I Want You Poems Quotes & Sayings

When I tell my family I want to be a writer, they smile and say, We see you in the backyard with your writing. They say, We hear you making up all those stories. And, We used to write poems. And, It's a good hobby, we see how quiet it keeps you. They say, But maybe you should be a teacher, a lawyer, do hair . . . I'll think about it, I say. And maybe all of us know this is just another one of my stories. — Jacqueline Woodson

every choice i have ever made after you existed
has been dependent on exactly
how close i can have you next to me
and how long i can get you to stay. — AVA.

I can already feel some things slipping through my fingers like sand and water, like artifacts and poems, like everything you want to hold on to and can't. — Ally Condie

Lying in bed, my body and soul bruised and tired, I realize that the Officials are right. Once you want something, everything changes. Now I want everything. More and more and more. I want to pick my work position. Marry who I choose. Eat pie for breakfast and run down a real street instead of on a tracker. Go fast when I want and slow when I want. Decide which poems I want to read and what words I want to write. There is so much that I want. I feel it so much that I am water, a river of want, pooled in the shape of a girl named Cassia. — Ally Condie

I can't go on flying apart just for those who want the benefit of a few verbal kicks. My God, do you know what poems like that cost? They're not written vicariously: they come out of actual suffering, real madness. — Theodore Roethke

If you want to write poetry, you must have poems that deeply move you. Poems you can't live without. I think of a poem as the blood in a blood transfusion, given from the heart of the poet to the heart of the reader. Seek after poems that live inside you, poems that move through your veins. — Ralph Fletcher

When I first encountered the poems of Jon Woodward, I was stunned into the state that is my life's joy-I was in the presence of the inimitable. Uncanny Valley extends that experience-almost into another dimension. These apocalyptic, pixilated poems forge a mythology of our ravaged culture, one that might have been written in the future. If you want poetry to give you a persimmon on a plate, look elsewhere; if you want to know what happens when seven trees fall on the highway and the story is told by a stutterer, this is the book, and it could only have been written by Woodward. — Mary Ruefle

Poet, do you think a melody would compliment one of you poems? I was fixing to compose one, fiddling with ideas in my head, but...would that make it a song and not a poem anymore? And I'm not saying I'll jot the tune down, but if I did, if you wanted it...that is to say, if you agreed, would that mean the poem has died? I don't want my lute to kill it, you see. Only when does a poem stop being a poem? Can it be a song, too?" He dropped his head and spoke to my boots. "Can they blend together?"
If only he were truly referring to artistry. — Natalia Jaster

everything i know about love
is that it hurts
and is almost always never returned
the way you want it to.

but i have hope
because i do not know everything. — AVA.

I simply don't want the poems mixed up with my life or opinions or picture or any other regrettable concomitants. I look like a bear and live in a cave; but you should worry. — Randall Jarrell

I do not believe in the government of the lash, if any one of you ever expects to whip your children again, I want you to have a photograph taken of yourself when you are in the act, with your face red with vulgar anger, and the face of the little child, with eyes swimming in tears and the little chin dimpled with fear, like a piece of water struck by a sudden cold wind. Have the picture taken. If that little child should die, I cannot think of a sweeter way to spend an autumn afternoon than to go out to the cemetery, when the maples are clad in tender gold, and little scarlet runners are coming, like poems of regret, from the sad heart of the earth - and sit down upon the grave and look at that photograph, and think of the flesh now dust that you beat. I tell you it is wrong; it is no way to raise children! Make your home happy. Be honest with them. Divide fairly with them in everything. — Robert G. Ingersoll

I want a marriage of companions - one of shared lives and shared poems,' he murmured. 'If we were husband and wife, we would collect books, read, and drink tea together. As I told you before, I'd want you for what's in here.'
Again he pointed to my heart, but I felt it in a place far lower in my body. — Lisa See

I thought leaving you would be easy,
just walking out the door
but I keep getting pinned against it
with my legs around your waist and it's like
my lips want you like my lungs want air,
it's just what they where born to do so
I am sitting at work thinking of you
cutting vegetables in my kitchen
your hair in my shower drain
your fingers on my spine in the morning
while we listen to Muddy Waters, I know
you will never be the one I call home
but the way you talk about poems
like marxists talk of revolution
it makes me want to keep trying.
I'm still looking for reasons to love you.
I'm still looking for proof you love me. — Clementine Von Radics

I am preparing myself for death. When I go to sleep, I try to keep myself smiling. So that when I die, I have a smile on my lips. I want an electric cremation. I don't want any poems or fuss after that. And for heaven's sake, don't bring back my ashes. Flush them down the toilet if the crematorium refuses to keep them. If they tell you that I am dead, I want you to give a big laugh. — Zohra Sehgal

