FastSaying

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


Muriel Rukeyser

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This is pretty strange, not poems, poems are pretty good.
JAMES DYE Poems are a hotline to our hearts, and we forget this emotional power at our peril.
ANDREW MOTION Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky, We fell them down and turn them into paper,
That...
KAHLIL GIBRAN Poems are word paintings. Poetry doesn’t belong to time. That’s why often you feel as if poems a...
SALIL JHA I prefer the absurdity of writing poems
to the absurdity of not writing poems.
WISłAWA SZYMBORSKA [His] poems are astonishing. These are poems that rival anything anyone in the world has ever writte...
BRIAN TREHEARNE Political poems are love poems, and then love poems can be political in this society where people ca...
ANDREA GIBSON We tend to put poems into factions. And it restricts our reading.
THOM GUNN ...some of the best love poems have been written by monks and nuns...
JOHN GEDDES Mandelstam's wife committed all his poems to memory in fear that both he and his poems would be dest...
ANTHONY HECHT Will slam poems and I slam doors.
COLLEEN HOOVER Do not commit your poems to pages alone, sing them I pray you.
VIRGIL Yes, I read. I have that absurd habit. I like beautiful poems, moving poetry, and all the beyond<...
LOUIS ARAGON It's the process of writing and life that matters... We are trying to become sane along with our poe...
NATALIE GOLDBERG No contemporary poet has brought so much lived experience into such formally perfect poems as Richar...
JOHN BARR No poems can please for long or live that are written by water-drinkers.
HORACE No poems can please for long or live that are written by water drinkers.
HORACE It seems to me that if poems should do anything, they should confirm our intimacy — at least point ...
JEFF HARDIN For me, it makes sense to address shocking experiences through poems because of the way poems also h...
DANA GOODYEAR My readers at that time were still men of letters; but there had to be other people waiting to read ...
SALVATORE QUASIMODO Read a lot - poems, prose, stories, newspapers, anything. Read books and poems that you think you wi...
MICHAEL MORPURGO I like poems that are little games.
PETER DAVISON The great poems are not about experience, but are the experience itself, felt in the body.
DAVID WHYTE Love poems are always cliche to me but not to the person it's for.
JAMES DYE The songs are the questions and the poems are the answers.
J C A ROWE I wrote simple poems with deep meaning instead of confusing poems that no one understands.
JEFFERY SMITH When you begin to write poems because you love language, because you love poetry. Something happens ...
C. K. WILLIAMS Trees are poems that the earth writes upon the sky.
KAHLIL GIBRAN I found the poems in the fields,
And only wrote them down.
JOHN CLARE Samuel Marshak was one of the founders of modern Russian children's literature. Soviet children ...
MICHAEL PATRICK HEARN We carried out a survey of our readers, and more than half of them only ever used point-and-shoot mo...
JAMIE HARRISON If I'm still wistful about On the Road, I look on the rest of the Kerouac oeuvre--the poems, the poe...
SARAH VOWELL My poems are hymns of praise to the glory of life.
EDITH SITWELL I believe that poems die the moment they are outwardly expressed.
MAURICE MAETERLINCK Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep.
SEAMUS HEANEY Howl and Other Poems
ALLEN GINSBERG I have hundreds of poems memorized. Mostly by others, but also my own. I use the poems when I lead r...
DAVID WHYTE If I wasn't writing poems I'd be washing my hands all the time.
SHERMAN ALEXIE I love Beethoven, especially the poems.
RINGO STARR I like Beethoven, especially the poems.
RINGO STARR The fatal problem with poetry: poems.
BEN LERNER Roses are red Violets are blue Most poems rhyme This one doesn't.
UNKNOWN It is spring again. The earth is like a child that knows poems by heart.
RAINER MARIA RILKE I'm not sure of any direct influence, but some of my most successful poems are short poems. They hav...
HARRY BROWN He does not write at all whose poems no man reads
MARCUS AURELIUS My stories are sometimes closer to poems or meditations, but often there is at least a little narrat...
LYDIA DAVIS By reason of weird translation, many such sets of instructions read like poems anyhow.
BRIAN FERNEYHOUGH I recite my poems for the King.
MITTA XININDLU Poems are soft kitten furs. smoothing out the rough edges of my world.
SANOBER KHAN In other words the pictures are in a kind of relationship with each other which is touching only at ...
PETER PORTER The few bad poems which occasionally are created during abstinence are of no great interest.
