Love Poems Or Quotes & Sayings

Pages burnt, memories buried, I wake
or think I'm awake. Or dreaming still? — Yong Shu Hoong

I can't make flowery speeches," Sir Kai began, "and I wouldn't even if I could. I won't whimper at your feet like these callow puppies that call themselves knights these days, and I don't write poetry or play the damned rebec. I don't intend to change my manners or my way of life, but if you'll have me, Connoire, I'd be obliged if you'd marry me."
The incredulous silence that struck the watching crowd was so profound that Piers could hear the peep of a chickadee in the distant forest. Lady Connoire's expression did not change. Taking a deep breath, she said, "I don't like flowery speeches, and if you ever make one to me, I'll just laugh at you. I despise simpering poems, I hate the squealing of a rebec, and we'll see whether you'll change your manners or not. I'll marry you. — Gerald Morris

Since Liz's adolescence, when viewing television commercials that celebrated the ostensibly unconditional love of mothers for their children, or on spotting merchandise in stores that honored this unique bond with poems or effusive declarations - picture frames, magnets, oven mitts - she had felt like a foreign exchange student observing the customs of another country. — Curtis Sittenfeld

I thought of all the others who had tried to tie her to the ground and failed. So I resisted showing her the songs and poems I had written, knowing that too much truth can ruin a thing. And if that meant she wasn't entirely mine, what of it? I would be the one she could always return to without fear of recrimination or question. So I did not try to win her and contented myself with playing a beautiful game. But there was always a part of me that hoped for more, and so there was a part of me that was always a fool. — Patrick Rothfuss

i over love.
i under love.

i am either a flood
or i am nothing. — AVA.

People love their fathers. Their sisters. People love dogs or songs or poems. If I've got to be the champion of something, make it something that doesn't change what it means every time someone says it. — Daniel Abraham

How is it that the poets have said so many fine things about our first love, so few about our later love? Are their first poems their best? or are not those the best which come from their fuller thought, their larger experience, their deeper-rooted affections? The boy's flute-like voice has its own spring charm; but the man should yield a richer, deeper music. — George Eliot

They are constantly colonists and emigrants ; they have the name of being at home in every country. But they are in exile in their own country. They are torn between love of home and love of
something else; of which the sea may be the explanation or may be only the symbol. It is also found in a nameless nursery rhyme which is the finest line in English literature and the dumb refrain of all English poems, 'Over the hills and far away. — G.K. Chesterton

If more people recognized the difference between friendship and mere attraction, or how love must partake of both to prosper, I expect there'd be more happy people."
"And a lot fewer poems and plays," I said, laughing as I splashed about in the scented water. — Sherwood Smith

When I worked on a magazine, I learned that there are many, many writers writing that can't write at all; and they keep on writing all the cliches and bromides and 1890 plots, and poems about Spring and poems about Love, and poems they think are modern because they are done in slang or staccato style, or written with all the 'i's' small. — Charles Bukowski

Kiss Across Time," she read. Well, that fit with the lyrics and Domhnall words. Domhnall lived through years of threat from enemies., the invasion of his country and the loss of his culture. His stories and epic poems were all full of death, glory, love, battles, dying and more... or would be, if she had ever been able to catch more than a glimpse of him from the corner of her eye, in research terms. — Teal Ceagh

I write less about alcohol, less and less and less. You 're an addict - so of course you write about the thing you love most. I loved alcohol the most, loved it more than anybody or anything. That's what I wrote about. And it certainly accounted for some great writing. But it accounted for two or three years of good writing - it would never account for 20 years of good writing. I would have turned into Charles Bukowski. He wrote 10,000 poems and 10 of them were great. — Sherman Alexie

Most common people oft he market-place much prefer light literature to improving books. The problem is, that so many romances contain slanderous anecdotes about sovereigns and ministers or cast aspersions upon man's wives and daughters so that they are packed with sex and violence. Even worse are those writers of the breeze-and-moonlight school, who corrupt the young with pornography and filth. As for books of the beauty-and-talented-scholar type, a thousand are written to a single pattern and none escapes bordering on indecency. They are filled with allusions to handsome, talented young men and beautiful, refined girls in history; but in order to insert a couple of his own love poems, the author invents stereotyped heroes and heroines with the inevitable low character to make trouble between them like a clown in a play, and makes even the slave girls talk pedantic nonsense. So all these novels are full of contradictions and absurdly unnatural. — Cao Xueqin

