"Poetry is what happens when nothing else can."
— Charles Bukowski

"Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."
— William Butler Yeats (The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats)

"In order to know who you are you need to know God is."
— Annette Hoggs-Jackson

"Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?"
— Virginia Woolf (Orlando)

"I'm making a list
I'm making a list of things I must say
For politeness,
And goodness and kindness and gentleness
Sweetness and rightness:
Hello
Pardon me
How are you?
Excuse me
Bless you
May I?
Thank you
Goodbye
If you know some that I've forgot,
Please stick them in you eye!
"
— Shel Silverstein

"Every moment of the night
Forever changing places
And they put out the star-light
With the breath from their pale faces"
— Edgar Allan Poe

"Ourchestra:
So you haven't got a drum, just beat your belly.
So I haven't got a horn-I'll play my nose.
So we haven't any cymbals-
We'll just slap our hands together,
And though there may be orchestras
That sound a little better
With their fancy shiny instruments
That cost an awful lot-
Hey, we're making music twice as good
By playing what we've got!"
— Shel Silverstein

"Far off in the red mangroves an alligator has heaved himself onto a hummock of grass and lies there, studying his poems."
— Mary Oliver

"kau mata, aku airmatamu..."
— Joko Pinurbo

"All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born."
— W.B.Yeats

"And what will you do now? You'll collect loves
Like stamps. You've got doubles and no one
Will trade you and you have the damaged ones."
— Yehuda Amichai

"Browsing the dim back corner
Of a musty antique shop
Opened an old book of poetry
Angels flew out from the pages
I caught the whiff of a soul
The ink seemed fresh as today
Was that voices whispering?
The tree of the paper still grows.
"
— Pixie Foudre

"The road whinnies and rears up. The sky gallops.
You are permanent within me in this chaos.
Somewhere deep in my mind you shine forever, without
moving, silent, like the angel awed by death,
or like the insect burying itself
in the rotted heart of a tree."
— Miklós Radnóti (Clouded Sky)

"I am very close to HIM, sometimes I think I am HIM, with my mood is the weather,bright and sunny forever."
— Santosh Kalwar

""Some people like me, some don't. I don't understand, Where the difference comes from. My heart like them all. For a simple childish reason. We all are created equal, we all are humans.""
— Santosh Kalwar (A Very First Book Of Poems: Heartbreak)

"November comes
And November goes,
With the last red berries
And the first white snows.

With night coming early,
And dawn coming late,
And ice in the bucket
And frost by the gate.

The fires burn
And the kettles sing,
And earth sinks to rest
Until next spring."
— Clyde Watson

"Don't be afraid of poetry."
— Clifton Fadiman (Clifton Fadiman's Fireside Reader)

"I did best when I had least truth for my subjects."
— John Donne (The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne)

"It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road."
— Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own)

"I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is pressed
Against the earth's sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree."
— Joyce Kilmer

"God would seem to indicate to us and not allow us to doubt that these beautiful poems are not human, or the work of man, but divine and the work of God; and that the poets are only the interpreters of the Gods..."
— Socrates

"Love is anterior to life"
— Emily Dickinson (The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson)

"All the drawing lacks
is the final touch: To add
eyes to the dragon"
— Diane Duane (Young Wizards, Book 5: The Wizard's Dilemma)

""I have a rendezvous with death... I will not fail that rendezvous""
— Alan Seeger

"As a friend I meet you, As a friend I treat you, but late I realized that I fell in love with you "
— Tais Mileile

"A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness."
— Robert Frost

"The kind of poetry to avoid in the pretty-pretty kind that pleased our grandmothers, the kind that Longfellow and Tennyson, good poets at their best, wrote at their worst."
— Clifton Fadiman (Clifton Fadiman's Fireside Reader)

"There is art in my fingertips,
a poem in my head,
a song brushing past my lips,
a piano being fed.

A mic waiting to be held,
a pen waiting to be used;
Waiting for the perfect hand
and a voice to be felt.

This is: EMOTION"
— Melinda Pitkin

"According to [Galway] Kinnell, to make a poem you need the creatures of the world, language, and the unconsious brought together."
— Patricia Kirkpatrick ("That Flickering Bird: Tracking the Unconscious in Poetry for Young Readers")

"...in that rich earth a richer dust concealed.

(I'm flogging a dead horse w/ this one but this is the 1st time I've even seen this quotes feature! I just wanted to post something.)"
— Rupert Brooke

"THE GESTURE

The question is: how does one hold an
apple
Who likes apples

And how does one handle
Filth? The question is

How does one hold something
In the mind which he intends

To grasp and how does the salesman
Hold a bauble he intends

To sell? The question is
When will there not be a hundred

Poets who mistake that gesture
For a style."
— George Oppen (New Collected Poems)

"Impossible to doubt the world: it can
be seen
And because it is irrevocable

It cannot be understood, and I believe
that fact is lethal"
— George Oppen (New Collected Poems)

"morning cracks to peeling paint

This beings my poem which was cut into red marble by Artist Larry Kirkland of Washington, D.C. and is on permanent display in New York City's Penn Station, 7th Avenue Concourse. It is next to
William Carlos Williams' red wheelbarrow poem. My hero. "
— Ed Smith