WILHELM REICH We are ashamed of our thoughts and often see them brought forth by others.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON New and Selected Poems: Volume Two
MARY OLIVER The notes I have made are not a diary in the ordinary sense, but partly lengthy records of my spirit...
EDVARD MUNCH Our minds should not be empty because if they are not preoccupied by good, evil will break in upon t...
JOHNSON Our minds should not be empty because if they are not preoccupied by good, evil will break in upon t...
SAMUEL JOHNSON If your teachers suggest that your poems are sentimental, that is only half of it. Your poems probab...
MARY RUEFLE Heap on more wood! the wind is chill; But let it whistle as it will, We'll keep our Christmas merry ...
SIR WALTER SCOTT The true poem rests between the words.
VANNA BONTA I can't understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems: I...
PHILIP LARKIN One attraction of Latin is that you can immerse yourself in the poems of Horace and Catullus without...
PETER BRODIE Nature composes some of her loveliest poems for the microscope and the telescope.
THEODORE ROSZAK My verses, I cannot say poems. I was following in the exquisite footsteps of Miss Millay, unhappily ...
DOROTHY PARKER Some good, some so-so, and lots plain bad: that's how a book of poems is made, my friend
MARCUS AURELIUS She saved all of those poems in a scrapbook, ... And when I look at the scrapbook, it brings back so...
JACQUELINE KENNEDY ONASSIS Allen turned up at my little cabin, ... and we immediately began exchanging poems.
GARY SNYDER I love not man the less, but nature more
GEORGE GORDON BYRON I've reached a point in life where it would be easy to let down my guard and write simple imagis...
MAXINE KUMIN I wanted to write some words you'd remember.

Words so alert they'd leap from the paper, C.L. FOSTER I was trying to pay the bills with poems, and it was easy to memorize my poems, because I'd be r...
OMARI HARDWICK The poems in the fifth section are from a book I'm trying to get published.
HARRY BROWN I've always thought my poems told stories.
DOUGLAS DUNN Stars are important," I say, laughing.

"Sure, but why not more poems about the sun? The s...
NICOLA YOON my poems are only bits of scratching
on the floor of a
cage.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI The ancient Greek oral poets all had this anxiety about the deficiencies of their memories and alway...
DAVID ANTIN I believed in fictional characters as if they were a part of real life. Poetry was important, too. M...
ALICE MCDERMOTT To write good poems is the secret of brevity.
DEJAN STOJANOVIC I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have.
SYLVIA PLATH If our children are becoming teenagers who are abusive, have mental health issues, and are committin...
VIKRAM PATEL If I wasn't writing poems I'd be washing my hands all the time.
SHERMAN ALEXIE When I go to the shore, I take along the poems of Pablo Neruda. I suppose it's because the poems...
TOM ROBBINS Where the cheerful children
of unwritten poems,
play all around,
you will find me the...
KHADIJA RUPA We dare not tempt them with weakness. For only when our arms are sufficient beyond doubt can we be c...
JOHN FITZGERALD KENNEDY The Hollywood movies are more like novels, and the kinds of films I make are more like poems.
STAN BRAKHAGE I still read Donne, particularly his love poems.
CAROL ANN DUFFY Tears for Water: Songbook of Poems and Lyrics.
ALICIA KEYS Each word bears its weight, so you have to read my poems quite slowly.
ANNE STEVENSON We all write poems. It is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.
JOHN FOWLES We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.
JOHN FOWLES I first came across 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree' in college, with other anthologized poems b...
BILLY COLLINS When I worked on a magazine, I learned that there are many, many writers writing that can't writ...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI He has written some of the most memorable poems of our time, and his achievement rivals that of grea...
CHRISTIAN WIMAN listen to my poems
but do not look for me
look for you.
NAYYIRAH WAHEED We all write poems; it is simply that the poets are the ones who write in words
JOHN FOWLES I am a genius who has written poems that will survive with the best of Shakespeare, Wordsworth and K...
IRVING LAYTON These poems are cups
that I pour my love into.
Here,
Drink!
KAMAND KOJOURI I have written symphonic poems and chamber music. It is my way of personal expression.
CARMINE COPPOLA The idea is to take the most ordinary things and make them extraordinary, as Gerard Manley Hopkins d...
ALFONSO A. OSSORIO Of all great poems, love is the absolute and essential foundation.
C. FITZHUGH I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
VIRGINIA WOOLF

More Muriel Rukeyser

Nourish beginnings, let us nourish beginnings. Not all things are blest, but the seeds of all things...
