Quotes About Poetry

John Prine in particular... just the chord changes combined with the words. He definitely can make you cry a little bit. Just a little bit.

People mostly associate Tagore only with Gitanjali. That is the mistake they make. Gitanjali is just one per cent of his oeuvre.

Kisses, even to the air, are beautiful.

When I read the Koran or hear it read, the images and the poetry, the sound of the language is very inspiring.

A theology should be like poetry, which takes us to the end of what words and thoughts can do.

I once broke up with a boy because he wrote me an awful poem.

Kiss me as if you remember me. Inspire this wild god as once you did. Incite poetry and fire with your passion and perhaps I'll find a way.

When I was in high school, I used to hate that Sylvia Plath poem where she talked about knowing the bottom, that she knew it with her great taproot and that it was what everybody else feared, but she didn't, because she'd been there. I still hate it. But I get it now.

People think of the green pastoral when they think of lovers in nature. Those English poets used the vales and streams to douse their lusts into verse. But the desert offers something that no forest brook or valley ever can: distance. A cloudless rooming house for couples. Skies that will host any visitors' dreams with the bald hospitality of pure space.

They are treading water in a sea of retarded sexuality and bad poetry.

One can translate an editorial but not a poem. For one can go across the border naked but not without one's skin; for, unlike clothes, one cannot get a new skin.

Everything that's created remains as it was before it was created. The artist fetches it down from the heavens as a finished thing. Eternity has no beginning. Poetry or a Joke: the act of creation lies between what's self-evident and what is permanent

Maschinelles Leben fördert, künstlerische Umgebung lähmt die innere Poesie.

on Georg Trakl:] it was always inconceivable to me that he could live. His madness wrestled with godly things.

I didn't go to the funeral of poetry. I stayed home and watched it on television.

To you the offering of this thought, The greeting of my poetry, To you this work of solitude, O slaves of din and vanity. In silence did my sad sigh name You Cecily's unmet by me, All of you Psyches without wings, Mute sisters of my soul! God grant you, unknown family, One sacred dream mid sinful lies, In the prison of this narrow life Just one brief burst of that other life.

It occurred to her, suddenly, that the Chinese took poets as concubines. Their poets slept with warlords. They wrote with gold ink. They ate orchids and smoked opium. They were consecrated by nuance, by birds and silk and the ritual birthdays of gods and nothing changed for a thousand years. And afternoon was absinthe yellow and almond, burnt orange and chrysanthemum. And in the abstract sky, a litany of kites.

fine love poetry tends to be written when the object of one's affection is at a safe distance; also, it often reflects a love of words more than a love of women...

Poets dream of being archaeologists, as if their lives were sedimentary, like rocks. Poets don't mind getting down and dirty with the past.

T]he moral seemed to be that one should always have Latin, or at least a good classical poetry quotation, to depend upon in great or desperate moments.

Naturally, etiquette books order handwashing before as well as after meals, but the practice also appears, with a frequency that borders on obsession, in poetry. Poets found it hard to describe a banquet or even a meal without affirming that everyone washed their hands.

With poetry, you take the stock and boil it down to where it's a glaze. It is the elixir of language.

But in the end, you must move forward into the future. While you may not 'create' a moment, the very fact that you pedal down the road, that action thrusts you into another unique event in your life. Relish it, live it and smile that life treats you well. You represent living poetry in motion." FHW

Remember that to these worlds and these beings and these ages we are to be the messengers of the grace and wisdom and glory of God. In that view the future loses its sense of dread, and one looks on to the new opportunities for art, and music, and poetry, and above all perchance of preaching, that are coming to the ransomed ones when the discipline of time is merged into the fitness of eternity, with reverent and holy desire.