Famous Quotes & Sayings

C. C. H. Pounder

When I was a kid, a pickleball hit me in the back of the head, and I had memory problems. I was in a boarding school and the nuns gave me poems to remember to try and get the memory going again.

William Shakespeare

But thy eternal summer shall not fade.

Muriel Rukeyser

Our poems will have failed if our readers are not brought by them beyond the poems.

Robert Littell

The poetry of Walt Whitman. I can return again and again to these magnificent poems and still get pleasure from reading them.

The poems in the fifth section are from a book I'm trying to get published.

Since the age of 11, I have loved writing poems and fragments from my life.

My first book was an adult novel, 'Down Among the Gods,' published by Virago, and I've written poems as well, a slim volume of poetry.

William Shakespeare

Give every man thine ear, but few thy voice; Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment.

Teju Cole

Throughout his career, W.G. Sebald wrote poems that were strikingly similar to his prose. His tone, in both genres, was always understated but possessed of a mournful grandeur.

Edward Hirsch

I didn't sit down then and start writing poems, but it was in the back of my mind.

Claire Tomalin

People who attack biography choose as their models vulgar and offensive biography. You could equally attack novels or poems by choosing bad poems or novels.

Andrea Gibson

Political poems are love poems, and then love poems can be political in this society where people can be so separated from each other.

Daphne Gottlieb

Poetry is a lousy form of activism; it doesn't really change much. And maybe we can point to one or two historical times when a poem has started a revolution or a rebellion or an uprising, but it doesn't happen that often, and if you put the number of poems next to the number of political acts, it would be pretty slim.

Edward Hirsch

Poems mesmerized me, and I felt better when I was writing them, or trying to - more in touch with something deep and dark within myself.

Poems are endlessly renewable resources. Whatever you bring to them, at whatever stage of life, gets mirrored back, refracted, reread in new ways.

August Wilson

In 1977, I wrote a series of poems about a character, Black Bart, a former cattle rustler-turned-alchemist. A good friend, Claude Purdy, who is a stage director, suggested I turn the poems into a play.

Thom Gunn

When I first started to write, I was aware of being queer, but I didn't write about it. Queer poems would probably not have been accepted by the editors I sent them to.

Sharon Shinn

I hadn't thought specifically about doing graphic novels until a couple of my friends got contracts for them. Then I started picturing how various of my stories or poems would work in an illustrated format and thinking how cool that would be.

C. K. Williams

When you begin to write poems because you love language, because you love poetry. Something happens that makes you write poems. And the writing of poems is incredibly pleasurable and addictive.

Christian Wiman

He has written some of the most memorable poems of our time, and his achievement rivals that of great American poets like Robert Frost and Elizabeth Bishop.

He loved language and found a medium to have to express himself with. That was one of best things. Whenever we would go visit my family, almost every occasion I would ask dad what his latest poems were. A lot of times he would have a work in progress and read it and sometimes ask for comment on it.

David Whyte

I have hundreds of poems memorized. Mostly by others, but also my own. I use the poems when I lead retreats for management groups on topics like creating teams, or coming up with a more entrepreneurial system, or creating more excitement.

I have been told my poems unfold in such a way that it is not at all obvious from the outset where they are going or how they will end.

Siri Hustvedt

I'd been writing poems for many years, but most of them I didn't like. Then, when I was 23, I wrote one I did like, sent it to 'The Paris Review' - the highest publication I could think of - and they accepted it. No other moment in my literary life has quite come close to that.

Stephen Kinzer

Celebrating historic triumphs is a favorite pastime for many Turks. Tales of how Turkic peoples emerged from Central Asia, crossed the steppes to Anatolia, established the Ottoman Empire and ruled for centuries over large swaths of Europe and Asia are the subject of countless legends, poems and books.

I'm always writing tidbits of poems here and there. I'm still writing, just not as much.

I'm a happy camper when I'm doing both: writing and art every day, along with a dose of reading and adventures into what else is being done by other artists/writers and poets. Like breathing. I've written poems or fictions to go with a painting. The source for the inspiration of the art often eludes me.

Helen Oyeyemi

I have been in love with Emily Dickinson's poetry since I was 13, and, like an anonymous post on findagrave.com says, 'Dear Emily - I hope I have understood.' Emily's poems are sometimes difficult, often abstract, on occasion flippant, but her mind is inside them.

Kelsea Ballerini

When I was 13, I started writing songs, and it fell into my lap all of a sudden. I wrote poems and journals, but that's when it switched for me to songwriting. That's when I wanted to do everything. It was like a fire all of a sudden. I started coming to Nashville and moved here when I was 15.

Jessye Norman

'Swan,' by Mary Oliver. Poems and prose. Reading from this book is as if visiting a very wise friend. There is wisdom and welcoming kindness on every page.

Marcus Aurelius

Some good, some so-so, and lots plain bad: that's how a book of poems is made, my friend

Philip Levine

My mother worked full-time so I was largely ungoverned, free to roam the streets of Detroit from an early age and research the poems to come, a tiny Walt Whitman going among powerful, uneducated people.

Jane Yolen

My youngest son becomes an award-winning nature photographer, and I cannot resist writing poems to his pictures. My daughter loves to cook, though I do not. Yet together, we write a cookbook with fairy tales. And now a second.