MURIEL RUKEYSER I think there is choice possible to us at any moment, as long as we live. But there is no sacrifice....
MURIEL RUKEYSER The universe is made of stories, not atoms.
MURIEL RUKEYSER The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.
MURIEL RUKEYSER I think there is choice possible to us at any moment, as long as we live. But there is no sacrifice....
MURIEL RUKEYSER The universe is made up of stories, not of atoms.
MURIEL RUKEYSER The universe is made up of stories, not of atoms
MURIEL RUKEYSER Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry.
MURIEL RUKEYSER Nourish beginnings, let us nourish beginnings. Not all things are blest, but the seeds of all things...
MURIEL RUKEYSER The fear of poetry is an indication that we are cut off from our own reality
MURIEL RUKEYSER Dreams the sources of action, the meeting and the end, / a resting-place among the flight of things.
MURIEL RUKEYSER I hear the singing of the lives of women. They clear mystery, the offering, and pride.
MURIEL RUKEYSER One characteristic of modern poetry is that arrangement of parts which strikes many people as being ...
MURIEL RUKEYSER The actual world, not some fantastic structure that has nothing to do with reality, must provide the...
MURIEL RUKEYSER However confused the scene of our life appears, however torn we may be who now do face that scene, i...
MURIEL RUKEYSER The journey is my home
MURIEL RUKEYSER In our period, they say there is free speech. They say there is no penalty for poets, There is no pe...
MURIEL RUKEYSER Flight is intolerable contradiction.
MURIEL RUKEYSER ...only one man lived who could understand MURIEL RUKEYSER Those who speak of our culture as dead or dying have a quarrel with life, and I think they cannot un...
MURIEL RUKEYSER What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?
The world would split open.
MURIEL RUKEYSER Fifteen cents of every twenty-cent stamp goes to storage.
LOUIS RUKEYSER I used to think it a pity that her mother rather than she had not thought of birth control.
MURIEL SPARK If I had my life over again I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death...
MURIEL SPARK Being over seventy is like being engaged in a war. All our friends are going or gone and we survive ...
MURIEL SPARK I wouldn't take the Pope too seriously. He's a Pole first, a pope second, and maybe a Christian thir...
MURIEL SPARK If you're going to do a thing, you should do it thoroughly. If you're going to be a Christian, you m...
MURIEL SPARK To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil's soul. To Miss Mackay it is ...
MURIEL SPARK To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil's soul. To Miss Mackay it is ...
MURIEL SPARK When tea becomes ritual, it takes its place at the heart of our ability to see greatness in small th...
MURIEL BARBERY To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil's soul.
MURIEL SPARK A loser seldom lives in the present, but instead destroys the present by focusing on past memories o...
MURIEL JAMES One's prime is elusive. You little girls, when you grow up, must be on the alert to recognize your p...
MURIEL SPARK One should only see a psychiatrist out of boredom.
MURIEL SPARK It is impossible to persuade a man who does not disagree, but smiles.
MURIEL SPARK One's prime is elusive. You little girls, when you grow up, must be on the alert to recognize yo...
MURIEL SPARK Be on the alert to recognize your prime at whatever time of your life it may occur.
MURIEL SPARK Parents learn a lot from their children about coping with life.
MURIEL SPARK It is impossible to repent of love. The sin of love does not exist.
MURIEL SPARK They didn't recognize me," I repeat.
He stops in turn, my hand still on his arm.
"It is be...
MURIEL BARBERY When a noble life has prepared old age, it is not decline that it reveals, but the first days of imm...
MURIEL SPARK Art and religion first; then philosophy; lastly science. That is the order of the great subjects of ...
MURIEL SPARK Women and men have to fight together to change society - and both will benefit... Partnership, not d...
MURIEL FOX Most of us experience happiness when we are enjoying life and feeling free, enjoying the process and...
JAMES MURIEL It is impossible to persuade a man who does not disagree, but smiles.
MURIEL SPARK To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil's soul. To Miss Mackay it...
MURIEL SPARK Art and religion first; then philosophy; lastly science. That is the order of the great subjects of ...
MURIEL SPARK This was going full circle for him.
MURIEL COOPER We never look beyond our assumptions and what's worse, we have given up trying to meet others; we ju...
MURIEL BARBERY Our house was the most lit-up house on Frazier Street.
