Poetry Church Quotes & Sayings

I usually eat six times a day, small meals. For breakfast, an egg and a corn tortilla, salsa and cilantro, and some ham. For snacks, I'll have an apple, some string cheese, a yogurt. For lunch I'll have salad with protein in it and for dinner usually steamed vegetables and chicken or fish. — Sprague Grayden

people coming out of church
conversing about the sermon
sniffing at the autumn air
something in the papers about forces of popular opinion
and values which are unto our nation

what is
holding you back, Catullus?
why don't you go and die?
the stalks of the potato-plants
are rotting fast this year
only October now

this evening away
A boy comes out of the wood,
crossbow on his shoulder — Pentti Saarikoski

Words, they say, are the food of minds. But, like other foods, they can do little by themselves. — Idries Shah

We don't know how to say goodbye,
We wander on, shoulder to shoulder
Already the sun is going down
You're moody, and I am your shadow.
Let's step inside a church, hear prayers, masses for the dead
Why are we so different from the rest?
Outside in the graveyard we sit on a frozen branch.
That stick in your hand is tracing
Mansions in the snow in which we will always be together. — Anna Akhmatova

The library had become her solace. Her refuge.Books did not question or judge. They made safe companions. — Inglath Cooper

The church and the whorehouse arrived in the Far West simultaneously. And each would have been horrified to think it was a different facet of the same thing. But surely they were both intended to accomplish the same thing: the singing, the devotion, the poetry of the churches took a man out of his bleakness for a time, and so did the brothels. — John Steinbeck

It's exciting to hear them talking about poetry and science and philosophy - about Shakespeare and Milton; Newton and Einstein and Freud; about Plato and Hegel and Kant, and all the other names that echo like great church bells in my mind. — Daniel Keyes

What we are going to do is continue to grow our content spend on original programming, both in absolute numbers and as a percentage of our total spending, because it's been working. It's been helping grow the brand; and more importantly, it's been driving viewing hours relative to how else we would spend the money. — Ted Sarandos

Up the still, glistening beaches,
Up the creeks we will hie,
Over banks of bright seaweed
The ebb-tide leaves dry.
We will gaze, from the sand-hills,
At the white, sleeping town;
At the church on the hill-side
And then come back down.
Singing: There dwells a loved one,
But cruel is she!
She left lonely for ever
The kings of the sea.
(from poem 'The Forsaken Merman') — Matthew Arnold

Spiritual power and spiritual authority notoriously shade over into both politics and poetry. — Harold Bloom

The cover was pebbled black leather, the pages onionskin, and he opened it carefully. It was his first Bible, the one his mother had given him, the one that had taken its time showing him what he was supposed to do with his life, his size, that voice of his. It was the one used for his ordination, and when he had buried his mother on a autumn hillside in Tennesee five years ago. King James. He didn't care about the scholars or the accuracy or the bringing of his church into whatever century they claimed it was these days; he cared about the poetry, and about the comfort it brought to those who needed to hear it. — Charles L. Grant

You taste like metal & blood,
kiss like a man's last gunshot.
I could find religion in your face.
Build a church in the palms of your hands. — Elisabeth Hewer

London
I wander through each chartered street,
Near where the chartered Thames does flow;
A mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every man,
In every infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear:
How the chimney-sweeper's cry
Every blackening church appals,
And the hapless soldier's sigh
Runs in blood down palace-walls.
But most, through midnight streets I hear
How the youthful harlot's curse
Blasts the new-born infant's tear,
And blights with plagues the marriage-hearse. — William Blake

I grew up in a household that had its roots in church and community and culture and poetry and song and in the arts. Those aspects certainly shaped what I do. — Robert Battle

Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downwards through the mud and slush of opinion and tradition, and pride and prejudice, appearance and delusion, through the alluvium which covers the globe, through poetry and philosophy and religion, through church and state, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, till we come to a hard bottom that rocks in place which we can call reality and say, This is and no mistake. — Henry David Thoreau

I don't have anyone around me that's not spiritual. — Jessica White

Take what the old-church
found in Mithra's tomb,
candle and script and bell,
take what the new-church spat upon
and broke and shattered. — Hilda Doolittle

Sound.
Noise
the air employs.
Melodies sweet.
Tweet, tweet, tweet.
Soft. Loud.
A roaring crowd.
Cluck. Caw. Crow.
Tet, tet. Tis, tis.
Guttural growl.
Harrowing howl.
Drip, drip, drip.
Tap, tap, tap.
Moan and groan.
Endless drone.
Ding, dang, dong.
A church bell song.
Vibrations in my ear
to hear.
Sound. — Richelle E. Goodrich

Deb and I were married on a snowy night - wind cross-wove a veil of snow for her then threw confetti at us as we left the lighted church ... — John Geddes

I believe I was ahead of my time. — Ike Turner

I was a violent, self-destructive teenager, who was adopted right at the end of World War II. I was lied to and abused by my parents. I hated life in Utah. I resented the Mormon Church, its sense of superiority and its certitude. I escaped through the Beat writers and discovered poetry and have devoted my entire life to the practice of poetry in varying ways. Poetry gave me a reason for being. And I'm not exaggerating when I say that. — Sam Hamill