Sometimes in the evening when love
tunes its harp and the crickets
celebrate life, I am like a troubadour
in search of friends, loved ones,
anyone who will share with me
a bit of conversation. My loneliness
arrives ghost like and pretentious,
it seeks my soul, it is ravenous
and hurting. I admire my father
who always has advice in these matters,
but a game of chess won't do, or
the frivolity of religion.
I want to find a solution, so I
write letters, poems, and sometimes
I touch solitude on the shoulder
and surrender to a great tranquility.
I understand I need courage
and sometimes, mysteriously,
I feel whole. — Luis Omar Salinas

Mister Cameron - I have read the unexpurgated Ovid, the love poems of Sappho, the Decameron in the original, and a great many texts in Greek and Latin histories that were not though fit for proper gentlemen to read, much less proper ladies. I know in precise detail what Caligula did to, and with, his sisters, and I can quote it to you in Latin or in my own translation if you wish. I am interested in historical truth, and truth in history is often unpleasant and distasteful to those of fine sensibility. I frankly doubt that you will produce anything to shock me. — Mercedes Lackey

The makers of fortunes have a second love of money as a creation of their own, resembling the affection of authors for their own poems, or of parents for their children, besides that natural love of it for the sake of use and profit which is common to them and all men. And hence they are very bad company, for they can talk about nothing but the praises of wealth. — Plato

Poems are bullshit unless they are

teeth or trees or lemons piled

on a step. Or black ladies dying

of men leaving nickel hearts

beating them down. Fuck poems

and they are useful, wd they shoot

come at you, love what you are,

breathe like wrestlers, or shudder

strangely after pissing. We want live

words of the hip world live flesh &

coursing blood. Hearts Brains

Souls splintering fire. We want poems

like fists beating niggers out of Jocks

or dagger poems in the slimy bellies

of the owner-jews. Black poems to

smear on girdlemamma mulatto bitches

whose brains are red jelly stuck

between 'lizabeth taylor's toes. Stinking

Whores! we want "poems that kill. — Amiri Baraka

Writing the poems, I came to think that regarding is a form of love, but the regarding is not necessarily accurate. In the poems, people are always misperceiving one another. But misperceptions are a part of being alive to others. You don't need truth or beauty. All you do is perceive. That's all you need to have loved and lived fully. — Joy Katz

Poetry contains few words but tells much. Its beauty is that by being condensed it is rich in meaning and open to various interpretations. Unlike prose, there is no boundary to poetry. There is nothing concrete or black and white. Poetry is mutable; it is transformative. Poetry is the alchemy of hearts. And what cannot be said in prose can sometimes be only said through poetry. — Salil Jha

He was weary of himself, of cold ideas and brain dreams. Life a poem? Not when you went about forever poetizing about your own life instead of living it. How innocuous it all was, and empty, empty, empty! This chasing after yourself, craftily observing your own tracks
in a circle, of course.
This sham diving into the stream of life while all the time you sat angling after yourself, fishing yourself up in one curious disguise or another! If he could only be overwhelmed by something
life, love, passion
so that he could no longer shape it into poems, but had to let it shape him! — Jens Peter Jacobsen

Love knows not from where you came, what religion you are, or even your name. Discover it and you will be whole, for when you do you have found your soul. — Charles F. Glassman

When Love Was New

When love was new
and life was young,
and once we walked
in gracious sun,
I never dreamt of darker days,
or feared that fate had cruel ways.

When life was strong
and love was free,
and time was once
eternity -
we never planned for more or less,
nor stopped to think we should digress.

When love was young
and life was new,
and everything
was once our due,
I never doubted what I owned,
nor knew the cost was merely loaned.

Now love is tried
and life is old,
and still my feet
drag down the road -
not knowing where it all has gone,
nor how much more it still goes on.

