Poetry Quotes
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Let my life as Poet begin. I want the life of the Poet. I have labored for over twelve years, one thousand pages of prose. Now, I want the easiness of poetry. The brevity of the poem.
Maxine Hong Kingston
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For one thing is needful: that a human being should attain satisfaction with himself, whether it be by means of this or that poetry or art; only then is a human being at all tolerable to behold. Whoever is dissatisfied with himself is constantly ready for revenge, and we others will be his victims, if only by having to endure his ugly sight.
Friedrich Nietzsche
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Women who are inclined to write poetry at all are inspired by being mad at something.
Amy Clampitt
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To be poet laureate is to try to spread the love and the accessibility of poetry to young people.
Jacqueline Woodson
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Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
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Palestinian society is filled with poetry, but not experimental poetry. The Palestinian poetry that people know is not the modernist experimentations, it's certain kinds of poetry that lends itself to recitation and song and things like that.
Elliott Colla
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The reverie we intend to study is poetic reverie. This is a reverie which poetry puts on the right track, the track an expanding consciousness follows. This reverie is written, or, at least, promises to be written. It is already facing the great universe of the blank page. Then images begin to compose and fall into place.
Gaston Bachelard
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I thought a bit of poetry might be interesting - I even write a few lines myself. I composed a short poem for my mum's 70th birthday recently. When I recited it I saw the glint of a tear in her eye...although I guess it wasn't the quality of the poetry was that making her cry!
Iain Dowie
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All myth is an enriched pattern, a two-faced proposition, allowing its operator to say one thing and mean another, to lead a double life. Hence the notion found early in ancient thought that all poets are liars. And from the true lies of poetry trickled out a question. What really connects words and things?
Anne Carson
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Of all the arts poetry (which owes its origin almost entirely to genius and will least be guided by precept or example) maintains the first rank.
Immanuel Kant
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Where I come from, we sing poetry.
Derek Walcott
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I write poetry, and I put it to a beat - I mean, that's what they call rap.
Keith Stanfield
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If your language lacks poetry and paradox, it’s unequal to the task of accounting for actuality. Otherwise anything radically new is literally unspeakable.
Bob Black
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In Lithuania, I am known as a poet, and they don't care about my cinema. In Europe, they don't know my poetry; in Europe, I am a filmmaker. But here, in the United States, I am only a maverick!
Jonas Mekas
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I shall have poetry in my life. And adventure. And love, love, love, above all. Love as there has never been in a play. Unbiddable, ungovernable, like a riot in the heart and nothing to be done, come ruin or rapture.
Tom Stoppard
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Even the people who have had success and made money writing these books of fiction seem to feel the need to pretend it's no big deal, or part of a natural progression from poetry to fiction, but often it's really just about the money, the perceived prestige.
George Murray
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Of pure poetry there are two kinds, that which mirrors the beauty of the world in which our bodies are, and that which builds the more mysterious kingdoms where geography ends and fairyland begins, with gods and heroes at war, and the sirens singing still, and Alph going down to the darkness from Xanadu.
Lord Dunsany
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I write all the time - I write poetry, I love to write.
Colin Quinn
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The residue of religion in my work appears as a modified transcendentalism, and the positivist scientific side of my thought appears as concreteness and realism. The effort to reconcile the two is at the core of all my poetry.
Louis Dudek
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I was actually a poetry major in college before I punted and decided to become a theater major. I wrote the poem that we put on the sauerkraut boxes in the style of Elling.
Denis O'Hare
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Italian is the language of song. German is good for philosophy and English for poetry. French is best at precision; it has a rigour to it.
Maurice Druon
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Poetry [is] more necessary than ever as a fire to light our tongues.
Naomi Shihab Nye
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And my father was a comic. He could play any musical instrument. He loved to perform. He was a wonderfully comedic character. He had the ability to dance and sing and charm and analyze poetry.
Lynn Johnston
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I was influenced by surrealist poetry and painting as were thousands of other people, and it seems to me to have become a part of the way I write, but it's not.
Kenneth Koch