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Poetry Quotes

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Poetry Quotes

“The poet presents the imagination with images from life and human characters and situations, sets them all in motion and leaves itto the beholder to let these images take his thoughts as far as his mental powers will permit. This is why he is able to engage men of the most differing capabilities, indeed fools and sages together. The philosopher, on the other hand, presents not life itself but the finished thoughts which he has abstracted from it and then demands that the reader should think precisely as, and precisely as far as, he himself thinks. That is why his public is so small.”

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Author:Arthur Schopenhauer
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“You can be a thorough-going Neo-Darwinian without imagination, metaphysics, poetry, conscience, or decency. For 'Natural Selection' has no moral significance: it deals with that part of evolution which has no purpose, no intelligence, and might more appropriately be called accidental selection, or better still, Unnatural Selection, since nothing is more unnatural than an accident. If it could be proved that the whole universe had been produced by such Selection, only fools and rascals could bear to live.”

IfsStillsWholeMightPoetryPurposeUniverseImaginationNaturalDealsMoralFoolBearsEvolutionConscienceIntelligenceAccidentsProofSignificanceMetaphysicsSelectionDecencyUnnaturalThoroughNatural SelectionRascalsAppropriateness
Author:George Bernard Shaw
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“It is unwise to equate scientific activity with what we call reason, poetic activity with what we call imagination. Without the imaginative leap from facts to generalisation, no theoretic discovery in science is made. The poet, on the other hand, must not imagine but reason--that is to say, he must exercise a great deal of consciously directed thought in the selection and rejection of his data: there is a technical logic, a poetic reasoning in his choice of the words, rhythms and images by which a poem's coherence is achieved.”

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Author:Cecil Day-Lewis
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“Ô, the wine of a woman from heaven is sent, more perfect than all that a man can invent.”

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Book:The Love of Europa: Limited Time Edition
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“Ô, the wine of a woman from heaven is sent, more perfect than all that a man can invent. When she came to my bed and begged me with sighs not to tempt her towards passion nor actions unwise, I told her I’d spare her and kissed her closed eyes, then unbraided her body of its clothing disguise. While our bodies were nude bathed in candlelight fine I devoured her mouth, tender lips divine; and I drank through her thighs her feminine wine. Ô, the wine of a woman from heaven is sent, more perfect than all that a man can invent.”

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Author:Roman Payne
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“Hold on, and I’ll drive the darkness back!— Whispers the lunar prince to the stranded sheep, tenderly, While he puts on the adorned crown of night, And while the winds are wrestling it out devoid of senses. Hold on even as the stars have disappeared from sight, And the herd has abandoned you to the wolves. Hold on to that last bit of life you have! Hold out throughout the seeming strife, And I promise the clock will not strike twelve. Hold out until my hand reaches to your rescue, Hold on to the very last moment!—I will do it.”

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Book:Journeys Beyond Earth
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“The pleasures of the fancy are more conducive to health, than those of the understanding, which are worked out by dint of thinking, and attended with too violent a labour of the brain. Delightful scenes, whether in nature, painting, or poetry, have a kindly influence on the body, as well as the mind, and not only serve to clear and brighten the imagination, but are able to disperse grief and melancholy, and to set the animal spirits in pleasing and agreeable motions. For this reason Sir Francis Bacon, in his Essay upon Health, has not thought it improper to prescribe to his reader a poem or a prospect, where he particularly dissuades him from knotty and subtle disquisitions, and advises him to pursue studies that fill the mind with splendid and illustrious objects, as histories, fables, and contemplations of nature.”

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Book:The Pleasures of the Imagination : ur The Spectator, June 19th - July 3rd, 1712
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“How is it that what is actually present and transpiring is commonly perceived by the common sense and understanding only, is bare and bald, without halo or the blue enamel of intervening air? But let it be past or to come, and it is at once idealized. It is not simply the understanding now, but the imagination, that takes cognizance of it. The imagination requires a long range. It is the faculty of the poet to see present things as if, in this sense, also past and future, as if distant or universally significant.”