But life grows new
and love gets old,
and this tired heart
stays off the cold -
not caring it compares with fools,
nor wise enough to fear the rules.
-Drea Damara — Drea Damara

He was all emotion all the time, constantly talking about his feelings and his profound love for her. He was minutes from getting his first period. He wrote poems too. It's my personal belief that if men are writing poems, they're making up for something else like a big hair back, or one ball. Not that one ball is a bad thing. Especially since I don't know any females who are dying to their their hands on a set of balls. The way I see it, the less balls, the better. — Chelsea Handler

The words of the true poems give you more than poems, they give you to form for yourself poems, religions, politics, war, peace, behavior, histories, essays, daily life, & everything else, they balance the ranks, colors, races, creeds, and the sexes, they do not seek beauty, they are sought, forever touching them or close upon them follows beauty, longing, fain, love-sick.
They prepare for death, yet they are not the finish, but rather the outset, they bring none of his or her terminus or to be content & full, whom they take they take into space to behold the birth of the stars, to learn one of the meanings, to launch off with absolute faith, to sweep through the ceaseless rings & never be quiet again. — Walt Whitman

We want to be famous as a writer, as a poet, as a painter, as a politician, as a singer, or what you will. Why? Because we really don't love what we are doing. If you loved to sing, or to paint, or to write poems, if you really loved it you would not be concerned with whether you are famous or not. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

What we had went so much deeper than a kiss. When we were together, she turned me completely inside out. It didn't matter if we were dead or alive. We could never be kept apart. There were some things more powerful than worlds or universes. She was my world, as much as I was hers. What we had, we knew. The poems are all wrong. It's a bang, a really big bang. Not a whimper. And sometimes gold can stay. Anybody who's ever been in love can tell you that. — Kami Garcia

But, in the end, a kiss is just a kiss; I have no time for love, or seasoned lips. — Phar West Nagle

There is a tender breeze
Wafting around here
Feel it from your Soul
You will see Magic over here

Did I just now hear a beautiful symphony over here ?
Or is it just your soothing words murmuring in my ear?

Is it the cute mynah bird on my shoulder?
Or is it your soft head nestling that I feel so tender?

There is a tender breeze
Wafting around here
Feel it from your Soul
You will see Magic over here...

Did I just now hear the nightingale sing around here?
Or is it the breeze whispering softly to the trees near?

Is that you giggling away to glory?
Or is that just the flowers mingling with the bees and telling their story?

There is a tender breeze
Wafting around here
Feel it from your Soul
You will see Magic over here.. — Avijeet Das

There are probably very few people who have not at some time of their lives had some quality of genius. If they have not had such, it is probable that they have also been without great sorrow or great pain. They would have needed only to live sufficiently intently for a time for some quality to reveal itself. The poems of first love are a case in point, and certainly such love is a sufficient stimulus. — Otto Weininger

hough we travel the whole over to find the perfect match,we must carry it with us a light or it's playing hard to catch. — Ana Claudia Antunes

I read everything. I'll read a John Grisham novel, I'll sit and read a whole book of poems by Maya Angelou, or I'll just read some Mary Oliver - this is a book that was given to me for Christmas. No particular genre. And I read in French, and I read in German, and I read in English. I love to see how other people use language. — Jessye Norman

I wrote a number of poems about Kah Tai lagoon, when Safeway was building that huge, ugly store down there where I used to love to watch the birds nest. That political poem, or environmental poem, was unsuccessful because Safeway built there anyway. And yet the poem has something to say today, as it did then. And I speak here only of my own poems. The agenda for every poet has to be different because most of us write from direct human experience in the world. — Sam Hamill

The time of minor poets is coming. Good-by Whitman, Dickinson, Frost. Welcome you whose fame will never reach beyond your closest family, and perhaps one or two good friends gathered after dinner over a jug of fierce red wine ... While the children are falling asleep and complaining about the noise you're making as you rummage through the closets for your old poems, afraid your wife might've thrown them out with last spring's cleaning.
It's snowing, says someone who has peeked into the dark night, and then he, too, turns toward you as you prepare yourself to read, in a manner somewhat theatrical and with a face turning red, the long rambling love poem whose final stanza (unknown to you) is hopelessly missing. — Charles Simic

It's about a love song to myself, and a love song to the universe, kind of like the way that Song of Solomon consists of love songs to God or like the way Sufi poems are erotic love songs to God, I kind of wanted something like that. Because I was getting to know myself more deeply at this point. I've always been on this track where I wanted to be enlightened. — Larkin Grimm

