Poetry Lyrics Quotes & Sayings

I've always written poetry and lyrics. My first husband, who was a musician, we wrote a bunch of songs together. — P. J. Soles

I write lyrics everyday as I go. I'm always taking notes in my phone whenever I am inspired by something. Most of my writing starts out as poetry before I put it into songs. — Vic Fuentes

Is the phrase 'pay' or 'play the piper'
I inquire, why
'Cause I admire a desire to flip the switch
Yeah make a way to face the music like
Life savings for a mosh pit riot
Listen to a mix
Rock the tickets, higher volume
Velocity which shakes a cockpit's pilot — Criss Jami

Chance is your god
Though you're falling free you will land hard — Criss Jami

We are silent haters
communicating through
memories and tears
We are silent lovers
communicating through
poetry and lyrics — Shannon Lynette

Walk and love
We're walking in love
For the walk of love — Criss Jami

From time to time
I once wondered how one wanders from time to time
And think up the paradox line
Speak of Epoch's crime
Oh I lied, it hasn't happened yet
But bet you better believe it's such a habit that
I just said that in a past mindset — Criss Jami

She's like poetry. Like prose and love letters and lyrics, cascading down the center of a page. — Colleen Hoover

In all my work, in the movies I write, the lyrics, the poetry, the prose, the essays, I am saying that we may encounter many defeats - maybe it's imperative that we encounter the defeats - but we are much stronger than we appear to be and maybe much better than we allow ourselves to be. Human beings are more alike than unalike. — Maya Angelou

If I knew what to do
I'd do more than write a song for you — Criss Jami

A fruitless year, take a fearless heart
One that blooms late will flourish in the dark — Criss Jami

Dylan's voice was awful, an aged quaver that sounded nothing like the deep-throated or silky R&B that Dad took as gospel. But the lyrics wore him down, until he played Dylan in that addicted manner of college kids who cordon off portions of their lives to decipher the prophecies of their favorite band. Dad heard poetry, but more than that an angle that confirmed what a latent part of him already suspected. This was was bullshit. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Lennon's was one of the first voices I emulated when I began to sing. When we held tryouts in my pal's dad's living room for the singer in our band, I sang a Beatles song that Lennon sang. There is something about the timbre of his voice, something that it conveys, that still gets to me. The quality and the poetry of his lyrics. The wry sense of humor. And the boyishness, in the beginning. There are a great many things that touch me about him ... Lennon was, to put it in his own words, a 'working-class hero.' — Don Henley

Don't call my lyrics poetry. It's an insult to real poets. — Bernie Taupin

I mean, there's an aspect I've always said that is - it's, you know, it's not poetry but it's kind of like it. It's not song lyrics but it's kind of like song lyrics. It's not rap but it's kind of like rap. And it's not stand-up comedy but it is kind of like stand-up comedy. It's all those things together. — Quentin Tarantino

So while I drove my little and planned his fantasy night of how I was going to give Otter the key to my soul (his words, not mine), I silently panicked and wrote lines of bad poetry. Normally, I am quite adept at writing poems and lyrics to songs I'l never sing, but this stuff was just atrocious. For example:
I love you
You love me
Thank God for that
I'm so happy
And Ty's personal favorite (which he helped me on):
Otter! Otter! Otter!
Don't lead cows to slaughter
I love you and I know
I should've told you soon-a
But you didn't buy the dolphin-safe tuna!
TY asked me if I got the hidden message in his poem. I told him it was loud and clear. — T.J. Klune

Poetry is music though, unfortunately, not all music is poetry. Because music has other carriers to take its message - beats, lyrics, singers, bass players - anyone in music can rise to make a major statement but in poetry there are only words to do the work. And they do sometimes have to sweat. — Nikki Giovanni

As long as music survives, poetry will never die. — Michael Bassey Johnson

It starts off like climbing a tree or solving a puzzle - poetry, if nothing else, is just fun to write. But deeper into each and every piece, you no longer hesitate to call it work. It's passion. A poet's sense of lyrical accomplishment is then his food and water, his means of survival. — Criss Jami

Poetry and lyrics are very similar. Making words bounce off a page. — Taylor Swift

Sing your life; any fool can think of words that rhyme. — Morrissey

I've finally decided to write about profit for a change
But before I really started I already started to feel lame
Baby what's it to a beast who manely to money remains untamed — Criss Jami

When you write a song it's sometimes in a desperate moment whn you can't really articulate it. What I love about lyrics is what T.S. Eliot said: 'Good poetry is felt before it is heard.' I'm a believer in that. It's those moments when you sit yourself down, and talk to yourself in the mirror. — Marcus Mumford

A steampunk nation
Baby pollution rises up then the loving comes arraigning 'cause
Our art's official and only partially artificial
And our heart's in the middle of sharp hardened shards of metal but
There's not where it settles
Because it's beating to the steaming of God's hottest pot or kettle
And now we face it, this creation we made to
To save our craving for a synthetic rebelnation it's
Our safeway they make into a pathetic revelation
In our steampunk nation
Our steampunk nation — Criss Jami