April 26 - I know I shouldn't hang around the college when I'm through at the lab, but seeing the young men and women going back and forth carrying books and hearing them talk about all the things they're learning in their classes excites me. I wish I could sit and talk with them over coffee in the Campus Bowl Luncheonette when they get together to argue about books and politics and ideas. It's exciting to hear them talking about poetry and science and philosophy - about Shakespeare and Milton; Newton and Einstein and Freud; about Plato and Hegel and Kant, and all the other names that echo like great church bells in my mind. Sometimes I listen in on the conversations at the tables around me, and pretend I'm a college student, even though I'm a lot older than they are. I carry books around, and I've started to smoke a pipe. It's silly, but since I belong at the lab I feel as if I'm a part of the university. I hate to go home to that lonely room. — Daniel Keyes

For a long time I found the celebrities of modern painting and poetry ridiculous. I loved absurd pictures, fanlights, stage scenery, mountebanks backcloths, inn-signs, cheap colored prints; unfashionable literature, church Latin, pornographic books badly spelt, grandmothers novels, fairy stories, little books for children, old operas, empty refrains, simple rhythms. — Arthur Rimbaud

There are a billion people in China. It's not easy to be an individual in a crowd of more than a billion people. Think of it. More than a billion people. That means even if you're a one-in-a-million type of guy, there are still a thousand guys exactly like you. — A. Whitney Brown

I wander through each chartered street,
Near where the chartered Thames does flow;
A mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every man,
In every infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear:

How the chimney-sweeper's cry
Every blackening church appals,
And the hapless soldier's sigh
Runs in blood down palace-walls.

But most, through midnight streets I hear
How the youthful harlot's curse
Blasts the new-born infant's tear,
And blights with plagues the marriage-hearse.

- London — William Blake

You can't understand a God who's all mercy and no justice. That cute, fuzzy God wouldn't last two minutes in the Warrens, would he? — Brent Weeks

The [book of the bible] Song Of Songs is an amazing erotic love poem that the church has tried very hard not to notice. It is really beautiful, and musical in its poetry. — Alan Green

To be perpetually longing and impatiently desirous of anything, so that a man cannot abstain from it, is to lose a man's liberty, and to become a servant of meat and drink, or smoke. — Jeremy Taylor

The most carefully crafted language in our culture tends to be poetry. And poetry at its finest moments subverts our best attempts at hiding from reality ...
The poetry of liturgy has just this power. The liturgy contains words that have been shaped and crafted over the centuries. It is formal speech. It is public poetry. As such it reaches into us to reveal not only the unnamed reality of our lives but the God who created us ...
But even when the words of the liturgy are not literally biblical words, the words, like all truthful words, work on us over time, like a steady, unrelenting stream slowly reshapes the banks of a river. The words do something to us even when we're not paying attention. — Mark Galli

My main calling in life is to seek and achieve spiritual balance, and to express that through my instrument. Everything else is here today, gone later today. — Steve Vai

You are my brother and I love you. I love you worshipping in your church, kneeling in your temple, and praying in your mosque. You and I and all are children of one religion, for the varied paths of religion are but the fingers of the loving hand of the Supreme Being, extended to all, offering completeness of spirit to all, anxious to receive all. — Kahlil Gibran

Silence is the language of faith. Action--be it church or charity, politics or poetry--is the translation. — Christian Wiman

Ridge: Wow. I'm impressed with us. We're both so mature. — Colleen Hoover

Theology is just not important in Judaism, or in any other religion, really. There's no orthodoxy, as you have it in the Catholic Church. No complicated creeds to which everybody must subscribe. No infallible pronouncements by a pope. Nobody can tell Jews what to believe. Within reason, you can believe what you like ... We have orthopraxy instead of orthodoxy. Right practice rather then right belief. That's all. You Christians make such a fuss about theology, but it's not important in the way you think. It's just poetry, really, ways of talking about the inexpressible. — Hyam Maccoby

Parabatai" said Jace. "It means a pair of warriors who fight together - who are closer than brothers. Alec is more than justmy best friend. — Cassandra Clare

You shouldn't change your mind, your heart. Go get happy. — Ariel Seraphino

You alone in Europe are not ancient oh Christianity
The most modern European is you Pope Pius X
And you whom the windows observe shame keeps you
From entering a church and confessing this morning
You read the prospectuses the catalogues the billboards that sing aloud
That's the poetry this morning and for the prose there are the newspapers
There are the 25 centime serials full of murder mysteries
Portraits of great men and a thousand different headlines
("Zone") — Guillaume Apollinaire

In rereading one of the best essays I know on Dante's Paradiso, Giovanni Getto's "Aspetti della poesia di Dante" (Aspects of Dante's Poetry, 1947), one can see that there is not one single image of Paradise that does not stem from a tradition that was part of the medieval reader's heritage, I won't say of ideas, but of daily fantasies and feelings. It is from the biblical tradition and the church fathers that these radiances come from, these vortices of flame, these lamps, these suns, these brilliances and brightnesses emerging "like a horizon clearing" (Par. 14.69) ... For medieval man, reading about this light and luminosity was equivalent to when we dream about the sinuous gracefulness of a movie star, the elegant lines of a car ... It is this appeal to a poetry of understanding that can make the Paradiso fascinating even for the modern reader who has lost the reference points familiar to his medieval counterpart. — Umberto Eco

The language of the Catholic Church - the liturgy, the prayer, the gospels - was in many ways my first poetry. — Alice McDermott

There is no remedy for death
or birth
except to hug the spaces in between. Live loud. Live wide. Live tall. — Jim Crace