But although the rules are vague
And widely disregarded now
Some precepts remain: live with love -
That is a rule we all can understand;
Forgive those who need forgiveness,
Which I think is everybody, more or less;
Be kind - that, perhaps, is first and foremost
In any postmodern, new-fangled
Code we devise for ourselves;
Yes, be kind: love one another,
And most of all tend with gentleness
The small patch of terra firma
That is allocated to each of us ... — Alexander McCall Smith

those who have inherited their fortunes than of those who have acquired them; the makers of fortunes have a second love of money as a creation of their own, resembling the affection of authors for their own poems, or of parents for their children, — Plato

This was because their English teachers would wince and cover their ears and give them flunking grades and so on whenever they failed to speak like English aristocrats before the First World War. Also: they were told that they were unworthy to speak or write their language if they couldn't love or understand incomprehensible novels and poems and plays about people long ago and far away, such as Ivanhoe. *** The black people would not put up with this. They went on talking English every which way. They refused to read books they couldn't understand - on the grounds they couldn't understand them. They would ask such impudent questions as, Whuffo I want to read no Tale of Two Cities? Whuffo? — Kurt Vonnegut

I am often asked what keeps me going after all these years. I think it is the realization that there is no final struggle. Whether you win or lose, each struggle brings forth new contradictions, new and more challenging questions. As Alice Walker put it in one of my favorite poems: I must love the questions themselves as Rilke said like locked rooms full of treasures to which my blind and groping key does not yet fit.1 — Grace Lee Boggs

I can't actually explain why my lines got shorter, but they did. Just as I can't explain why my early poems were 'all image' and my current ones are relatively abstract. The sense of the line changed with the theme, somehow my ear (or brain or heart/mind) fell in love with a short line and very very simple words. — Gregory Orr

I require silence to write the way an apple tree requires winter to make fruit. Being with people is intimate and joyous, but at some point, I'll wander off by myself. The paradox is that what began in childhood as an act of necessary solitude has led me straight to a life with others, in which I fly to China or Lithuania or northern Minnesota to read my poems and talk with other people who love language made into a lathe on which a life can be tuned and be turned. — Jane Hirshfield

After the fierce midsummer all ablaze
Has burned itself to ashes, and expires
In the intensity of its own fires,
There come the mellow, mild, St. Martin days
Crowned with the calm of peace, but sad with haze.
So after Love has led us, till he tires
Of his own throes, and torments, and desires,
Comes large-eyed friendship: with a restful gaze,
He beckons us to follow, and across
Cool verdant vales we wander free from care.
Is it a touch of frost lies in the air?
Why are we haunted with a sense of loss?
We do not wish the pain back, or the heat;
And yet, and yet, these days are incomplete. — Ella Wheeler Wilcox

And the truth is that I'm not, Ed, is what I wanted to tell you. I'm not arty like everyone says who doesn't know me, I don't paint, I can't draw, I play no instrument, I can't sing. I'm not in plays, I wanted to say, I don't write poems. I can't dance except tipsy at dances. I'm not athletic, I'm not a goth or a cheerleader, I'm not treasurer or co-captain. I'm not gay and out and proud, I'm not that kid from Sri Lanka, not a triplet, a prep, a drunk, a genius, a hippie, a Christian, a slut, not even one of those super-Jewish girls with a yarmulke gang wishing everyone a happy Sukkoth. I'm not anything, this is what I realized ... I like movies, everyone knows I do
I love them
but I will never be in charge of one because my ideas are stupid and wrong in my head. There's nothing different about that, nothing fascinating, interesting, worth looking at. — Daniel Handler

There are no barriers to poetry or prophecy; by their nature they are barrier-breakers, bursts of perceptions, lines into infinity. If the poet lies about his vision he lies about himself and in himself; this produces a true barrier. — Lenore Kandel

With lines that show an unyielding dedication to craft, these poems are not afraid of meaning or the meaningful. More and more every day, the thinking American asks how she is to believe in love when there is war all about her, and in each of her deeply felt lyrics, Elyse Fenton confronts this question with the kind of tenderness one lover reserves for another. If every poem is indeed a love poem,Clamor is indeed a debut worth reading and about which we must make noise. — Jericho Brown

My poems, I think, exist in a state of tension between the love of natural beauty and the fear of natural meaninglessness or absurdity. — Hayden Carruth

I think if you put something in a file that says "war poems" or "love poems" that you already restrict the way in which the poem might move. — Rita Dove