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Book:The Journal, 1837-1861
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“It is not an artifice that the mind has added to human nature. The mind has added nothing to human nature. It is a violence from within that protects us from a violence without It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do wIth our self-preservation; and that, no doubt, is why the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives.”

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Book:The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination
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“Blinking and it's dripping, the wet eyes The cold tears or foggy breath Pitter patter, but the melting one The deafening silence, shining My amusement, my curtains The cold, behind the landscape The conscious of aftermath Missing, night lamp lighting A symbolic gesture, raising my arm My bewilderment, this work done The cost of life, my uneven quilts These slurks of cold air, slowly entering By and by grabbed, a handful of curtain Failed to judge, the end of same Eventually, discovered the light Flashing my eyes, my un-dilated pupil The pane partiality covered, but visible The range of Bimar Narsar, like a bride It's blanket of white, flashing everywhere It's been snowing throughout the dark”

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Book:No Book: Some Forsaken Words
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“... he slipped in and out of himself, testing which disguise to use. He knew it had to be his most clever. The Sisters were too astute for his usual chicanery. He flapped his wings, then soared. The shape of an eagle, useful for fast travel across worlds, but only temporary. Not convincing enough to hide his true identity. ... He pushed out of the eagle skin and leaped away from the horde of birds, springing into the sky. Into nothingness. Instead of transforming into another creature, he hovered in between. Dangling on the mouth of wind. He rumbled with pleasure, at his own cleverness, born out of accident and indecision: he had become pure air. Without effort, he whooshed past the threshold into the cave, into the bark of the Great Tree, winding cleverly under and over and through a maze of roots and rough stone, past every trick and trap the Sisters had set. He delighted at the speed at which he travelled, catching himself just in time, before his enthusiasm revealed the disguise. Slowing impulse to a mere draft, sucking into himself, he reached the very heart of the Norns’ lair. The Great Hall of Time.”

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Book:Becoming Leidah
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“I push my eye farther into the crack, smushing my cheek. The door rattles. Her arm freezes. The needle stops. Instantly, her shadow fills the room, a mountain on the wall. “Leidah?” I hold my breath. No hiding in the wood-box this time. Before I even have time to pull my eye away, the door opens. My mother's face, like the moon in the dark hallway. She squints and takes a step toward me. “Lei-lee?” I want to tell her I’ve had a nightmare about the Sisters, that I can’t sleep with all this whispering and worrying from her—and what are you sewing in the dark, Mamma? I try to move my lips, but I have no mouth. My tongue is gone; my nose is gone. I don’t have a face anymore. It has happened again. I am lying on my back, flatter than bread. My mother’s bare feet slap against my skin, across my belly, my chest. She digs her heel in, at my throat that isn’t there. I can see her head turning toward her bedroom. Snores crawl under the closed door. The door to my room is open, but she can’t see my bed from where she stands, can’t see that my bed is empty. She nods to herself: everything as it should be. Her foot grinds into my chin. The door to the sewing room closes behind her. I struggle to sit up. I wiggle my hips and jiggle my legs. It is no use. I am stuck, pressed flat into the grain of wood under me. But it’s not under me. It is me. I have become the floor. I know it’s true, even as I tell myself I am dreaming, that I am still in bed under the covers. My blood whirls inside the wood knots, spinning and rushing, sucking me down and down. The nicks of boot prints stomp and kick at my bones, like a bruise. I feel the clunk of one board to the next, like bumps of a wheel over stone. And then I am all of it, every knot, grain, and sliver, running down the hall, whooshing like a river, ever so fast, over the edge and down a waterfall, rushing from room to room. I pour myself under and over and through, feeling objects brush against me as I pass by. Bookshelves, bedposts, Pappa’s slippers, a fallen dressing gown, the stubby ends of an old chair. A mouse hiding inside a hole in the wall. Mor’s needle bobbing up and down. How is this possible? I am so wide, I can see both Mor and Far at the same time, even though they are in different rooms, one wide awake, the other fast asleep. I feel my father’s breath easily, sinking through the bed into me, while Mor’s breath fights against me, against the floor. In and out, each breath swimming away, away, at the speed of her needle, up up up in out in out outoutout—let me out, get me out, I want out. That’s what Mamma is thinking, and I hear it, loud and clear. I strain my ears against the wood to get back into my own body. Nothing happens. I try again, but this time push hard with my arms that aren’t there. Nothing at all. I stop and sink, letting go, giving myself into the floor. Seven, soon to be eight… it’s time, time’s up, time to go. The needle is singing, as sure as stitches on a seam. I am inside the thread, inside her head. Mamma is ticking—onetwothreefourfivesix— Seven. Seven what? And why is it time to go? Don’t leave me, Mamma. I beg her feet, her knees, her hips, her chest, her heart, my begging spreading like a big squid into the very skin of her. It’s then that I feel it. Something is happening to Mamma. Something neither Pappa nor I have noticed. She is becoming dust. She is drier than the wood I have become. - Becoming Leidah Quoted by copying text from the epub version using BlueFire e-reader.”

