Poetry Quotes
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Everyone sort of sees his own life and times as being ephemeral. One thinks that everything good or important that happened, happened in the past. But I think that seeing scenes that you are used to, but with the heightening effects of poetry, perhaps makes you value your life and times more than you might otherwise do.
Vikram Seth -
Poetry is one of the destinies of speech... One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.
Gaston Bachelard
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Usually, I am a compulsive person, and I need - sometimes urgently - to paint... Painting is close to poetry, is a kind of poetry expressed visually. It has to be spontaneous, rapid - at least in my case.
Etel Adnan -
I published only in academic journals in philosophy until I was in my 40s, but I had been writing fiction and poetry my whole adult life - without ever once trying to publish it, and rarely letting anyone read it.
Cheryl Mendelson -
One can't write for all readers. A poet cannot write for people who don't like poetry.
Nathalie Sarraute -
To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.
Gaston Bachelard -
When I'm not working, I'm on the road with my band. Or I'm performing in poetry houses doing spoken work. So I've got another passion and another outlet that allows me to be creatively fulfilled and not sitting at home pulling my hair out waiting for the right role to come along.
Malcolm-Jamal Warner -
I am resigned to the fact that people who don't know me loathe me. Perhaps it is because I am a woman writing poetry. It must be annoying to a man who wants to write to see this horrid old lady who can.
Edith Sitwell
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I've always felt that poetry was particularly erotic, more than prose was... I say that you read poems not with your eyes and not with your ears, but with your mouth. You taste it.
Donald Hall -
Traditional matter must be glorified, since it would be easier to listen to the re-creation of familiar stories than to quite new and unexpected things; the listeners, we must remember, needed poetry chiefly as the re-creation of tired hours.
Lascelles Abercrombie -
I've always had a love for poetry and when I got signed to a record label I thought, 'How odd that I'm doing a record before a book of poetry,'
Jewel Kilcher -
Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.
Samuel Johnson -
The reason can only be this: heroic poetry depends on an heroic age, and an age is heroic because of what it is, not because of what it does.
Lascelles Abercrombie -
Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed. Their highest merit is suggestiveness.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That's how I get my kicks.
Ed Koch -
Every now and then I read a poem that does touch something in me, but I never turn to poetry for solace or pleasure in the way that I throw myself into prose.
Joanne Rowling -
I don't believe that poetry is in danger because nobody wants to read it or appreciate it. There is a tremendous audience for it on any given day or night. You just have to know where to look.
Derek Walcott -
The poet existed among the cave men; he will exist among men of the atomic age, for he is an inherent part of man. Even religions have been born from the need for poetry, which is a spiritual need, and it is through the grace of poetry that the divine spark lives forever in the human flint.
Saint-John Perse -
When a great poet has lived, certain things have been done once for all, and cannot be achieved again.
T. S. Eliot -
And how can poetry stand up against its new conditions? Its position is perfectly precarious.
John Crowe Ransom
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Dreams are the food of human progress. Poetry, like all physics, ultimately quantifies the unquantifiable that is beyond all form.
Vanna Bonta -
Poetry isn't a profession, it's a way of life. It's an empty basket; you put your life into it and make something out of that.
Mary Oliver -
It is a way we reassess our past. We can do that in poetry in ways we can't do in prose.
Peter Davison -
As human beings, we are the only organisms that create for the sheer stupid pleasure of doing so. Whether it's laying out a garden, composing a new tune on the piano, writing a bit of poetry, manipulating a digital photo, redecorating a room, or inventing a new chili recipe - we are happiest when we are creating.
Gary Hamel