Poems You Are My Everything Quotes & Sayings

In every one of these haunting and hungry poems, Howell draws a map for how to enter the heat and dew of the human being, naked and facing the natural world, desperate to feel. I did not realize while reading Render how deeply I was handing everything over. — Nikky Finney

[John Clare's] father was a casual farm labourer, his family never more than a few days' wages from the poorhouse. Clare himself, from early childhood, scraped a living in the fields. He was schooled capriciously, and only until the age of 12, but from his first bare contact fell wildly in love with the written word. His early poems are remarkable not only for the way in which everything he sees flares into life, but also for his ability to pour his mingled thoughts and observations on to the page as they occur, allowing you, as perhaps no other poet has done, to watch the world from inside his head. Read The Nightingale's Nest, one of the finest poems in the English language, and you will see what I mean.
("John Clare, poet of the environmental crisis 200 years ago" in The Guardian.) — George Monbiot

My poems and prose are not often in direct conversation with each other, but there's so much crossover - everything that comes out of that crucible of language - that working in poetry and prose is energizing - to me as a writer and to the work itself. — Alex Lemon

You told me once
about how they used
to build whole city states
out of poems
how everything you see here
is made out of
the bones of dreams
how having a stiff
drink with lorca meant
you had to write
everything down right away
lately the words just
won't come — John Dorsey

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

When I was 13, I started writing songs, and it fell into my lap all of a sudden. I wrote poems and journals, but that's when it switched for me to songwriting. That's when I wanted to do everything. It was like a fire all of a sudden. I started coming to Nashville and moved here when I was 15. — Kelsea Ballerini

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

EVERYTHING
WE
LOVE
IS
WELL
ARRANGED
DUST.

- ATTICUS — Atticus Poetry

I keep all my poems in my journals and lock them away. They are the start of everything. — Stevie Nicks

William Spiver said that the universe was expanding ... that means there will be more of everything! More cheese puffs, more jelly sandwiches, more words, more poems, more love. And more giant donuts ... maybe even gianter donuts. Is gianter a word? It should be. — Kate DiCamillo

The poems turned up everywhere. Soon the lady of the house went into fits of hysteria when she kept discovering this attack of poetry in the most unlikely places - under doors, in the mother-of-pearl latticework of windowpanes, under jars, stones, flowerpots, loaves of bread, and even delivered by homing pigeons, around whose rose-coloured claws the young matador lovingly wound poems in which he declaimed his love in the quaint language whose provenance was unknown to the world and still evoked images of the uninterrupted empires of Visigiths, the unbridled lust of the Huns and the intransigence of the Berbers. The young maiden recognized only a few words, but to her they were fragments of a secret music: zirimiri, fine rain; senaremaztac, husband and wife; nik behar diren guzian eginen ditut, I shall do everything necessary ... — Eric Gamalinda

Begin. Keep on beginning. Nibble on everything.
Take a hike. Teach yourself to whistle. Lie.
The older you get the more they'll want your stories.
Make them up. Talk to stones. Short-out electric
fences. Swim with the sea turtle into the moon. Learn
how to die. Eat moonshine pie. Drink wild geranium
tea. Run naked in the rain. Everything that happens
will happen and none of us will be safe from it.
Pull up anchors. Sit close to the god of night.
Lie still in a stream and breathe water. Climb to the
top of the highest tree until you come to the branch
where the blue heron sleeps. Eat poems for breakfast.
Wear them on your forehead. Lick the mountain's
bare shoulder. Measure the color of days
around your mother's death. Put your hands over
your face and listen to what they tell you. — Ellen Kort

I reached for the notebook which was always close by. All thoughts of composing epic poems of Greek heroes had left me. The words that often burst from my onto the paper in recent days would be considered mere nothings to the world, but they were everything to me ... They were the pourings of my heart FOR my heart ... — Nancy Moser

The gestures poems make are the same as the gestures of ritual injunction - curse; exorcism; prayer; underlying everything perhaps, the attempt to make someone or something live again. Both poet and shaman make a model that stands for the whole. Substitution, symbolic substitution. The mind conceives that something lived, or might live. Implicit is the demand to understand. The memorial that is ward and warning. Without these ancient springs poems are merely more words. — Frank Bidart

The other chief love- and how similar it was to science, and how different- was reading. As soon as she realized the figures on the page meant something- could be strung together as words, and then sentences, and then paragraphs- she was covetous of the whole system. It seemed a new universe to her. And it was. Everything opened up. Some stories were meant to inform, and others were meant to entertain. And then other stories were separate from those- this the young teacher did not tell her, it was something Angelene figured out on her own, the first year, when a man visited and read them a poem out of a tome of poems- that seemed crafted to relay some secret, and even more than that, some secret about herself. Angelene was mesmerized. What was available for her to know? What secrets did the world hold? Which secrets would be revealed to her through the soil, and which through words? — Amanda Coplin

