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Poetry In Quotes

[The Bible] has noble poetry in it... and some good morals and a wealth of obscenity, and upwards of a thousand lies.
- Mark Twain

I'm not against sentimentality. I think you need it. I mean, I don't think you get a true picture of people without it in writing... It's a kind of poetry, it's an emotional poetry, and, to bring it back to the literary scene, I don't think anything is true that doesn't have it, that doesn't have poetry in it.
- Nelson Algren

And so ended his affection," said Elizabeth impatiently. "There has
been many a one, I fancy, overcome in the same way. I wonder who first
discovered the efficacy of poetry in driving away love!"
"I have been used to consider poetry as the food of love," said Darcy.
- Jane Austen

I wonder who first discovered the efficacy of poetry in driving away love!- Elizabeth Bennet
- Jane Austen

All lives are composed of two basic elements," the squirrel said, "purpose and poetry. By being ourselves, squirrel and raven, we fulfill the first requirement, you in flight and I in my tree. But there is poetry in the meanest of lives, and if we leave it unsought we leave ourselves unrealized. A life without food, without shelter, without love, a life lived in the rainthis is nothing beside a life without poetry.
- Peter S Beagle

Who succeeds in forming and leading a Great Group? He or she is almost always a pragmatic dreamer. They are people who get things done, but they are people with immortal longings. Often, they are scientifically minded people with poetry in their souls.
- Warren G Bennis

You'll have to take me to some museums, he said. He was being the young man on the road, following the sun because gray weather made him suicidal, writing his poetry in his mind in diners and gas station men's rooms across the country.
- Francesca Lia Block

If we find poetry in the service station and motel, if we are drawn to the airport or train carriage, it is perhaps because, in spite of their architectural compromises and discomforts, in spite of their garish colours and harsh lighting, we implicitly feel that these isolated places offer us a material setting for an alternative to the selfish ease, the habits and confinement of the ordinary, rooted world.
- Alain De Botton

I have no advice for anybody; except to, you know, be awake enough to see where you are at any given time, and how that is beautiful, and has poetry inside. Even places you hate.
- Jeff Buckley

The mystic purchases a moment of exhilaration with a lifetime of confusion; and the confusion is infectious and destructive. It is confusing and destructive to try and explain anything in terms of anything else, poetry in terms of psychology.
- Basil Bunting

I wouldn't be surprised if poetry - poetry in the broadest sense, in the sense of a world filled with metaphor, rhyme, and recurring patterns, shapes, and designs - is how the world works. The world isn't logical; it's a song.
- David Byrne

I sense the world might be more dreamlike, metaphorical, and poetic than we currently believe--but just as irrational as sympathetic magic when looked at in a typically scientific way. I wouldn't be surprised if poetry--poetry in the broadest sense, in the sense of a world filled with metaphor, rhyme, and recurring patterns, shapes, and designs--is how the world works. The world isn't logical, it's a song.
- David Byrne

Bleak House is just the most astounding piece of work. There's huge, visionary poetry in it.
- Simon Callow

They may have been ugly. They may have been evil. But when it came to poetry in motion, the Things had all the grace and coordination of a deck-chair.
- Terry Pratchett

There's no poetry in me, Reginleit. No fine words." He stared down at her, his gaze seeming to consume her. "I come to you as a man unfinished.
- Kresley Cole

Only in dreams, in poetry, in play do we sometimes arrive at what we were before we were this thing that, who knows, we are.
- Julio Cortazar

Romance like a ghost escapes touching; it is always where you are not, not where you are. The interview or conversation was prose at the time, but it is poetry in the memory.
- George William Curtis

There's real poetry in the real world. Science is the poetry of reality
- Richard Dawkins

It is a way we reassess our past. We can do that in poetry in ways we can't do in prose.
- Peter Davison

I go in and slip a note in Jane's locker, which I've gotten in the habit of doing. It's always just a line or two that I found from some poem in the gigantic poetry anthology my sophomore English taught me from. I said I wouldn't be the kind of boyfriend who reads her poetry, and I'm not, but I guess I am the kind of cheesy bastard who slips lines of poetry into her mornings.
- John Green

I said I wouldn't be the kind of boyfriend who reads her poetry, and I'm not, but I guess I am the kind of cheesy bastard who slips lines of poetry into her mornings.
- John Green

When superstition is allowed to perform the task of old age in dulling the human temperament, we can say goodbye to all excellence in poetry, in painting, and in music.
- Denis Diderot

Instead of trying to come up and pontificate on what literature is, you need to talk with children, to teachers, and make sure they get poetry in the curriculum early.
- Rita Dove

We recognise in the finished art, which is the result of these conditions, the best words in the best order - poetry; and to put this essential poetry into different classes is impossible.
- John Drinkwater

The musician - if he be a good one - finds his own perception prompted by the poet's perception, and he translates the expression of that perception from the terms of poetry into the terms of music.
- John Drinkwater

You can find poetry in your everyday life, your memory, in what people say on the bus, in the news, or just what's in your heart.
- Carol Ann Duffy

He carried Paul inside and up the stairs. He gave him a drink of water and the orange chewable aspirin he like and sat with him on the bed, holding his hand...This was what he yearned to capture on film: these rare moments where the world seemed unified, coherent, everything contained in a single fleeting image. A spareness that held beauty and hope and motion - a kind of silvery poetry, just as the body was poetry in blood and flesh and bone.
- Kim Edwards

It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted.
- George Eliot

I used to write sonnets and various things, and moved from there into writing prose, which, incidentally, is a lot more interesting than poetry, including the rhythms of prose.
- Shelby Foote