PoetryImaginationMagicMagical RealismOutcastNorseWiccaSelkieAncestralShapeshift
Book:Becoming Leidah
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“I found a room, both quiet and slow, a room where the walls are thick. Where pixie dust is kept in jars, and paper rockets soar to Mars, and battles leave no lasting scars as clocks forget to tick. I guard this room, both small and bare, this room in which stories live. Where Peter Pan and Alice play, and Sinbad sails at dawn of day, and wolves cry 'boy' to get their way when ogres won’t forgive. With you I’ll share my hiding place, this room under cloak and spell. We’ll snuggle up inside a nook, and read a venturous story book, that makes us question in a look what nonsense fairies tell. In fictive plots and fabled ends, Our happy-e’er-afters dwell!”

PoetryReadingImaginationStorytellingRichelle GoodrichPoemsRichelle E GoodrichLove Of ReadingStorybooks
Book:A Heart Made of Tissue Paper
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“More strange than true. I never may believe These antique fables, nor these fairy toys. Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends. The lunatic, the lover, and the poet Are of imagination all compact. One sees more devils than vast hell can hold: That is the madman. The lover, all as frantic, Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt. The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name. Such tricks hath strong imagination That if it would but apprehend some joy It comprehends some bringer of that joy; Or in the night, imagining some fear, How easy is a bush supposed a bear!”

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Book:A Midsummer Night’s Dream
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“[Poems] train and exercise the imagination. Trained imaginations are what we need most at a time like this. That is what will enable us to reach across cultures and understand each other, to think of new models and modes of organization that might work better, and to wage peace, because the love of beauty is deeply related to the love of peace.”

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Book:Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies
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“Thanks for the heavenly message brought by thee, Child of the wandering sea, Cast from her lap, forlorn! From thy dead lips a clearer note is born Than ever Triton blew from wreathèd horn! While on mine ear it rings, Through the deep caves of thought I hear a voice that sings:— Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, As the swift seasons roll! Leave thy low-vaulted past! Let each new temple, nobler than the last, Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, Till thou at length art free, Leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s unresting sea!”

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Author:Oliver Wendell Holmes
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“…the imagination gives to everything that it touches a peculiarity, and it seems to me that the peculiarity of the imagination is nobility, of which there are many degrees. This inherent nobility is the natural source of another, which our extremely headstrong generation regards as false and decadent. I mean that nobility which is our spiritual height and depth; and while I know how difficult it is to express it, nevertheless I am bound to give a sense of it. Nothing could be more evasive and inaccessible. Nothing distorts itself and seeks disguise more quickly. There is a shame of disclosing it and in its definite presentations a horror of it. But there it is.”

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Book:The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination
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