Quotes by Poet of the Authors - Page 429

• Khalil Gibran / Poet

We shall never understand one another until we reduce the language to seven words.

• Khalil Gibran / Poet

A man can be free without being great, but no man can be great without being free.

• Khalil Gibran / Poet

It is not a garment I cast off this day, but a skin that I tear with my own hands.

• Langston Hughes / Poet

LIBERTY! FREEDOM! DEMOCRACY! True anyhow no matter how many Liars use those words.

• Langston Hughes / Poet

I stuck my head out the window this morning and spring kissed me bang in the face.

• Langston Hughes / Poet

Your explanation depresses me," I said. "Your nonsense depresses me," said Simple.

• Langston Hughes / Poet

My writing has been largely concerned with the depicting of Negro life in America.

• Lawrence Ferlinghetti / Poet

For even bad poetry has relevance for what it does not say for what it leaves out.

• Leigh Hunt / Poet

Oh for a seat in some poetic nook, Just hid with trees and sparkling with a brook!

• Letitia Elizabeth Landon / Poet

Imagination is to love what gas is to the balloon-that which raises it from earth.

• Linda Hogan / Poet

We are full of bread and gas, getting fat on the outside while inside we grow thin

• Louis Macneice / Poet

Broadcasting is plastic; while it can ape the press, it can also emulate the arts.

• Louise Glück / Poet

The advantage of poetry over life is that poetry, if it is sharp enough, may last.

• Louise Labe / Poet

You are alone my evil and my good With you I have everything - without you nothing

• Lucretius / Poet

True piety lies rather in the power to contemplate the universe with a quiet mind.

• Lucretius / Poet

How many evils has religion caused! [Lat., Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum!]

• Ludovico Ariosto / Poet

For rarely man escapes his destiny. [It., Che l'uomo il suo destin fugge di raro.]

• Lydia Sigourney / Poet

Something will be gathered from the tablets of the most faultless day for regrets.

• Mahmoud Darwish / Poet

If the Olive Trees knew the hands that planted them, Their Oil would become Tears.

• Mahmoud Darwish / Poet

The days have taught you not to trust happiness because it hurts when it deceives.

• Mahmoud Darwish / Poet

... For me it is essential, essential for the poet to have a new toast, new songs.

• Marceline Desbordes-Valmore / Poet

You had my heart, and I yours; a heart for a heart, good fortune for good fortune.

• Margaret Atwood / Poet

There were a lot of gods. Gods always come in handy, they justify almost anything.

• Margaret Atwood / Poet

This is how the girl who couldn't speak and the man who couldn't see fell in love.

• Margaret Atwood / Poet

I would not change [my past work] anymore than I would airbrush a photo of myself.

• Margaret Atwood / Poet

Some people mistakenly think nature is very nice and benevolent and never betrays.

• Margaret Atwood / Poet

I want everything back, the way it was. But there is no point to it, this wanting.

• Marge Piercy / Poet

Sleeping together is a euphemism for people, but tantamount to marriage with cats.

• Marianne Moore / Poet

Truly as the sun can rot or mend, love can make one bestial or make a beast a man.

• Marianne Moore / Poet

The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; not in silence, but restraint.

• Mark Doty / Poet

Poetry is ... the physical enactment of a process of knowing by means of language.

• Mark Nepo / Poet

To listen is to lean in, softly, with a willingness to be changed by what we hear.

• Mark Strand / Poet

I am not concerned with truth, nor with conventional notions of what is beautiful.

• Mary Jo Bang / Poet

A child, then a man, now a feather / Passing through a furious fire / Called time.

• Mary Oliver / Poet

I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too.

• Mary Oliver / Poet

Writers must... take care of the sensibility that houses the possibility of poems.

• Matthew Arnold / Poet

To thee only God granted A heart ever new: To all always open; To all always true.

• Matthew Arnold / Poet

That which in England we call the middle class is in America virtually the nation.

• Matthew Prior / Poet

For, when with beauty we can virtue join, We paint the semblance of a form divine.

• May Sarton / Poet

Do I think there's life after death? No, I think my books are my life after death.

• Milarepa / Poet

To attain Buddhahood ... we must scatter this life's aims and objects to the wind.

• Miller Williams / Poet

You do not know what wars are going on down there where the spirit meets the bone.

• Moses Ibn Ezra / Poet

Sorrow shatters my heart; And men distress it with blame, Because it follows love.

• Novalis / Poet

Prayer is to religion what thinking is to philosophy. To pray is to make religion.

• Octavio Paz / Poet

To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.

• Octavio Paz / Poet

Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two.

• Ogden Nash / Poet

I am a conscientious man, when I throw rocks at seabirds I leave no tern unstoned.

• Ogden Nash / Poet

It is the sin of omission, the second kind of sin, That lays eggs under your skin.

• Ogden Nash / Poet

Why did the Lord give use so much quickness unless it was to avoid responsibility?

• Ogden Nash / Poet

Nobody agrees with anybody else anyhow, but adults conceal it and infants show it.