If a thing can be said in ten words, I may be relied upon to take a hundred to say it. I ought to apologize for that. I ought to prune, pare and extirpate excess growth, but I will not. I like words - strike that, I love words - and while I am fond of the condensed and economical use of them in poetry, in song lyrics, in Twitter, in good journalism and smart advertising, I love the luxuriant profusion and mad scatter of them too.
- Stephen Fry

Poetry has an immediate effect on the mind. The simple act of reading poetry alters thought patterns and the shuttle of the breath. Poetry induces trance. Its words are chant. Its rhythms drumbeats. Its images become the icons of the inner eye. Poetry is more than a description of the sacred experience; it carries the experience itself.
- Ivan M Granger

If there's no money in poetry, neither is there poetry in money.
- Robert Graves

There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either.
- Robert Graves

What we know is that Shakespeare wrote perhaps the most remarkable body of passionate love poetry in the English language to a young man.
- Stephen Greenblatt

There have been two popular subjects for poetry in the last few decades: the Vietnam War and AIDS, about both of which almost all of us have felt deeply.
- Thom Gunn

When you translate poetry in particular, you're obliged to look at how the writer with whom you're working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence.
- Marilyn Hacker

I shall have poetry in my life. And adventure. And love, love, love, above all. Love as there has never been in a play. Unbiddable, ungovernable, like a riot in the heart and nothing to be done, come ruin or rapture.
- Tom Stoppard

To be born in Wales, not with a silver spoon in your mouth, but, with music in your blood and with poetry in your soul, is a privilege indeed.
- Brian Harris

The inmost spirit of poetry, in other words, is at bottom, in every recorded case, the voice of pain and the physical body, so to speak, of poetry, is the treatment by which the poet tries to reconcile that pain with the world.
- Ted Hughes

Music resembles poetry, in each
Are nameless graces which no methods teach,
And which a master hand alone can reach.
- Alexander Pope

I'm fascinated by rap and by hip-hop. I think there's a lot of poetry in it. There's a lot of anger, a lot of social energy in it. And I think you'd better listen to it pretty carefully, 'cause it's important.
- John F Kerry

One must write poetry in such as way that if one threw the poem in a window, the pane would break.
- Daniil Kharms

He's probably out there in the hallway right now, composing bad poetry in his head." Michi cleared her throat, her voice taking on a breathless lilt:
"Pale Fox's Daughter,
Her cherry lips haunt my dreams.
Something, something, breasts..
- Jay Kristoff

Who you are contributes to your poetry in a number of important ways, but you shouldn't identify with your poems so closely that when they are cut, you're the one that bleeds.
- Dorianne Laux

.. I am a student of life, and don't want to miss any experience. There's poetry in this sort of thing, you know--or perhaps you don't know, but it's all the same.
- H P Lovecraft

What does that represent? There was never any question in plastic art, in poetry, in music, of representing anything. It is a matter of making something beautiful, moving, or dramatic - this is by no means the same thing.
- Fernand Leger

When Rachel Carson accepted the National Book Award, she said, 'if there is poetry in my book about the sea it is not because I deliberately put it there but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out poetry.
- Jim Lynch

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.
- Norman Maccaig

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

... imaginary gardens with real toads in them...
... if you demand on one hand,
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness and
that which is on the other hand
genuine, then you are interested in poetry.
- Marianne Moore

I did not have a very literary background. I came to poetry from the sciences and mathematics, and also through an interest in Japanese and Chinese poetry in translation.
- Robert Morgan

Those who say we should dismantle the role of Poet Laureate altogether, the trick they miss is that being called this thing, with the weight of tradition behind it, and with the association of the Royal family, does allow you to have conversations and to open doors, and wallets, for the good of poetry in a way that nothing else would allow.
- Andrew Motion

Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.
- Vladimir Nabokov

Men had always been the reciters of poetry in the desert.
- Michael Ondaatje

I look for poetry in English because it's the only language I read.
- Jack Prelutsky

He passes from lyric to epic poetry in order to speak about the world and the torment in the world through man, rationally and emotionally. The poet then becomes a danger.
- Salvatore Quasimodo

There is little premium in poetry in a world that thinks of Pound and Whitman as a weight and a sampler, not an Ezra, a Walt, a thing of beauty, a joy forever.
- Anna Quindlen

I write poetry in order to live more fully.
- Judith Rodriguez

Nobody ever told me what to read, or ever put poetry in my way.
- Isaac Rosenberg

Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.
- Jeanpaul Sartre

Because people are very interested in my poetry, in what I say.
- Compay Segundo

Some say they see poetry in my paintings; I see only science.
- Georges Seurat

I'm sorry, man, but I've got magic. I've got poetry in my fingertips. Most of the time - and this includes naps - I'm an F-18, bro. And I will destroy you in the air. I will deploy my ordinance to the ground.
- Charlie Sheen

On July 26, 1916, I announced to all my friends in America that from now on I resolved to write no more poems in the classical language, and to begin my experiments in writing poetry in the so-called vulgar tongue of the people.
- Hu Shih

There's poetry in everything, everything is music; just listen and you will hear it.
- Noam Shpancer

I'm not really quiet or shy. Ask any of my friends! But I always ground my poetry in life itself. Poetry is an art of language, though, so I am always aware of every word's meaning, or multiple meanings.
- Anne Stevenson

Theater is far superior to film in poetry, in abstract poetry.
- Julie Taymor

There's a kind of Ah-ha! Somebody at least for a moment feels about something or sees something the way that I do. It doesn't happen all the time. It's these brief flashes or flames, but I get that sometimes. I feel unaloneintellectually, emotionally, spiritually. I feel human and unalone and that I'm in a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness in fiction and poetry in a way that I don't with other art.
- David Foster Wallace

I'm a poet. And then I put the poetry in the drama. I put it in short stories, and I put it in the plays. Poetry's poetry. It doesn't have to be called a poem, you know.
- Tennessee Williams

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