Leaves will fall, cold will creep in
A circle of life that ends where it begins
It may take a thousand years and a thousand poems penned
But my hair will someday gray and my back will bend
Then my shadow will join my body in the earth once again.
I know not the way, or even the when
Or who chooses that day we're called away to ascend
But you bathed me in your bravery and forgave me my sins
You made a home in your heart for mine to live in
And in return, my friend, this poem is my oath that a river of love will run through it until the very end. — Ryan Winfield

There lived a poet in the lands of gold,
Wrote along poems unaffected by warmth or cold,
His words spoke truth and pen's stroke was bold,
His only motive: lives to mould — Adhish Mazumder

I am a tale, I am a book, written in different languages and styles

I can't be read, can't be understood,
neither by me nor the greatest of minds

I am too big, I am too small, to be processed or seen by the naked eye

I am too dim, I am too bright, to appear in the shadows or the sunshine. — Sanober Khan

Words
I ONCE HEARD A MAN SAY OR WAS IT SOMEWHERE I READ, OR MAYBE SOMETHING I WROTE A THOUSAND TIMES IN MY MIND. YOU GOT TO FIND YOUR OWN MEANING IN THIS WORLD. NO MATTER HOW MUCH YOU CHANGED, YOU STILL HAVE TO PAY THE PRICE FOR THE THINGS YOU HAVE DONE. AS I CONTINUE ON MY JOURNEY OR WHAT SOME CALL THE LONG ROAD OF LIFE I KNOW I WILL REMEMBER THAT SPECIAL YOU.
KNOWING I WILL SEE YOU FOREVER IN MY DREAMS IN THIS WORLD OR THE NEXT. — Don S. McClure

I guess that isn't the right word, she said. She was used to apologizing for her use of language. She had been encouraged to do a lot of that in school. Most white people in Midland City were insecure when they spoke, so they kept their sentences short and their words simple, in order to keep embarrassing mistakes to a minimum. Dwayne certainly did that. Patty certainly did that.
This was because their English teachers would wince and cover their ears and give them flunking grades and so on whenever they failed to speak like English aristocrats before the First World War. Also: they were told that they were unworthy to speak or write their language if they couldn't love or understand incomprehensible novels and poems and plays about people long ago and far away, such as Ivanhoe. — Kurt Vonnegut

Most of the books of erotic poetry available today are either too old or are big anthologies covering the same poets and poems. There is a lack of new and original work. Most of us have read something from Ovid, Sappho, Shakespeare, the ancient Greeks, the Romans, or from the Kama Sutra. But love is a theme that should be celebrated with freshness. — Salil Jha

Even though we've written epic poems and made incredible films about love, I still don't think anyone can understand what it is, or why it means everything. — Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

But it is these four heroes, whom I will discuss from time to time in this book, whose poems, novels, stories, articles, memoirs, and encyclopedias opened my eyes to the soul of the city in which I live. For these four melancholic writers drew their strength from the tensions between the past and the present, or between what Westerners like to call East and West; they are the ones who taught me how to reconcile my love for modern art and western literature with the culture of the city in which I live. — Orhan Pamuk

More or Less Love Poems #11:
No babe
We'd never
Swing together but
the syncopation
would be something wild — Diane Di Prima

And nothing holds more glory
than in dying for Love or Liberty. — Pietros Maneos

He was not such a special person. He loved to read very much, and also to write. He was a poet, and he exhibited me many of his poems. I remember many of them. They were silly, you could say, and about love. He was always in his room writing those things, and never with people. I used to tell him, What good is all that love doing on paper? I said, Let love write on you for a little. But he was so stubborn. Or perhaps he was only timid. — Jonathan Safran Foer

The moon splits open.
We move through, waterbirds rising
to look for another lake.
Or say we are living in a love-ocean,
where trust works to caulk our body-boat,
to make it last a little while,
until the inevitable shipwreck,
the total marriage, the death-union.
Dissolve in friendship,
like two drunkards fighting.
Do not look for justice here
in the jungle where your animal soul
gives you bad advice.
Drink enough wine so that you stop talking.
You are a lover, and love is a tavern
where no one makes much sense.
Even if the things you say are poems
as dense as sacks of Solomon's gold,
they become pointless. — Rumi

True love requires action. We can speak of love all day long, we can write notes or poems that proclaim it, sing songs that praise it, and preach sermons that encourage it but until we manifest that love in action, our words are nothing but sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. — Dieter F. Uchtdorf