They want to know
who I write these poems for.
Tell them it's for all lovers
because I don't see a difference
between our love
and their love. — Kamand Kojouri

When I was a boy, I choked on a piece of candy outside the kitchen window for a few minutes while watching my parents making dinner. I thought I was going to die, but I didn't want to scare them. Our existence was so separate, a dying and a doing well, an outside and an inside. Trey Moody's poems hover in that cold, wet, refrigerator-lit place between the dying and the doing well, the outside and the inside. His poems are the thoughts of the person you love who is always standing behind you, slowly and silently suffocating. But they're not afraid to say hello, and please, and I'm scared. — Zachary Schomburg

I want to write poems that are natural, luminous, deep, spare. I dream of an art so transparent that you can look through and see the world. — Stanley Kunitz

Part of the reason that these attempts at explanation fail, I think, is that photographers, like all artists, choose their medium because it allows them the most fully truthful expression of their vision ... as Robert Frost told a person who asked him what one of his poems meant, 'You want me to say it worse?' — Robert Adams

i'm so hooked
on how your mind works,
on what you notice,
on everything that excites you.
i'm so caught up in
how you see the world,
how you see everything
and still offer up your love
for all to take it.

you give me a glimpse of your heart
and i can't tell you
how much you turn me on. — AVA.

Peter Conners stunning prose poems are packed with keen sensitivity, dreaminess, and wit. I love his time travels, the vibrant layering of image and detail. Try taking walks as you are reading this book- the dazzle of landscapes, inner and outer, feel replenished and rich. This is language and vision I want to come home to again and again. — Naomi Shihab Nye

I love you in my very own way.
Like a stone loves the mosses around it
Like a sea loves the pebbles in it
Like a coincidence ...
Taking you as the way you are,
With all the bruises, scars and broken parts all around you and your heart.
I love you in my very own way
By throwing the stone, the mosses, the sea and the pebbles to your head
Like i want to kill you.
Just because of envying the love
That my heart spend on you. — Arzum Uzun

You can say no if you dun' wanna do it," he finally says, "but I was thinkin' maybe you could teach me to read."
"Shit, Jimmy, I just gave away my reading slate to Bill."
"I know it," he says, "but I didn't wanna read none of that stuff anyhow."
"Then what did you want to read?"
"I wanna read those poems you said you might write."
I can't help but smile so wide my cheeks hurt.
"Okay, Jimmy. I'm going to write you a poem for your birthday, and then I'm going to teach you how to read it. — Ryan Winfield

Did you know Grandfather would give the poems to me?" I ask.
"We thought he might," my mother says.
"Why didn't you stop him?"
"We didn't want to take away your choices," my mother says.
"But Grandfather never did tell me about the Rising," I say.
"I think he wanted you to find your own way," my mother says. She smiles. "In that way, he was a true rebel. I think that's why he chose that argument with your father as his favorite memory. Though he was upset when the fight happened, later he came to see that your father was strong in choosing his own path, and he admired him for it. — Ally Condie

I said it before and I'll say it again: books are dead, plays are dead, poems are dead: there's only movies.
Music is still okay, because music is sound track. Ten, fifteen years ago, every arts student wanted to be a novelist or a playwright. I'd be amazed if you could find a single one now with such a dead-end ambition. They all want to make movies. Not write movies. You don't write movies. You make movies. — Stephen Fry

Emily Kendal Frey's The Grief Performance is a book that condenses a journey of finding and re-finding loss into beautiful packages. The packages are the poems and they sit shiny and new on every page of this fabulous and generous book. I want to go into the world that these poems create, just so that I can be given these terrifying presents again and again. I know you will, too. See you there. — Dorothea Lasky

i want so much to touch you
where my hands cannot. — AVA.

Ah men, why do you want all this attention? I can write poems for myself, make love to a doorknob if absolutely necessary. What do you have to offer me I can't find otherwise except humiliation? Which I no longer need. — Margaret Atwood

I'm interested in connecting with readers and strangers through poetry. I want to create real intimacy with my poems. Whether I do that through pulling from my personal life or using my fantasy life - or say history, whether that history is personal history or our collective histories - what's important is that an experience is created. An experience that will hopefully matter to people and feel real. I want my poems to move people and make them want to live their lives, however complicated and impossible those lives may be. I think a poem can speak to the life you currently live but also to the lives you've lived before, the ones to come and also those you've yet to imagine. What else can do that? Not sex or money or other people. — Alex Dimitrov

I want to be clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you'd get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy. — Nikki Giovanni

