Quotes

“I think we communicate only too well, in our silence, in what is unsaid, and that what takes place is a continual evasion, desperate rearguard attempts to keep ourselves to ourselves. Communication is too alarming. To enter into someone else’s life is too frightening. To disclose to others the poverty within us is too fearsome a possibility.”
— Harold Pinter

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.
Oscar Wilde

 

Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out… Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.
A. E. Housman

 

Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.
Mark Strand

 

Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment.
Carl Sandburg

 

Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.
Salvatore Quasimodo

 

Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
Don Marquis

 

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

 

“Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul – and sings the tunes without the words – and never stops at all.”-Emily Dickinson

“At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet”–Plato

“A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.”

“A poem is never finished, only abandoned.”  ~Paul Valéry

“The poet is in the end probably more afraid of the dogmatist who wants to extract the message from the poem and throw the poem away than he is of the
sentimentalist who says, “Oh, just let me enjoy the poem.”  ~Robert Penn Warren

“The poem is the point at which our strength gave out.  “~Richard Rosen

“Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason. ” ~Novalis

“Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.”  ~Carl Sandburg

“Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.  “~Robert Frost

“Ink runs from the corners of my mouth
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.”
~Mark Strand, “Eating Poetry,”

 

“A poet never takes notes. You never takes notes in a love affair.” — Robert Frost