poetry Quotes That Will Inspire You to Live Your Best Life

1. --> This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson    done,Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the    themes thou lovest best,Night, sleep, death and the stars. — A Clear Midnight, Leaves of Grass. Originally published: July 4, 1855. Leaves of Grass

2. ¡Los suspiros son aire y van al aire!¡Las lágrimas son agua y van al mar!Dime, mujer, cuando el amor se olvida¿sabes tú adónde va?

3. . . . All artists’ work is autobiographical. Any writer’s work is a map of their psyche. You can really see what their concerns are, what their obsessions are, and what interests them.

4. . . . chasing after words like trying to grab the tails of comets. The Diviners

5. . . . We love fog becauseit shifts old anomalies into the elementssurrounding them. It gives relief from a way of seeing Domestic Violence: Poems

6. . . .because we had survivedsisters and brothers, daughters and sons,we discovered bones that rosefrom the dark earth and sangas white birds in the treesBecause the story of our lifebecomes our lifeBecause each of us tells the same storybut tells it differentlyand none of us tells it the same way twice . . (from, Why We Tell Stories) The Private Life: Poems

7. ... and I realise the only way to tell the others is through the way my voice can take these broken wordsand turn it into music. Turn it into poetry.And I sing to make myself come alive, but also for you,because I’d like this to mean something.To not disappear with the dark I will enter one day and so now I will tell.If not for you, then for my own heart, because it tells me to,and I'm learning to listen. Another Vagabond Lost To Love: Berlin Stories on Leaving & Arriving

8. ... imaginary gardens with real toads in them ...... if you demand on one hand,the raw material of poetry inall its rawness andthat which is on the other handgenuine, then you are interested in poetry. Complete Poems

9. … the fisherman’s daughter grinding serenity in her coffee grinder. The Fourth Dimension

10. ... unfools of unbeing ... means quite clearly people who are too stereotyped to be eccentric – people who are too dead spiritually to exist at all and who call alive individual fools e. e. cummings: The Art of His Poetry

11. ..."vers libre," (free verse) or nine-tenths of it, is not a new metre any more than sleeping in a ditch is a new school of architecture. Fancies Versus Fads

12. ...and so many colorsI will have seen...the menacing greysand pine greensthe soft pink and purplesof springand summer blueand so many otherswithout you. A touch, a tear, a tempest

13. ...and then, I have nature and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough?

14. …be awake to the Life that is loving you andsing your prayer, laugh your prayer, dance your prayer, runand weep and sweat your prayer,sleep your prayer, eat your prayer, paint, sculpt, hammer, and read your prayer, sweep, dig, rake, drive and hoe your prayer,garden and farm and build and clean your prayer,wash, iron, vacuum, sew, embroider and pickle your prayer,compute, touch, bend and fold but never deleteor mutilate your prayer.Learn and play your prayer, work and rest your prayer,fast and feast your prayer, argue, talk, whisper, listen and shout your prayer,groan and moan and spit and sneeze your prayer,swim and hunt and cook your prayer,digest and become your prayer,release and recover your prayer,breathe your prayer, be your prayer

15. ...but it is good to be several floors up in the dead of night wondering whether you are any good or not and the only decision you can make is that you did it... Lunch Poems

16. ...But...to sing,to dream, to smile, to walk, to be alone, be free,with a voice that stirs and an eye that still can see!To cock your hat to one side, when you pleaseat a yes, a no, to fight, or- make poetry!To work without a thought of fame or fortune,on that journey, that you dream of, to the moon!Never to write a line that's not your own... Cyrano de Bergerac

17. ...few young poets [are] testing their poems against the ear. They're writing for the page, and the page, let me tell you, is a cold bed.

18. …how it would be nice if, for every sea waiting for us, there would be a river, for us. And someone -a father, a lover, someone- able to take us by the hand and find that river -imagine it, invent it- and put us on its stream, with the lightness of one only word, goodbye. This, really, would be wonderful. It would be sweet, life, every life. And things wouldn’t hurt, but they would get near taken by stream, one could first shave and then touch them and only finally be touched. Be wounded, also. Die because of them. Doesn’t matter. But everything would be, finally, human. It would be enough someone’s fancy -a father, a lover, someone- could invent a way, here in the middle of the silence, in this land which don’t wanna talk. Clement way, and beautiful.A way from here to the sea. Ocean Sea

19. ...if you do not even understand what words say, how can you expect to pass judgement on what words conceal?