MURIEL COOPER And on the way home I thought: pity the poor in spirit who know neither the enchantment nor the beau...
MURIEL BARBERY Personally I think that grammar is a way to attain beauty.
MURIEL BARBERY I thought: pity the poor in spirit who know neither the enchantment nor the beauty of language.
MURIEL BARBERY Godfrey's wife, Charmian, sat with her eyes closed, attempting to put her thoughts into alphabetical...
MURIEL SPARK All my pupils are the crème de la crème. Give me a girl of an impressionable age, and she is mine ...
MURIEL SPARK Even if I didn't have a brokerage, I'd want to talk with a broker. You have big accounts, long-term ...
MURIEL SIEBERT Maybe that's what being alive is about: so we can track down those movments that are dying.
MURIEL BARBERY I am putting old heads on your young shoulders...all my pupils are the creme de la creme.
MURIEL SPARK Most people, when they move, well they just move depending on whatever's around them. At this very m...
MURIEL BARBERY If you want to concentrate deeply on some problem, and especially some piece of writing or paper-wor...
MURIEL SPARK This pause in time, within time ... When did I first experience the exquisite sense of surrender tha...
MURIEL BARBERY When someone that you love dies..it's like fireworks suddenly burning out in the sky and everything ...
MURIEL BARBERY The only purpose of cats is that they constitute mobile decorative objects.
MURIEL BARBERY Sólo se me ocurre el psicoanálisis para rivalizar con el cristianismo en la predilección por los ...
MURIEL BARBERY I am going to die, but that is of no importance.
MURIEL BARBERY It is one of the secrets of Nature in its mood of mockery that fine weather lays heavier weight on t...
MURIEL SPARK Parents learn a lot from their children about coping with life
MURIEL SPARK We're going to see what Bush says tonight, and we're going to see what Greenspan says tomorrow -- no...
MURIEL SIEBERT We have a knowledge of harmony, anchored deep within. It is this knowledge that enables us, at every...
MURIEL BARBERY In a split second of eternity, everything is changed, transfigured. A few bars of music, rising from...
MURIEL BARBERY There is always the easy way out, although I am loath to use it. I have no children, I do not watch ...
MURIEL BARBERY ... c'est peut-être ça la vie : beaucoup de désespoir mais aussi quelques moments de beauté où ...
MURIEL BARBERY ...what I dread more than anything else in this life is noise...silence helps you to go inward..anyo...
MURIEL BARBERY It would be so much better if we could share our insecurity, if we could all venture inside ourselve...
MURIEL BARBERY . . . maybe that's what life's all about: there's a lof of despair, but also the odd moments of beau...
MURIEL BARBERY We think we can make honey without sharing in the fate of bees, but we are in truth nothing but poor...
MURIEL BARBERY If you dread tomorrow it's because you don't know how to build the present, and when you don't know ...
MURIEL BARBERY But many intelligent people have a sort of bug: they think intelligence is an end in itself. They ha...
MURIEL BARBERY Life has meaning and we grown-ups know what it is is the universal lie that everyone is suppo...
MURIEL BARBERY Beautiful things should belong to beautiful souls.
MURIEL BARBERY There's so much humanity in a love of trees, so much nostalgia for our first sense of wonder, so muc...
MURIEL BARBERY I have read so many books. And yet, like most Autodidacts, I am never quite sure of what I have gain...
MURIEL BARBERY The tea ritual: such a precise repetition of the same gestures and the same tastes; accession to sim...
MURIEL BARBERY I may be indigent in name, position, and in appearance, but in my own mind I am an unrivaled goddess...
MURIEL BARBERY Do you know that it is in your company that I have had my finest thoughts?
MURIEL BARBERY When something is bothering me, I seek refuge. No need to travel far; a trip to the realm of literar...
MURIEL BARBERY Madame Michel has the elegance of the hedgehog: on the outside she is covered in quills, a real fort...
MURIEL BARBERY I find this a fascinating phenomenon: the ability we have to manipulate ourselves so that the founda...
MURIEL BARBERY I have finally concluded, maybe that's what life is about: there's a lot of despair, but also the od...
MURIEL BARBERY If you have but one friend, make sure you choose her well.
MURIEL BARBERY People aim for the stars, and they end up like goldfish in a bowl. I wonder if it wouldn't be simple...
MURIEL BARBERY All my pupils are the creme de la creme. Give me a girl of an impressionable age, and she is mine fo...
MURIEL SPARK For the first time in my life I understood the meaning of the word 'never'. And it's really awful. Y...
