Sharon > Sharon's Quotes

“Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.”
― Frederick Douglass

“Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.”
― Groucho Marx, The Essential Groucho: Writings For By And About Groucho Marx

“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go.”
― Dr. Seuss, I Can Read with My Eyes Shut!

“Wear the old coat and buy the new book.”
― Austin Phelps

“The ability to read awoke inside of me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.”
― Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

“The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.”
― Mark Twain

“She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Work: A Story of Experience

“Reading without reflecting is like eating without digesting.”
― Edmund Burke

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close.”
― Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets

“All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“We love the things we love for what they are.”
― Robert Frost

“Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Alarms and Discursions

“To be nobody but
yourself in a world
which is doing its best day and night to make you like
everybody else means to fight the hardest battle
which any human being can fight and never stop fighting.”
― E.E. Cummings

“Poetry is what gets lost in translation.”
― Robert Frost

“Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.”
― Leonardo da Vinci

“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.”
― Harry Crosby, Transit of Venus

“Dogs are better than human beings because they know but do not tell.”
― Emily Dickinson

“Music is the universal language of mankind.”
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“Listen--are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?”
― Mary Oliver

“Watch out for intellect,
because it knows so much it knows nothing
and leaves you hanging upside down,
mouthing knowledge as your heart
falls out of your mouth.”
― Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems

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

“The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Poetry makes life what lights and music do the stage.”
― Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers

“Poetry is not the most important thing in life... I'd much rather lie in a hot bath reading Agatha Christie and sucking sweets.”
― Dylan Thomas

“A word is elegy to what it signifies.”
― Robert Haas

“I act as the tongue of you,
... tied in your mouth . . . . in mine it begins to be loosened.”
― Walt Whitman

“My Heart

I'm not going to cry all the time
nor shall I laugh all the time,
I don't prefer one "strain" to another.
I'd have the immediacy of a bad movie,
not just a sleeper, but also the big,
overproduced first-run kind.
I want to be at least as alive as the vulgar. And if some aficionado of my mess says "That's not like Frank!," all to the good! I don't wear brown and grey suits all the time, do I? No. I wear workshirts to the opera,
often. I want my feet to be bare,
I want my face to be shaven, and my heart--you can't plan on the heart, but
the better part of it, my poetry, is open.”
― Frank O'Hara

“Poems are never finished - just abandoned”
― Paul Valery

“Don't use the phone. People are never ready to answer it. Use poetry.”
― Jack Kerouac