If a thing can be said in ten words, I may be relied upon to take a hundred to say it. I ought to apologize for that. I ought to prune, pare and extirpate excess growth, but I will not. I like words - strike that, I love words - and while I am fond of the condensed and economical use of them in poetry, in song lyrics, in Twitter, in good journalism and smart advertising, I love the luxuriant profusion and mad scatter of them too. — Stephen Fry

There ain't no money in poetry, that's what keeps the poet free. I've had all the freedom I can stand. — Guy Clark

You ask me why I don't speak
Not a word at will
But write so much worth well over a mill'
Well I value words like I value kisses
A sober one, a closer one penetrates the heart
Darling it's how it mends it — Criss Jami

I think it was T.S. Eliot who talked about good poetry being felt before it's understood. I believe that. There are some bands where I love their lyrics but I don't have a clue what they're on about. — Marcus Mumford

It is perhaps one of those imponderables of life that many people declare their dislike for poetry, yet it surrounds us in the lyrics of the songs and hymns we love, the catchy advertising jingles, in picture books, and remembered snippets from Shakespeare or remembered and much loved verses. " Jeanette O'Hagan 1 May 2017 — Jeanette O'Hagan

With lyrics for me, it's usually musically-based. It's not really poetry- or writer-based. It's rock-based. It doesn't mean that I'm aping rock lyrics, but I'm writing from a music standpoint. I'm thinking more of music heroes, if they're in my mind. Not William Blake or John Ashbury. Sometimes maybe I thought of him a little bit. Or Wallace Stevens. I don't even really fully understand either of them. — Stephen Malkmus

I have had much to learn from Sweden's poetry and, more especially, from her lyrics of the last generation. — Knut Hamsun

The best ideas will eat at you for days, maybe even weeks, until something, some incident, some impulse, triggers you to finally express them. — Criss Jami

I never really liked poetry readings; I liked to read poetry by myself, but I liked singing, chanting my lyrics to this jazz group. — Leonard Cohen

Our Cross
Our little circle hides in the mind,
It's difficult to miss but hard to find,
It goes unspoken but yet it speaks,
From backward years to forward weeks,
We can't forget but why even try,
Two of a kind doesn't know goodbye,
It's a silent question that God won't share,
A breeze we feel but seems unfair,
Distant, rare but only madness can see,
It's something deeper than any infinity,
Because we walk this parallel path up and down,
There is no circle to hold us circus clowns,
So let's give it a symbol and label it a loss,
We will remember it always as we carry our cross. — Shannon L. Alder

True poetry is the perception of human feelings, the voice of the heart, open or hidden. It is the lyrics, compositions, and melody of the relation between humankind, the universe and God, a shadow pinpointing each of the truths we can discern everywhere (from the earth to the stars), a photograph of the creation's projection cast in our feelings and thoughts and framed through words, a heartfelt tune of our loves and joys played on different strings, and it is a bouquet of our faith, hope, determination, beauty, love, reunion, and yearnings. — M. Fethullah Gulen

Music is poetry, babe. Each note is a word that's uniquely crafted to go with the next note. For me, the only way it gets better is if you put that to lyrics. You take them apart, any good song tells a story separately, through the music and through the lyrics. What makes it grab you by the balls is when you put them together. — Kristen Ashley

Thou shalt not use poetry, art or music to get into girls' pants - use it to get into their heads. — Scroobius Pip

I think there is a song out there to describe just about any situation. — Criss Jami

There's no difference between lyrics and poetry. Words are words. The only difference is the people who are in academic positions and call themselves poets and have an academic stance. They've got something to lose if they say it's all poetry; if there's not music to it, and you have to wear a certain kind of checkered shirt or something like that. It's all the same. Lyrics are lyrics, poetry is poetry, lyrics are poetry, and poetry is lyrics. They are interchangeable to me. — Van Morrison

I want to write songs with complete sentences. I almos have this obsession with short-changing words. I would never be so pretentious to say that my lyrics are poetry ... Poems are poems. Song lyrics are for songs. — Ben Gibbard

A good poem is a tautology. It expands one word by adding a number which clarify it, thus making a new word which has never before been spoken. The seedword is always so ordinary that hardly anyone perceives it. Classical odes grow from and or because, romantic lyrics from but and if. Immature verses expand a personal pronoun ad nauseam, the greatest works bring glory to a common verb. Good poems, therefore, are always close to banality, over which, however, they tower like precipices. — Alasdair Gray

I wrote poetry, which got me into lyrics. Stevie Wonder, Carole King, Elton John pulled me into pop. I started singing with a band - just for fun - when I was 17. And pretty soon, I was thinking I could sing pop in English as well as Spanish. — Gloria Estefan

Her close friends have gathered.
Lord, ain't it a shame
Grieving together
Sharing the blame.
But when she was dying
Lord, we let her down.
There's no use cryin'
It can't help her now.

The party's all over
Drink up and go home.
It's too late to love her
And leave her alone.