MURIEL BARBERY Phrases like 'the team spirit' are always employed to cut across individualism, love and personal lo...
MURIEL SPARK Je savais qu'un afflux inespéré d'énergie l'avait levé de son lit, lui avait donné la force de ...
MURIEL BARBERY Sandy felt warmly towards Miss Brodie at these times when she saw how she was misled in her idea of ...
MURIEL SPARK [...] there were other people's Edinburghs quite different from hers [...]
MURIEL SPARK But those of Miss Brodie's kind were great talkers and feminists and, like most femini...
MURIEL SPARK I'm not saying anything against the Modern side.
Modern and Classical, they are equal...
MURIEL SPARK It is impossible to persuade a man who does not disagree, but smiles.
MURIEL SPARK But now they were all fifteen, there was a lot they did not tell each other.
MURIEL SPARK  I'd rather deal with a rogue than a fool.
MURIEL SPARK Nothing infuriates people more than their own lack of spiritual insight.
MURIEL SPARK The word ‘education’ comes from the root e from ex, out, and duco, I lead. It means a leading ou...
MURIEL SPARK I am putting old heads on your young shoulders,' Miss Brodie had told them at the time.
MURIEL SPARK O where shall I find a virtuous woman, for her price is above rubies.
MURIEL SPARK  One's prime is the moment one was born for. 
MURIEL SPARK Do you know, Sandy dear, all my ambitions are for you and Rose. You have got insight, perhaps not qu...
MURIEL SPARK Six years previously, Miss Brodie had led her new class into the garden for a history lesson underne...
MURIEL SPARK In fact, it was the religion of Calvin of which Sandy felt deprived, or rather a specified recogniti...
MURIEL SPARK The Brodie set did not for a moment doubt that she would prevail. As soon expect Julius Caesar to ap...
MURIEL SPARK ... flattening their scorn underneath the chariot wheels of her superiority.
MURIEL SPARK It's only possible to betray where loyalty is due
MURIEL SPARK 4:15. Not 4 not 4:30 but 4:15. She thought to intimidate me with the use of quarter hours.
MURIEL SPARK Miss Brodie was easily the equal of both sisters together, she was the square on the hypotenuse of a...
MURIEL SPARK One’s prime is elusive. You little girls, when you grow up, must be on the alert to recognise your...
MURIEL SPARK The word 'education' comes from the root e from ex, out, and duco, I lead. It means a leading out. T...
MURIEL SPARK These years are still the years of my prime. It is important to recognise the years of one's prime, ...
MURIEL SPARK Give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life.
MURIEL SPARK It is well, when in difficulties, to say never a word, neither black nor white. Speech is silver but...
MURIEL SPARK For those who like that sort of thing," said Miss Brodie in her best Edinburgh voice, "That is the s...
MURIEL SPARK Allow me, in conclusion, to congratulate you warmly upon your sexual intercourse, as well as your si...
MURIEL SPARK The word "education" comes from the root e from ex, out, and duco, I lead. It means a leading out. T...
MURIEL SPARK For a few seconds Maria did not move, or even breathe, apparently. Then she gave a sorrowful gulp an...
MURIEL BARBERY Iata deci cugetarea mea profunda pe ziua de azi: e pentru prima oara cand intalnesc pe cineva care c...
MURIEL BARBERY Elsewhere the world may be blustering or sleeping, wars are fought, people live and die, some nation...
MURIEL BARBERY She wasn't a person to whom things happen. She did all the happenings.
MURIEL SPARK Hildegard had long felt that sentimentality was a luxury she could not afford.
MURIEL SPARK There are only two moments when everything is possible in this life," said Petrus, "when one drinks,...
MURIEL BARBERY Qui croit
Pouvoir faire du miel
Sans partager le destin des abeilles?
MURIEL BARBERY I am an advocate for older citizens. I want to change the image in this country people have of older...
MURIEL SAUNDERS There is more to this sport than just the skill of placing your discs. You have to know how to outwi...
MURIEL ROWLAND I truly believe that Betty Friedan was the most influential woman, not only of the 20th century but ...
MURIEL FOX He came off as gruff, but the kids could see beneath that. He was about giving the kids opportunity.
MURIEL COOPER You are stronger than you think. I have weathered many storms, tragedies, and heartaches in my life�...
MICHELLE MURIEL When we move, we are in a way de-structured by our movement toward something: we are both her...
MURIEL BARBERY