For the various spiritual forms of the imagination have a natural affinity with certain sensuous forms of art - and to discern the qualities of each art, to intensify as well its limitations as its powers of expression, is one of the aims that culture sets before us. It is not an increased moral sense, an increased moral supervision that your literature needs. Indeed, one should never talk of a moral or an immoral poem - poems are either well written or badly written, that is all. And, indeed, any element of morals or implied reference to a standard of good or evil in art is often a sign of a certain incompleteness of vision, often a note of discord in the harmony of an imaginative creation; for all good work aims at a purely artistic effect. 'We must be careful,' said Goethe, 'not to be always looking for culture merely in what is obviously moral. Everything that is great promotes civilisation as soon as we are aware of it. — Oscar Wilde

I seem to keep returning to my father in poems because his personality was so extreme, so driven. He did everything to excess. — Robert Morgan

Everything is personal - the poems and the crime novels. I have never been involved in any murders, but there are strong autobiographical elements in each. — Sophie Hannah

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

And it all came to pass, all that she had hoped, but it did not fill her with rapture nor carry her away with the power or the fervor she had expected. She had imagined it all different, and had imagined herself different, too. In dreams and poems everything had been, as it were, beyond the sea; the haze of distance had mysteriously veiled all the restless mass of details and had thrown out the large lines in bold relief, while the silence of distance had lent its spirit of enchantment. It had been easy then to feel the beauty; but now that she was in the midst of it all, when every little feature stood out and spoke boldly with the manifold voices of reality, and beauty was shattered as light in a prism, she could not gather the rays together again, could not put the picture back beyond the sea. Despondently she was obliged to admit to herself that she felt poor, surrounded by riches that she could not make her own. — Jens Peter Jacobsen

We also fought about everything
like real sisters. We fought about money, bedrooms, whose car to take. Everyone of these fights was actually about something else
usually abandonment. I wanted to be first on her list and she wanted to be first on mine. I wanted all her attention, all her love, all her care. I wanted her to be my mommy, my daddy, my sister. She wanted the same from me. She wanted to be fed, cared for, nurtured without limit. She wanted backrubs, poems, pastas, and to be left alone when she needed to be left alone. She wanted to come before my writing, my child, my man. And I wanted no less from her.
She was sick at first, so I took care of her. Then I was jealous of the attention and she took care of me. We had gone down into the primal cave of our friendship. we had felt loved enough to rage and fight, to show the inside of our naked throats and our bared fags, and the friendship took another leap toward intimacy. Without rage, intimacy can't be. — Erica Jong

I do think free will is sewn into everything we do; you can't cross a street, light a cigarette, drop saccharine in your coffee without really doing it. Yet the possible alternatives that life allows us are very few, often there must be none. I've never thought there was any choice for me about writing poetry. No doubt if I used my head better, ordered my life better, worked harder etc., the poetry would be improved, and there must be many lost poems, innumerable accidents and ill-done actions. But asking you is the might have been for me, the one towering change, the other life that might have been had. — Robert Lowell

There is no escape. You can't be a vagabond and an artist and still be a solid citizen, a wholesome, upstanding man. You want to get drunk, so you have to accept the hangover. You say yes to the sunlight and pure fantasies, so you have to say yes to the filth and the nausea. Everything is within you, gold and mud, happiness and pain, the laughter of childhood and the apprehension of death. Say yes to everything, shirk nothing. Don't try to lie to yourself. You are not a solid citizen. You are not a Greek. You are not harmonious, or the master of yourself. You are a bird in the storm. Let it storm! Let it drive you! How much have you lied! A thousand times, even in your poems and books, you have played the harmonious man, the wise man, the happy, the enlightened man. In the same way, men attacking in war have played heroes, while their bowels twitched. My God, what a poor ape, what a fencer in the mirror man is- particularly the artist- particularly myself! — Hermann Hesse

S. E. Smith's I Live in a Hut has a deceptively simple title, considering that the brain in that hut contains galaxies-worth of invention: At night when your soldiers are praying ceaselessly for less rain and more underwear my soldiers make underwear out of rain. These poems seesaw between despair and delight but delight is winning the battle. Smith is a somersaulting tightrope walker of a poet and her poems will make you look at anything and everything with new eyes: For days I tried to rub the new freckle // off my hand until I realized what it was / and began to grant it its sovereignty. — Matthea Harvey

