Quotes About Poem

Booker T. Washington wrote that "character, not circumstances", makes the person. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, "No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character." While character makes for a good story or poem, in reality we are less shaped by character traits than we think, and more than we realize by the circumstances that life deals us - and our responses to those circumstances.

A poem to repeat, either aloud or silently, will help you over a hill or on a long mile as surely as a neighbor who stops his team and gives you a lift.

A life is like a poem: Its content is inspired partly by unconscious feelings but also by mindful judgment.

Multiplying my age by 2 in my head/I'm a grandfather. Or Dead.

The Chess pieces are the block alphabet which shapes thoughts; and these thoughts, although making a visual design on the chessboard, express their beauty abstractly, like a poem

Suddenly I remembered a line in a poem by Vaughan: 'There is in God (some say) a deep but dazzling darkness' – and the next second, the darkness exploded into light.

It's all about time, dimwit time, inferior time, people checking watches and other devices, other reminders. This is time draining out of our lives. Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There's an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away surfaces, when you see into it, what's left is terror. This is the thing that literature was meant to cure. The epic poem, the bedtime story.

The pleasure we feel, reading a poem, is our assurance of its integrity.

Be encouraged. Your heart is writing a poem on the world and it's being turned into a thousand songs.

I don't know where Henry was. Probably looking at the moon and reciting some poem from the T'ang Dynasty.

Envoi Tombe d'un rêve de novembre J'ai mis ce pouème à l'eau de Seine Du mieux que j'ai pu, en lumière. (in Queneau en novembre)

El poema es el momento en que se capta con la sangre el pensamiento de la vida.

The girlish talk of love and lovers is henceforth stale and commonplace. The cheap jokes of the comic papers on love and its poor counterfeit, flirtation, are a blasphemy. Love-romances and love-poems have lost their charm, so inadequate are they to tell love's true story. She is herself the romance; she is herself the poem.

But Sparrow remembered every word as if the brief letter was a poem or Bach partita. He could stand up and deliver it now, word for word, note for note.

Yet if a Poem have a Genius, it will force its own reception in the World.

Forgive me if I wander a little this evening, for I have been all day employ'd in a very abstract Poem and I am in deep love with you—two things which must excuse me.

Poetry is the experience of liberty. The poet risks himself, chances all on the poem's all with each verse he writes.

The fact that The Bridge contains folk lore and other material suitable to the epic form need not therefore prove its failure as a long lyric poem, with interrelated sections.

The poem is a confession of faith.

The poem is in my hands, and can run stories through her hands.

The poem is neither here nor there, and with a girl's breast it can illuminate the nights. With the glow of an apple it fills two bodies with light and with a gardenia's breath it can revive a homeland!

In a world that has no heaven the earth becomes an abyss. And the poem is one of its consolation prizes. One of the qualities of the winds, north or south

O último poema Assim eu quereria o meu último poema. Que fosse terno dizendo as coisas mais simples e menos intencionais Que fosse ardente como um soluço sem lágrimas Que tivesse a beleza das flores quase sem perfume A pureza da chama em que se consomem os diamantes mais límpidos A paixão dos suicidas que se matam sem explicação.

My Last Poem I would like my last poem thus That it be gentle saying the simplest and least intended things That it be ardent like a tearless sob That it have the beauty of almost scentless flowers The purity of the flame in which the most limpid diamonds are consumed The passion of suicides who kill themselves without explanation. - translation by Elizabeth Bishop