Chinese Poetry Quotes & Sayings

In traditional Asian arts, the word and the picture always sit next to each other. I have an aunt, a Chinese brush painter, who told me that when you do a Chinese brush painting, you have to pair the image up with some poetry. — Gene Luen Yang

How to Be Alone
Remember that at any given moment
There are a thousand things
You can love — David Levithan

Men do not trip over mountains: They fall over earth mounds. — Pierre Stephen Robert Payne

The library was a great sprawling complex with rolls and rolls of paper tucked into many shelves. Between the reading rooms were courtyards with living fountains and singing birds and butterflies that would transform into handsome young women to guide or entertain anyone who stayed there any length of time. I saw one among the stacks, explaining an older style of calligraphy to the newly appointed Heavenly Marine Official of the South China Sea. In another wing, a librarian stepped from her chrysalis for the first time, reciting T'ang Dynasty poetry to the flowers. That's how I knew I was in the right section. — Larissa Lai

In poetry, I have, since very young, loved poetry in translation. The Chinese, the French, the Russians, Italians, Indians and early Celts: the formality of the translator's voice, their measured breath and anxiety moves me as it lingers over the original. — Fanny Howe

But every great scripture, whether Hebrew, Indian, Persian, or Chinese, apart from its religious value will be found to have some rare and special beauty of its own; and in this respect the original Bible stands very high as a monument of sublime poetry and of artistic prose. — Lafcadio Hearn

I did not have a very literary background. I came to poetry from the sciences and mathematics, and also through an interest in Japanese and Chinese poetry in translation. — Robert Morgan

They lay together in a sheltered place among the ruins of Brasilia while deathbeams from Chinese EMVs played like blue searchlights on broken ceramic walls. — Dan Simmons

Music pulled me like a gravitational force. I entered college as a physics major but left as a Bachelor of Music, a degree with the same practical application as, say, one in the History of Chinese Poetry. — Marshall Brickman

Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later. — Robert Morgan

... (my father) would say nothing,
And I could not find a silence
Among the one hundred Chinese silences
That would fit the one he created
Even though I was the one
Who had just made up the business
Of the one hundred Chinese silences-
The Silence of the Night Boat.
And the Silence of the Lotus,
Cousin to the Silence of the Temple Bell
Only deeper and softer ... — Billy Collins

It's really rather easy to write eighth-century Chinese poetry," said Angus Lordie. "In English, of course. It requires little effort, I find. — Alexander McCall Smith

I'm basically a poetry scholar, and I'm happier here in my studio with my row of Chinese dictionaries than I am, frankly, at Lincoln Center. — Sam Hamill

My Father Still Sleeping After Surgery
In spite of himself,
my father loved me. In spite
of the hands that beat me, in spite
of the mouth that kept silent, in spite
of the face that turned cruel
as a gold Chinese king,
he could not control the love
that came out of him.
The body is monumental, a colossus
through which he breathes.
His hands crawl over his stomach
jerkily as sand crabs on five legs;
he makes a fist
like the fist of a newborn. — Toi Derricotte

Looking back on my life, I'd say I am grateful to my two sons for having brought me up. It could not have been easy - for them or for their father. For me it was a "Poetry Workshop," a way of doing poetry by another means (in no sense a continuation of Iowa) - as well as the sort of upbringing I never got from my mother.

As luck would have it, I had a poet, a classical poet, for a mother. She didn't write free verse; she wrote poetry until the last years of her life in the classical Chinese style. So a lot of work was done for me - when you imbibe Tang and Sung poets with a mother who chanted verses on the balcony in the moonlight. — Wong May

Is it a comb, a fan, a torn dress, a curtain, a bed, an empty rice-bin? It hardly seems to matter. The Chinese poet makes a heart-breaking poetry out of these quite as naturally as Keats did out of the song of a nightingale heard in a spring garden. It is rarely dithyrambic, rarely high-pitched: part of its charm is its tranquility, its self-control. And the humblest reads it with as much emotion as the most learned. — Conrad Aiken

a generation:
the black night gave me black eyes
still I use them to seek the light — Gu Cheng

Our faith institutions have the best product that God can offer; but we have the worst customer service imaginable. — Johnnie Dent Jr.

We are what we make ourselves — Genevieve Cogman

The rush to California, for instance, and the attitude, not merely of merchants, but of philosophers and prophets, so called, in relation to it, reflect the greatest disgrace on mankind. That so many are ready to live by luck, and so get the means of commanding the labor of others less lucky, without contributing any value to society! And that is called enterprise! — Henry David Thoreau

Siege

This I do, being mad:
Gather baubles about me,
Sit in a circle of toys, and all the time
Death beating the door in.

White jade and an orange pitcher,
Hindu idol, Chinese god, -
Maybe next year, when I'm richer -
Carved beads and a lotus pod...

And all this time
Death beating the door in. — Edna St. Vincent Millay

I really dig The Byrds. I think they are the most underrated - in their original form - pop group. — Bruce Johnston

Ode to Love
Lin Huiyin

I think you are the April of this world,
Sure, you are the April of this world.
Your laughter has lit up all the wind,
So gently mingling with the spring.

You are the clouds in early spring,
The dusk wind blows up and down.
And the stars blink now and then,
Fine rain drops down amid the flowers.

So gentle and graceful,
You are crowned with garlands.
So sublime and innocent,
You are a full moon over each evening.

The snow melts, with that light yellow,
You look like the first budding green.
You are the soft joy of white lotus
Rising up in your fancy dreamland.

You're the blooming flowers over the trees,
You're a swallow twittering between the beams;
Full of love, full of warm hope,
You are the spring of this world! — Lin Huiyin