I WANT TO BE WITH SOMEONE WHO DREAMS OF DOING EVERYTHING IN LIFE
AND NOTHING ON RAINY SUNDAY AFTERNOONS. — Atticus Poetry

There are ancient and modern poems which breathe, in their entirety and in every detail, the divine breath of irony. In such poemsthere lives a real transcendental buffoonery. Their interior is permeated by the mood which surveys everything and rises infinitely above everything limited, even above the poet's own art, virtue, and genius; and their exterior form by the histrionic style of an ordinary good Italian buffo. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

You have everything within you to do great things in this world. Maybe, you are inspired to sing a song, write a book or poems, create art in various forms. Or you may decide to find a cure for disease, end world hunger, prevent abuse, or take a stand politically. The question is how to begin the process of fulfilling your vision. Start where you are and use the resources you have to build from there. Inspiration is what motivates you to achieve your remarkable ideas. Also it takes time and dedication to excel to the next level. — Amaka Imani Nkosazana

On the other side of that big-ass mirror, a video camera was watching us. In about ten seconds, it was going to start spitting static at itself, and everything it saw was going to break up into a fuzzy, gray-white wash, rolling up and down, that wouldn't be admissible as evidence on Judge Judy. Those missing frames would last a little less than a quarter of a minute, consolidate themselves back
into a semblance of reality, and then I would theoretically go walking right back out of here.
Between now and that moment, there stretched an infinite ocean of potential
time. Time enough to walk around the world. Time enough to fall in love, get
married on a white beach under purple stars, write a book of poems about
truest passion, have a few good and bloody screaming matches, get divorced in a court of autumn elves and gypsy moths, then set the ink-stained, tear-streaked pages of your text ablaze. — Clinton Boomer

Philosophy
I studied philosophy for four years. But I'd trade everything I learned for this passage ... quoted in the Britannica:
'But we were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments? Or our treaties whatever they may be worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted into battlefields; our dreams however rarely they may be accomplished. The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses.'
Amen. — A. J. Jacobs

the hope is small
but it is everything. — AVA.

The act of song writing and recording became one and the same to me; because I essentially recorded everything I did from the day I began trying to write songs. I've always had a lot to say. I'd always written poems. — Adam Goldberg

I think of my best poems as vessels that I can or hope to fill with everything I have. — Alex Lemon

Young writers should be encouraged to write, and discouraged from thinking they are writers. If they arrive at college with literary ambitions, they should be told that everything they have done since their first childhood poems, printed in the school paper, has been preparation for entering a long, long apprenticeship. — Wallace Stegner

I grew up around poets and novelists and my dad wrote poems about everything - from a cat sleeping in a window to a car wreck he passed on the highway. I learned not to censor myself: that was one of things I learned in my apprenticeship, my creative-writing apprenticeship with my dad. — Lucinda Williams

I loved them in the way one loves at any age - if it's real at all - obsessively, painfully, with wild exaltation, with guilt, with conflict; I wrote poems to and about them; I put them into novels (disguised of course); I brooded upon why they were as they were, so often maddening, don't you know? I wrote them ridiculous letters. I lived with their faces. I knew their every gesture by heart. I stalked them like wild animals. I studied them as if they were maps of the world - and in a way, I suppose they were." She had spoken rapidly, on the defensive ... if he thought she didn't know what she was talking about! "Love opens the doors into everything, as far as I can see, including and perhaps most of all, the door into one's own secret, and often terrible and frightening, real self. — May Sarton

Vedanta is the teaching of the Upanishads, a collection of dialogues, stories, and poems, some of which go back to at least 800 B.C. Sophisticated Hindus do not think of God as a special and separate super-person who rules the world from above, like a monarch. Their God is "underneath" rather than "above" everything, and he (or it) plays the world from inside. One might say that if religion is the opium of the people, the Hindus have the inside dope. What is more, no Hindu can realize that he is God in disguise without seeing at the same time that this is true of everyone and everything else. In the Vedanta philosophy, nothing exists except God. There seem to be other things than God, but only because he is dreaming them up and making them his disguises to play hide-and-seek with himself. — Alan W. Watts

Besides the actual reading in class of many poems, I would suggest you do two things: first, while teaching everything you can and keeping free of it, teach that poetry is a mode of discourse that differs from logical exposition. — A.R. Ammons

I could take a walk with my wife and try
to explain the ghosts I can't stop speaking to.
Or I could read all those books piling up
about the beginning of the end of understanding ...
Meanwhile, it's such a beautiful morning,
the changing colors, the hypnotic light.
I could sit by the window watching the leaves,
which seem to know exactly how to fall
from one moment to the next. Or I could lose
everything and have to begin over again. — Philip Schultz