Your poems are rather hard to understand, whereas your paintings are so easy. Easy? Of course - you paint flowers and girls and sunsets; things that everybody understands. I never met him. Who? Everybody. Did you ever hear of nonrepresentational painting? I am. Pardon me? I am a painter, and painting is nonrepresentational. Not all painting. No: housepainting is representational. And what does a housepainter represent? Ten dollars an hour. In other words, you don't want to be serious - It takes two to be serious. — E. E. Cummings

Everyone's taste is different. But I think the best way to defend against regrets after opening night is to try your best to tell the story you want to tell. In terms of smaller changes over time, I think good plays are like poems. Every syllable counts. — Stephen Karam

I tended to write poems about both social and spiritual problems, and some problems one doesn't really want to solve, and so the problems themselves are solved. You certainly don't want to solve problems in poems that haven't been solved in the world. — C. K. Williams

You ask me. You have asked others before this. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are upset when certain editors reject your work. Now (since you have said you want my advice) I beg you to stop doing that sort of thing. You are looking outside, and that is what you should most avoid right now. No one can advise or help you - no one — Rainer Maria Rilke

The Mania Speaks


You clumsy bootlegger. Little daffodil.
I watered you with an ocean and you plucked one little vein?
Downed a couple bottles of pills and got yourself carted off to the ER?
I gifted you the will of gunpowder, a matchstick tongue, and all you managed
was a shredded sweater and a police warning?
You should be legend by now.
Girl in an orange jumpsuit, a headline.
I built you from the purest napalm, fed you wine and bourbon.
Preened you in the dark, hammered lullabies into your thin skull.
I painted over the walls, wrote the poems. I shook your goddamn boots.
Now you want out? Think you'll wrestle me out of you with prescriptions?
A good man's good love and some breathing exercises?
You think I can't tame that? I always come home. Always.
Ravenous. Loaded. You know better than anybody:
I'm bigger than God. — Jeanann Verlee

And look, my brother, we learned to talk
very quietly and simply.
We understand each other now - there is no need for anything more.
And I say tomorrow we will become still simpler;
we'll find those words that take on the same weight in all hearts, on all lips so that we can call figs figs, and a trough a trough, so that others will smile and say: 'We're making you a hundred poems an hour'. This is what we want too.
Because we do not sing to separate ourselves from people, my brother,
we sing to bring people together. — Yiannis Ritsos

I've been an inveterate reader of literary magazines since I was a teenager. There are always discoveries. You're sitting in your easy chair, reading; you realize you've read a story or a group of poems four times, and you know, Yes, I want to go farther with this writer. — Marilyn Hacker

As for all your latest Mayan discoveries and poems, I want to hear every word of it if you want to transmit it, or tell it when we meet, but don't expect me to get excited by anything anymore. — Jack Kerouac

I want you to judge me without thinking about it.
I want you to give me advice without considering my opinion.
I want you to expecting anything without the need to trust me.
I want you to decide for me with all the care in the world.
I want you to help me without smothering me.
I want you to decide without seeing my point of view.
I want you to hug me without holding me...
I want you to feel protected in my presence without me having to lie.
I want you to be close without suffocating me.
I want you to know everything without knowing anything...
I want you to know that both love and friendship should always be Unconditional. — Stefan Dimov

Ruskin says that anyone who expects perfection from a work of art knows nothing of works of art. This is an appealing sentence that, so far as I can see, is not true about a few pictures and statues and pieces of music, short stories and short poems. Whether or not you expect perfection from them, you get it; at least, there is nothing in them that you would want changed. But what Ruskin says is true about novels: anyone who expects perfection from even the greatest novel knows nothing of novels. — Randall Jarrell

What I want to know is how you go on when you look around
and don't see anywhere you want to go without the only person
you can't have. — Charlotte Eriksson

I do not just want you at your best.
I almost do not care
where your Happiness lives,
but please,
let me visit your pain?

Take me to the place
where your sadness goes,
and show me the tragedy
that no one knows. — Meraaqi

I have seen your
darkest nights
and brightest days
and I want you to know
that I will be here
forever
loving you
in dusk. — Atticus Poetry

And I knew that in spite of all the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showered on a woman before he married her, what he secretly wanted when the wedding service ended was for her to flatten out underneath his feet like Mrs. Willard's kitchen mat ... I also remembered Buddy Willard saying in a sinister, knowing way that after I had children I would feel differently, I wouldn't want to write poems any more. So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state. — Sylvia Plath

I can't help but notice that you keep writing love poetry to my wife. Well, you see, I married her, which makes her my wife. You know what you might want to try? Writing some poems about the sunset. The sunset isn't fucking married. — A. J. Jacobs