Top 1000 Poetry Quotes & Sayings - Page 2

I think people turn to poetry more often than they think they do, or encounter it in more ways than they think that they do. I think we forget the places that we encounter it, say, in songs or in other little bits and pieces of things that we may have remembered from childhood.

We simply have not kept in touch with poetry.

I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn't that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come back, I needed some breathing room. I'd already been translating French poetry, I'd been to Paris once before and liked it very much, and so I just went.

I love Sufism as I love beautiful poetry, but it is not the answer. Sufism is like a mirage in the desert. It says to you, come and sit, relax and enjoy yourself for a while.

That's one of the great things about poetry; one realises that one does one's little turn - that you're just part of the great crop, as it were.

There's a love of rhetorical skill in the Muslim world. Osama bin Laden doesn't just go on tape cassettes and say, 'America sucks.' He recites poetry; he finds things that 'America sucks' rhymes with.

As a direct line to human feeling, empathic experience, genuine language and detail, poetry is everything that headline news is not. It takes us inside situations, helps us imagine life from more than one perspective, honors imagery and metaphor - those great tools of thought - and deepens our confidence in a meaningful world.

When I was younger, I felt it was my duty to wake people up. I thought poetry was asleep. I thought rock 'n' roll was asleep.

I never think about poetry except when I'm writing it. I mean my poetry.

And if they haven't got poetry in them, there's nothing you can do that will produce it.

I'm not an academic, but I've always loved poetry since I've been small.

Any reflection about poetry should begin, or end, with this question: who and how many read poetry books?

When I was asked to be Writer in Residence at Edinburgh I thought, you can't teach poetry. This is ridiculous.

I find a lot of poetry to be narcissistic.

Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.

For whatever reason, people, including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading, do not read poetry.

And the second question, can poetry be taught? I didn't think so.

I was very interested in American poetry for many years. Much less now.

Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.

I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time. They are in opposition.

Poetry comes alive to me through recitation.

Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production.

I'm not really a musician. I'm a performer, and I love rock n' roll. I've embraced rock n' roll because it encompasses all the things I'm interested in: poetry, revolution, sexuality, political activism - all of these things can be found in rock n' roll.

I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests.

Probably induced by the asthma, I started reading and writing early on, my literary efforts from the age of about nine running chiefly to poetry and plays.

More modern poetry is written than read.

Poetry's a thing that belongs to everyone.

After attending the gymnasium between my eighth and seventeenth years, I studied classical philology at Berlin University for two years under Boeckh and Lachmann, and with the friendly support of Emanuel Geibel and Franz Kugler, I dabbled in all sorts of poetry.

In Bonn, where I studied for a year, I changed from classical to Romance philology, taught there by its great founder, F. Diez, and at the beginning of 1852, I received the doctorate for a dissertation on the refrain in Provencal poetry.

Tyranny will make an entire population into readers of poetry.

One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.

From my music training, I knew that, some Spanish rhythms apart, 5/4 is a time signature used only in the modern era. Holst's Mars from the Planets is 5/4. But if you speak lines of poetry in that pattern you just end up hitting the off-beats. It's only when you add a rest - a sixth beat - that it sounds as it surely should sound.

However, I learned something. I thought that if the young person, the student, has poetry in him or her, to offer them help is like offering a propeller to a bird.

If the object of poetry is, to make men, then poetry is the heir of prophecy.

The whole thing about making films in an organic film on location is that it's not all about characters, relationships and themes, it's also about place and the poetry of place. It's about the spirit of what you find, the accidents of what you stumble across.

A grain of poetry suffices to season a century.

Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed. Their highest merit is suggestiveness.

I like it when someone gives me a new book of poetry by a poet I haven't read.

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

I see poetry as spiritual medicine.

The novel is born of disillusionment; the poem, of despair.

Poetry seems to be the only weapon able to beat language, using language's own means.

When I first heard Bob Dylan, I'll be honest, I didn't like him. But I was shallow of mind and didn't understand the poetry. I just judged him on his singing and his guitar playing.

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

Nothing I had written before 'Mary Poppins' had anything to do with children, and I have always assumed, when I thought about it at all, that she had come out of the same wall of nothingness as the poetry, myth and legend that had absorbed me all my writing life.

Poetry is not Irish or any other nationality; and when writers such as Messrs. Clarke, Farren and the late F. R. Higgins pursue Irishness as a poetic end, they are merely exploiting incidental local colour.

If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger.

All those authors there, most of whom of course I've never met. That's the poetry side, that's the prose side, that's the fishing and miscellaneous behind me. You get an affection for books that you've enjoyed.

Surrealism is not a poetry but a poetics, and even more, and more decisively, a world vision.

I wanted to write poetry almost a little more than I wanted to eat.

You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you.

When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images.

We are looking to brands for poetry and for spirituality, because we're not getting those things from our communities or from each other.

Art: If the object of poetry is, to make men, then poetry is the heir of prophecy.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

It could be that all awful dictators are frustrated artists - Mao with his poetry and Mussolini with his monuments. Stalin was once a journalistic hack, and I can personally testify to how frustrated they are. Pol Pot left a very edgy photo collection behind. And Osama seems quite interested in video.

Poetry is a sort of homecoming.

I guess I started writing poetry and stuff and then decided to set it to music.

I love the fact that Inuit poetry may resonate with me as much as Irish.

I hadn't published a book of poetry in over a decade because I've been very ill. As I got better and started to write, I said, 'Wow, even as an old woman, I could have a selected book of poems.'