the poem QUOTES

81 " I fancied you'd return the way you said,But I grow old and I forget your name. --From the poem " Mad Girl's Love Song "

82 " Shall I tell you our secret? We are charming thieves who steal hearts and never fail because we are the friends of the One.

Blessed is the poem that comes through me but not of me because the sound of my own music will drown the song of Love. "

― Rumi

83 " ... (lady i will
touch you with my mind.) Touch
you, that is all/lightly and you utterly will become
with infinite care/ the poem which i do not write. "

― E.E. Cummings

84 " Every work turns against its author: the poem will crush the poet, the system the philosopher, the event the man of action. Destruction awaits anyone who, answering to his vocation and fulfilling it, exerts himself within history; only the man who sacrifices every gift and talent escapes: released from his humanity, he may lodge himself in Being. (...) One always perishes by the self one assumes: to bear a name is to claim an exact mode of collapse. "

― Emil M. Cioran , The Temptation to Exist

85 " It became a weekend of reading, of trying to see her in the fragments of the poem she'd left for me. "

86 " ...before the dawn I leave the night behind me
and before my heart I let you leave me behind.

- from the poem 'Behind "

― Munia Khan

87 " September 11, 2001: Citizens of the U.S., besieged by terror’s sting,
rose up, weeping glory, as if on eagles’ wings.--from the poem Angel of Remembrance: Candles for September 11, 2001 "

― Aberjhani , The River of Winged Dreams

88 " This philistinism of interpretation is more rife in literature than in any other art. For decades now, literary critics have understood it to be their task to translate the elements of the poem or play or novel or story into something else. Sometimes a writer will be so uneasy before the naked power of his art that he will install within the work itself - albeit with a little shyness, a touch of the good taste of irony - the clear and explicit interpretation of it. Thomas Mann is an example of such an overcooperative author. In the case of more stubborn authors, the critic is only too happy to perform the job. "

― Susan Sontag

89 " The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized. This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are — until the poem — nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt. "

― Audre Lorde , Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

90 " I am permitted to travel in the corridor between sky and heather" from the poem " Beyond the Beacon" in TerraAffirmative "

91 " The reason for the existence of the perfection conjured up in these fourteen lines is that it possesses ... the authorization to form a message that appeals from within itself. This power of appeal is exquisitely evident in the object evoked here. The perfect thing is that which articulates an entire principle of being. The poem has to perform no more and no less than to perceive the principle of being in the thing and adapt it to its own existence - with the aim of becoming a construct with an equal power to convey a message. "

― Peter Sloterdijk , You Must Change Your Life

92 " Bhagat Singh revered Lajpat Rai as a leader. But he would not spare even Lajpat Rai, when, during the last years of his life, Lajpat Rai turned to communal politics. He then launched a political-ideological campaign against him. Because Lajpat Rai was a respected leader, he would not publicly use harsh words of criticism against him. And so he printed as a pamphlet Robert Browning’s famous poem, ‘The Lost Leader,’ in which Browning criticizes Wordsworth for turning against liberty. The poem begins with the line ‘Just for a handful of silver he left us.’ A few more of the poem’s lines were:
‘We shall march prospering, not thro’ his presence;
Songs may inspirit us, not from his lyre,’ and
‘Blot out his name, then, record one lost soul more.’

There was not one word of criticism of Lajpat Rai. Only, on the front cover, he printed Lajpat Rai’s photograph! "

― Bipan Chandra , India's Struggle for Independence

93 " Waldo nodded and waved goodbye pathetically, like a young father going off to war.
As soon as the door was closed and he was gone, Jeanne squelched her own apprehensions, opened the paper and read the poem Waldo had written for her:

One taste of Jeanne and out I flew
Wildly, madly, in no direction
But hers, and yet so straight and true
I fly towards her with no protection
It feels so strange to move this way
Though I should land, desire it seems
Moves in strange circles and so I stay
Disoriented beyond my wildest dreams. "

― Donald Jeffries

94 " Can you hear me? Sighing. You were right. My requiem is well prepared. Still to be written is the poem that is never complete, an endless rubbing on the ink block, an endless dipping of the pen, an endless swoop over the white paper, the poem of my life. I will try to write it down. Soon, no, now, I will try. The first line. I called him Necktie. I will write: He taught me to see with eyes of feeling. "

― Milena Michiko Flašar , I Called Him Necktie

95 " The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making his life meaningful. And in the end the poem is not a thing we see - it is rather a light by which we may see - and what we see is life. "

96 " Hem, you know I don't think that owner's wife where you live likes me. She wouldn't let me wait upstairs for you.'
'I'll tell her,' I said.
'Don't bother. I can always wait here. It's very pleasant in the sun now, isn't it?'
'It's fall now,' I said. 'I don't think you dress warmly enough.'
'It's only cool in the evening,' Evan said. 'I'll wear my coat.'
'Do you know where it is?'
'No. But it's somewhere safe.'
'How do you know?'
'Because I left the poem in it. "

― Ernest Hemingway , A Moveable Feast

97 " With vocal and choral music, first and foremost, it's the text. Not only do I need to serve the text, but the text - when I'm doing it right - acts as the perfect 'blueprint', and all the architecture is there. The poet has done the heavy lifting, so my job is to find the soul of the poem and then somehow translate that into music. "

98 " The poem is not, as someone put it, deflective of entry. But the real question is, 'What happens to the reader once he or she gets inside the poem?' That's the real question for me, is getting the reader into the poem and then taking the reader somewhere, because I think of poetry as a kind of form of travel writing. "

99 " My first spoken word poem, packed with all the wisdom of a 14-year-old, was about the injustice of being seen as unfeminine. The poem was very indignant, and mainly exaggerated, but the only spoken word poetry that I had seen up until that point was mainly indignant, so I thought that that's what was expected of me. "

100 " Poetry is my cheap means of transportation. By the end of the poem the reader should be in a different place from where he started. I would like him to be slightly disoriented at the end, like I drove him outside of town at night and dropped him off in a cornfield. "

― Billy Collins

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