Poets Together Quotes & Sayings

I assumed it was a matter of time. One day I'd meet someone who counteracted my chemical structure. We would compete for supremacy, collide until one of us was forced to yield, or else go forth together, suspended in eternal stalemate. But my model is inaccurate. The poets are wrong. The opposite of ice isn't fire. It's water. — Brenna Yovanoff

Tree limbs rise and fall like the ecstatic arms of those who have submitted to the mystical life. Leaf sounds talk together like poets making fresh metaphors. — Rumi

It is personality with a penny's worth of talent. Error which chances to rise above the commonplace. — Pablo Picasso

He was from a fantasy where fairies and pixies danced through the woods and slept in dewy beds of twigs and petals. He was a creature unlike anything poets or philosophers could conjure up. He was born from alchemy, created by twisting storm clouds and rays of sunshine together. — Nash Summers

May our twilights mix together
like breath and breathlessness. — Sanober Khan

Poets, if they're genuine, must keep repeating "I don't know." Each poem marks an effort to answer this statement, but as soon as the final period hits the page, the poet begins to hesitate, starts to realize that this particular answer was pure makeshift that's absolutely inadequate to boot. So the poets keep on trying, and sooner or later the consecutive results of their self-dissatisfaction are clipped together with a giant paperclip by literary historians and called their oeuvre. — Wislawa Szymborska

The reason why there are so few first-class poets is that many people have intense feelings or first-class minds but to get the two together so that you will be willing to put a poem through sixty drafts, to be that self-critical, to keep breaking it down, that is what is rare. Right now most poetry is just self-indulgence. — May Sarton

On every full moon, rituals ... take place on hilltops, beaches, in open fields and in ordinary houses. Writers, teachers, nurses, computer programmers, artists, lawyers, poets, plumbers, and auto mechanics
women and men from many backgrounds come together to celebrate the mysteries of the Triple Goddess of the Dance of Life. The religion they practice is called Witchcraft. — Starhawk

Shakespeare possesses the power of subordinating nature for the purposes of expression, beyond all poets. His imperial muse tosses the creation like a bauble from hand to hand, and uses it to embody any caprice of thought that is uppermost in his mind. The remotest spaces of nature are visited, and the farthest sundered things are brought together, by subtle spiritual connection. We are made aware that magnitude of material things is relative, and all objects shrink and expand to serve the passion of the poet. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

As long as the sole ruler and disposer of the universe, the nous, remained excluded from artistic activity, things were mixed together in a primeval chaos: this was what Euripides must have thought; and so, as the first "sober" one among them, he had to condemn the "drunken" poets. Sophocles said of Aeschylus that he did what was right, though he did it unconsciously. This was surely not how Euripides saw it. He might have said that Aeschylus, because he created unconsciously, did what was wrong. The divine Plato, too, almost always speaks only ironically of the creative faculty of the poet, insofar as it is not conscious insight, and places it on a par with the gift of the soothsayer and dream-interpreter: the poet is incapable of composing until he has become unconscious and bereft of understanding. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The way something looks or sounds is also what it means. Words as visual and aural phenomena, which mainly poets, not critics and prose writers, tend to be obsessed with. I think maybe I'm more of a curator than I am a writer in the strict sense because I am interested in how everything on the page, in a space, works together. — Masha Tupitsyn

Every experience will fill with immediacy. Because I love this, I am never bored. Beauty constantly wells up like the noise of springwater in my ear. Tree limbs rise and fall like ecstatic arms. Leaf sounds talk together like poets making fresh metaphors. The green felt cover slips; we get a flash of the mirror underneath. The conventional opinion of this poetry is that it shows great optimism for the future. But Father Reason says, No need to announce the future. This now is it. Your deepest need and desire is satisfied by this moment's energy here in your hand. — Rumi

Circumstances may accumulate so strongly even against an innocent man, that directed, sharpened, and pointed, they may slay him. — Charles Dickens

Our theory of disaster, of sorrow, of affliction, borrowed from the poets and novelist, is that it is incessant; but every passage in our own lives and in the lives of others, so far as we have witnessed them, teaches us that this is false. The house of mourning is decorously darkened to the world, but within itself it is also the house of laughing. Burst of gaiety, as heartfelt as its grief, relieve the gloom, and the stricken survivors have their jest together, in which the thought of the dead is tenderly involved, and a fond sense, not crazier than many others, of sympathy and enjoyment beyond the silence, justifies the sunnier mood before sorrow rushes back, deploring and despairing, and make it all up again with the conventional fitness of things. — William Dean Howells

The poets, therefore, however much they adorned the gods in their poems, and amplified their exploits with the highest praises, yet very frequently confess that all things are held together and governed by one spirit or mind. — Lactantius

You can spend all day trying to think of some universal truth to set down on paper, and some poets try that. Shakespeare knew that it's much easier to string together some words beginning with the same letter. — Mark Forsyth

Poets may boast (as safely-vain) Their work shall with the world remain: Both bound together, live, or die, The verses and the prophecy. But who can hope his lines shou'd long Last, in a daily changing tongue? While they are new, envy prevails, And as that dies, our language fails. — Edmund Waller

Without poets, without artists ... everything would fall apart into chaos. There would be no more seasons, no more civilizations, no more thought, no more humanity, no more life even; and impotent darkness would reign forever. Poets and artists together determine the features of their age, and the future meekly conforms to their edit. — Guillaume Apollinaire

It's not an issue. Everyone's focused on us trying to get a victory. That's where the focus lies ... We're trying to win a game. Who cares about that (other stuff). If we'd played 'em two years ago when it happened, maybe it would be different. — Donnie Edwards

