Rhys Owain Williams > Rhys's Quotes

“Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.”
― Thomas Gray, Selected Poems

“My witness is the empty sky.”
― Jack Kerouac

“Nothing happens, and nothing happens, and then everything happens.”
― Fay Weldon

“A poet is always learning.”
― Malika Booker

“Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.”
― Allen Ginsberg

“Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.”
― T.S. Eliot

“The true poem rests between the words.”
― Vanna Bonta, Shades of the World

“A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.”
― W.H. Auden, The Complete Works of W.H. Auden: Prose, Volume II: 1939-1948

“Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.”
― Rita Dove

“Poetry isn’t about representing myself to others, but inviting them in to find out that my spaces aren’t so different from theirs.”
― Alan Kellermann

“Poetry could be a brilliant antidote to some of our current cultural problems...our collective attention deficit.”
― Ian Gregson

“When you cut into the present, the future leaks out”
― William S. Burroughs

“Each moment / of utterance is the true one; likewise none is true.”
― John Ashbery

“...just as children imagine a prayer / is merely silence...”
― John Ashbery

“If life were merely a habit, I should commit suicide; but even now, more or less desperate, I cannot but think, ‘Something wonderful may happen.’ It is not optimism, it is a rejection of self-pity (I hope) which leaves a loophole for life… I merely choose to remain living out of respect for possibility. And possibility is the great good. — Frank O’Hara, Early Writing, 108-9 (1/22/49) Bookpeople (June 1977).”
― Frank O'Hara, Early Writing