flexible women get from yoga.
J. Courtney Sullivan
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I started writing poetry in high school because I wanted desperately to write, but somehow, writing stories didn't appeal to me, and I loved the flow and the feel and sense of poetry, especially that of what one might call formal verse.
L. E. Modesitt
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There is no poetry where there are no mistakes.
Joy Harjo