There is no future for those who cannot or will not think. — Louis O. Kelso

Jase props himself up on an elbow, looking at me for a minute without saying anything. His face gets an unreadable expression, and I wish I could take back walking over.
Then he observes, "I'm guessing that's a uniform."
Crap. I'd forgotten I was still wearing it. — Huntley Fitzpatrick

I started moving away from poets like Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane and started reading poets like, again, Karl Shapiro, Howard Nemerov, Philip Larkin, and the British poets who were imported through that important anthology put together by Alvarez - and those would include Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes. And I think these poets gave me assurance that there were other ways to write besides the rather involuted style of high modernism whose high priests were Pound, Eliot and Stevens, and Crane perhaps. — Billy Collins

Yes, you can feel very alone as a poet and you sometimes think, is it worth it? Is it worth carrying on? But because there were other poets, you became part of a scene. Even though they were very different writers, it made it easier because you were together. — Roger McGough

There is an extraordinary degree of amity among Washington poets. They hang together. You would be hard pressed to find that in Manhattan. — Maxine Kumin

No temporary chaos is worth your sanity. Just knowing that whatever happens, it happens to the best of them too. — Nas

Crossan also gives credence to what he calls the Cross Gospel. "Does that fare any better?" I asked. "No, most scholars don't give it credibility, because it includes such outlandishly legendary material. For instance, Jesus comes out of his tomb and he's huge - he goes up beyond the sky - and the cross comes out of the tomb and actually talks! Obviously, the much more sober gospels are more reliable than anything found in this account. It fits better with later apocryphal writings. In fact, it's dependent on biblical material, so it should be dated later. — Lee Strobel

So poets keep on trying, and sooner or later the consecutive results of their self-dissatisfaction are clipped together with a giant paperclip by literary historians and called their oeuvres. — Wislawa Szymborska

I will always want to earn what I get, however much it hurts; that I want it because it hurts, because pain gives life a pain, and without it life isn't even death, just . . . nothingness. — Gemma Files

A lot of unemployment, though. We've got two closed factories and a rotting shopping mall that went bankrupt before it ever opened. We're not far from Kentucky, which marks the unofficial border to the South, so one sees more than enough pickup trucks decorated with stickers of Confederate flags and slogans proclaiming their brand of truck is superior to all others. Lots of country music stations, lots of jokes that contain the word "nigger." A sewer system that occasionally backs up into the streets for some unknown reason. Lots and lots of stray dogs around, many with grotesque deformities. — David Wong

Words are little houses, each with its cellar and garret. Common-sense lives on the ground floor, always ready to engage in "foreign commerce" on the same level as the others, as the passers-by, who are never dreamers. To go upstairs in the word house, is to withdraw, step by step; while to go down to the cellar is to dream, it is losing oneself in the distant corridors of an obscure etymology, looking for treasures that cannot be found in words. To mount and descend in the words themselves - this is a poet's life. To mount too high or descend too low, is allowed in the case of poets, who bring earth and sky together. — Gaston Bachelard

Love itself is obvious.You meet, love, part ways, get hurt and you meet again. I bet people get married because they're tired of repeating those things. — Kim A-joong

They say, he's mine, and you say, all right, all right, he's yours, of course, take him. Nothing matters to me at all. Not me, not my food, not my bread, not my life, and not him either, nothing matters to me." "I ,Tatiana, fight for nothing — Paullina Simons

In general, I would think that at present prose writers are much in advance of the poets. In the old days, I read more poetry than prose, but now it is in prose where you find things being put together well, where there is great ambition, and equal talent. Poets have gotten so careless, it is a disgrace. You can't pick up a page. All the words slide off. — William H Gass

The primary math of the real world is one and one equals two. The layman (as, often, do I) swings that every day. He goes to the job, does his work, pays his bills and comes home. One plus one equals two. It keeps the world spinning. But artists, musicians, con men, poets, mystics and such are paid to turn that math on its head, to rub two sticks together and bring forth fire. Everybody — Bruce Springsteen

Scholars and artists thrown together are often annoyed at the puzzle of where they differ. Both work from knowledge; but I suspectthey differ most importantly in the way their knowledge is come by. Scholars get theirs with conscientious thoroughness along projected lines of logic; poets theirs cavalierly and as it happens in and out of books. They stick to nothing deliberately, but let what will stick to them like burrs where they walk in the fields. — Robert Frost

We will read books together inside the blanket and stay warm. And keep writing poetry in our respective journals. Time will fly but we will still remain inside the blanket forever. — Avijeet Das

[Talking about Monte Rissell] ... and like Ed Kemper he was able to convince the psychiatrist he was making excellent progress while he was actually killing human beings. This is kind of a sick version of the old joke about how many psychiatrists it takes to change a light bulb. The answer being, just one, but only if the light bulb wants to change. — John E. Douglas, Mark Olshaker

It was the monster of all winged dinosaurs, the pteranodon. — James Rollins

Why do you suppose the poets talk about hearts?' he asked me suddenly. 'When they discuss emotional damage? The tissue of hearts is tough as a shoe. Did you ever sew up a heart?'
I shook my head. 'No, but I've watched. I know what you mean.' The walls of a heart are thick and strong, and the surgeons use heavy needles. It takes a good bit of strength, but it pulls together neatly. As much as anything it's like binding a book.
The seat of human emotion should be the liver,' Doc Homer said. 'That would be an appropriate metaphor: we don't hold love in our hearts, we hold it in our livers.'
I understood exactly. Once in ER I saw a woman who'd been stabbed everywhere, most severely in the liver. It's an organ with the consistency of layer upon layer of wet Kleenex. Every attempt at repair just opens new holes that tear and bleed. You try to close the wound with fresh wounds, and you try and you try and you don't give up until there's nothing left. — Barbara Kingsolver

Religion is the only metaphysic that the multitude can understand and adopt. — Joseph Joubert