20. ...if you do not even understand what words say,how can you expect to pass judgementon what words conceal? Trilogy: The Walls Do Not Fall / Tribute to the Angels / The Flowering of the Rod

21. ...much of poetry in the making is the fiddle with a few items. You lay a word against another and wait. You try another word. And another. Yet another. You wait. You begin again. Listening. Looking. For the elusive inevitable thing which has to arrive before it is recognised. And, like Odysseus, may not be recognised at first. Heartbreak

22. ...the collective wisdom of humanity [is] enshrined in its poetry. Tiger, Tiger

23. ...the wet brush of snowflakes was like your kisses everywhere ... A Familiar Rain

24. ...they come to us, these restless dead,Shrouds woven from the words of men,With trumpets sounding overhead(The walls of hope have grown so thinAnd all our vaunted innocenceHas withered in this endless frost)That promise little recompenseFor all we risk, for all we've lost... Feed

25. ...what the Man-Moth fears most he must do..

26. …wisely mingled poetry and prose. Little Women

27. ...you look at me like an emergency Diving Into the Wreck

28. ..i spill intothe kind of silenceonly Khalil Gibran would understand. Turquoise Silence

29. ‘Paradise Lost’ was printed in an edition of no more than 1,500 copies and transformed the English language. Took a while. Wordsworth had new ideas about nature: Thoreau read Wordsworth, Muir read Thoreau, Teddy Roosevelt read Muir, and we got a lot of national parks. Took a century. What poetry gives us is an archive, the fullest existent archive of what human beings have thought and felt by the kind of artists who loved language in a way that allowed them to labor over how you make a music of words to render experience exactly and fully.

30. (I pull the second to last item out of my bag. Her purple hair clip. She told me once how much it meant to her, and why she always keeps it.)This purple hair clip?It really is magic…just like your dad told you it was.It’s magic because, no matter how many times it lets you down…you keep having hope in it.You keep trusting it.No matter how many times it fails you,You never fail it.Just like you never fail me.I love that about you,because of you.(I set it back down and pull out a strip of paper and unfold it.)Your mother.(I sigh)Your mother was an amazing woman, Lake.I'm blessed that I got to know her,And that she was a part of my life, too.I came to love her as my own mom…just as she came to love Caulder and I as her own.I didn’t love her because of you, Lake.I loved her because of her.So, thank you for sharing her with us.She had more advice aboutLife and love and happiness and heartache than anyone I've ever known.But the best advice she ever gave me?The best advice she ever gave us?(I read the quote in my hands)"Sometimes two people have to fall apart, to realize how much they need to fall back together."(She’s definitely crying now. I place the slip back inside the satchel and take a step closer to the edge of the stage as I hold her gaze.)The last item I have wouldn’t fit, because you’re actually sitting in it.That booth.You’re sitting in the exact same spot you sat in when you watched your first performance on this stage.The way you watched this stage with passion in your eyes…I'll never forget that moment.It's the moment I knew it was too late.I was too far gone by then.I was in love with you.I was in love with you because of you.(I back up and sit down on the stool behind me, still holding her stare.)I could go on all night, Lake.I could go on and on and on about all the reasons I'm in love with you.And you know what? Some of them are the things that life has thrown our way.I do love you because you're the only other person I know that understands my situation.I do love you because both of us know what it's like to lose your mom and your dad.I do love you because you're raising your little brother, just like I am.I love you because of what you went through with your mother.I love you because of what we went through with your mother.I love the way you love Kel.I love the way you love Caulder.And I love the way I love Kel.So I'm not about to apologize for loving all these things about you, no matter the reasons or the circumstances behind them.And no, I don’t need days, or weeks, or months to think about why I love you.It’s an easy answer for me.I love you because of you.Because ofeverysinglethingabout you. Point of Retreat