Just say she was someone
Lord, so far from home
Whose life was so lonesome
She died all alone
Who dreamed pretty dreams
That never came true
Lord, why was she born
So black and blue?
Oh, why was she born
So black and blue?

Epitaph (Black And Blue)
Written by: Kris Kristofferson
Note: "Epitaph" is about Janis Joplin. — Kris Kristofferson

My heart is strong,
I will not fail,
I won't be wronged,
I will prevail. — Alexandra Lanc

By(e) pen, I've tried my hand at poetry; only to see how boring it is to me. That is, unless I get a chance to destroy each and every piece while doing it as I please. — Criss Jami

If you take text and image and you put them together, the multiple readings that are possible in either poetry or in something visual are reduced to one specific reading. By putting the two together, you limit the possibilities. Text and image don't always work together in the way music and song lyrics become part of each other. — Richard Hell

Life is as long as you live it. — Lashauna D. Hinton

I heard the voice of that bird, son of Polypas, whose piercing outcry
and whose arrival announces to men the season when fields
are plowed, and the voice of her broke the heart that darkens within me,
since other men posess my flourishing acres now,
and not for me are the mules dragging the plow through the grainland,
since I have given my heart to the restless seafarer's life. — Theognis

Her happiness floated like waves of ocean along the coast of her life. She found lyrics of her life in his arms but she never sung her song. — Santosh Kalwar

We all know what good writing is: It's the novel we can't put down, the poem we never forget, the speech that changes the way we look at the world. It's the article that tells us when, where, and how, the essay that clarifies what was hazy before. Good writing is the memo that gets action, the letter that says what a phone call can't. It's the movie that makes us cry, the TV show that makes us laugh, the lyrics to the song we can't stop singing, the advertisement that makes us buy. Good writing can take form in prose or poetry, fiction or nonfiction. It can be formal or informal, literary or colloquial. The rules and tools for achieving each are different, but one difficult-to-define quality runs through them all: style. "Effectiveness of assertion" was George Bernard Shaw's definition of style. "Proper words in proper places" was Jonathan Swift's. You — Mitchell Ivers

I have my books
And my poetry to protect me;
I am shielded in my armor,
Hiding in my room, safe within my womb.
I touch no one and no one touches me.
I am a rock,
I am an island.
— Paul Simon

I'm passing the bar
Where you first got in my car
I'm not ashamed to admit
That it's you I won't forget

I saved your cigarettes and
Bad habits I regret
But the hours flew by like clouds
Whenever I had you around

Parachute lover
Take me away
From the plane that went crashing
And the earth that's in flames

Saving you is saving me
High above the redwood trees
But down below I see shadows
And parachute debris

We're drifting like children
Along for the ride
Each time we find love
Another parachute arrives

Our madness will burn
As bright as the sun
And I'll keep finding lovers
But you were the one — Crystal Woods

Lyrical poetry is not a big part of most people's lives. Twitter now becomes an interesting way of getting cared for language into people's space. Because there is something deep inside of us that responds to cared for language, whether it's literary, poetry, or really good lyrics in a song. — Teju Cole

You own me with whispers like poetry.
Your mouth is a melody I memorize. — The Civil Wars

To me, Doors fans were always the 16-year-old idiots at parties, getting stoned, and talking about how Morrison's lyrics were like poetry ... like that was a deep thought. — Bruce McCulloch

Poetry and song lyrics might want us to believe that finding love is like uncovering buried treasure, but now I know the truth. There's no joy or celebration in love. There are no happy endings. There is simply me and her and a crushing pain. What's left after that? An entire life of mute should-haves and second-bests. — Autumn Doughton

Music straightjackets a poem and prevents it from breathing on its own, whereas it liberates a lyric. Poetry doesn't need music; lyrics do. — Stephen Sondheim

I didn't come in and say: "I'm a singer." I came into the band as a second guitar player and a vocalist, but not the songwriter. I had been writing poetry for years, so I sort of had the nature of the words. I felt like no one else could sing my lyrics, so I took a crack at it. — Paul Banks

If you want meaning, you read poetry or a novel or something, you don't read song lyrics. You're supposed to listen to them with music. — Roddy Woomble

Stretched and skewed
Tap of the 8-ball and the cue
Scratches fall through
They are the scars of you — Criss Jami

One difference between poetry and lyrics is that lyrics sort of fade into the background. They fade on the page and live on the stage when set to music. — Stephen Sondheim

There is no gender to my music. There's no male or female voice, no trite lyrics or poetry. It's much more abstract, so it lives with you longer. — Yanni

Anna Journey, in her new book of poems, Vulgar Remedies, creates an alchemical self whose shimmering limbic / alembic lyrics distill the mysterious terrors of childhood, the dangerous passions of adults, into her own honey-dusk 'voodun': protective, purified to gold. Poetry is always a time machine: here we are invisible travelers to a bewitched past, a beautifully occluded future. These poems are erotic, vertiginous, revelatory, their dazzling lyric force reflecting profound hermetic life. — Carol Muske-Dukes

For all but the sliver of poetry fans, over the past forty years popular song lyrics have been the nation's poetry. — John McWhorter