Verse Quotes

“No one here gets out alive.”
― Jim Morrison

“Take care of the sense and the sounds will take care of themselves.”
― Lewis Carroll, The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition

“I live not in myself, but I become
Portion of that around me: and to me
High mountains are a feeling, but the hum
of human cities torture.”
― George Gordon Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage

“Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us be thankful, and so worship God acceptably with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire.”
― Anonymous, The Holy Bible: King James Version

“...what good would it
do to
shutter your windows, never
dream of rainbows or find hope
in promises? Why choose to
walk away
rather than hold your ground
and fight for love?”
― Ellen Hopkins, Perfect

“Am I more afraid
Of taking a chance and
learning I'm somebody
I don't know, or of risking
new territory,
only to find I'm the same
old me? There is comfort
in the tried and true.
Breaking ground
might uncover a sinkhole,
one impossible to climb out
of. And setting sail in
uncharted waters
might mean capsizing into
a sea monster's jaws.
Easier to turn my back on
these things
than to try tjem and fail.
And yet, a whisper insists
I need to know if they are or
aren't integral to me.
Status quo is a swamp.
And stagnation is slow death.”
― Ellen Hopkins, Perfect

“To share is precious, pure and fair.
Don't play with something you should cherish for life. Don't you wanna care, ain't it lonely out there?”
― Marvin Gaye

“Did I live the spring I’d sought?
It’s true in joy, I walked along,
took part in dance,
and sang the song.
and never tried to bind an hour
to my borrowed garden bower;
nor did I once entreat
a day to slumber at my feet.

Yet days aren’t lulled by lyric song,
like morning birds they pass along,
o’er crests of trees, to none belong;
o’er crests of trees of drying dew,
their larking flight, my hands, eschew
Thus I’ll say it once and true…

From all that I saw,
and everywhere I wandered,
I learned that time cannot be spent,
It only can be squandered.”
― Roman Payne, Rooftop Soliloquy

“This day I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live 20 and that you may love the LORD your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him. For the LORD is your life, and he will give you many years in the land he swore to give to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

Deuteronomy 30:19-20 (NIV)”
― Anonymous, Holy Bible: The New King James Version

“Poetry isn’t an island, it is the bridge.
Poetry isn’t a ship, it is the lifeboat.
Poetry isn’t swimming. Poetry is water.”
― Kamand Kojouri

“I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. There are no such truths; there is nothing about death that Swinburne and Landor knew but Epicurus and Heidegger failed to grasp. Rather, it is because I would have lived more fully if I had been able to rattle off more old chestnuts — just as I would have if I had made more close friends.”
― Richard M. Rorty

“You have known, O Gilgamesh,
What interests me,
To drink from the Well of Immortality.
Which means to make the dead
Rise from their graves
And the prisoners from their cells
The sinners from their sins.
I think love's kiss kills our heart of flesh.
It is the only way to eternal life,
Which should be unbearable if lived
Among the dying flowers
And the shrieking farewells
Of the overstretched arms of our spoiled hopes.”
― Herbert Mason, The Epic of Gilgamesh

“Life is full of choices. We don't always make good ones. It seems to Kristina you gotta be crazy to open your windows, invite the demons in. Bree throws rocks at the feeble glass, laughs”
― Ellen Hopkins

“Crank, You See isn't any ordinary monster. It's like a giant octopus, weaving its tentacles not just around you, but through you, squeezing not hard enough to kill you, but enough to keep you from reeling until you try to get away. Try, and you hunger for it grasping clutch, the way its tendrils prop you up, your need intensifying exponentially every minute you refuse to admit its being (p.469)”
― Ellen Hopkins

“In the boundaryless forests,
there’re dancers of nude.
Yet in the confines of pasture,
there’s promise of food.
On which is your side?
Ô, but tarry and bide,
ere you decide,
in both do confide.”
― Roman Payne

“Let my toes teach the shore
how to feel a tranquil life
through the wetness of sands

Let my heart latch the door
of blackness, as all my pain
now blue sky understands”
― Munia Khan

“Live? Our servants will do that for us..”
― Auguste de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Axel

“Like the moon
I have learned
to be beautiful
in darkness.”
― Collette O'Mahony, The Soul in Words: A collection of Poetry & Verse

“Eagle's flight of loneliness soars so high
Around its sigh, no more alone the sky
Other birds remain away, clouds pass by
Between shrouds of life and haze sun rays die”
― Munia Khan

“I only wrote prose before I met you.
My musings were superfluous and serious as well.
But now the words dance with me.
I sing with them
and we create poetry.”
― Kamand Kojouri

“I feed my heart with sighs, that's all it asks,
I live on tears, I think I'm born to weep;
I don't complain of that, since in my state
weeping is sweeter than you might believe.”
― Petrarch

“Man disavows, and Deity disowns me;
Hell might afford my miseries a shelter;
Therefore Hell keeps her ever-hungry mouths all
Bolted against me.

Hard lot! encompassed with a thousand dangers,
Weary, faint, trembling with a thousand terrors,
I'm called, if vanquished, to receive a sentence
Worse than Abiram's.

Him the vindictive rod of angry Justice
Sent quick and howling to the centre headlong;
I, fed with judgement, in a fleshy tomb, am
Buried above ground.”
― William Cowper, Poetical Works of William Cowper

“Nighthawks

I wanted to run away with you tonight
but you are a difficult woman
the rules of you -

Past and future circle round us
now we know more now less
in the institute of shadows.

On a street black as widows
with nothing to confess
our distances found us

the rules of you -
so difficult a woman
I wanted to run away with you tonight.”
― Anne Carson, Men in the Off Hours

“O Don Quixote, wise as thou art brave,
La Mancha's splendor and of Spain the star!
To thee I say that if the peerless maid,
Dulcinea del Toboso, is to be restored
to the state that was once hers, it needs must be
that thy squire Sancho take on his bared behind,
those sturdy buttocks, must consent to take
three thousand lashes and three hundred more,
and well laid on, that they may sting and smart;
for those are the authors of her woe
have thus resolved, and that is why I've come,
This, gentles, is the word I bring to you.”
― Cervantes, Don Quixote

“I’ve reached the vanishing point
without you.
Here my heartache begins with your pain
trying to find an unborn start
in this fatal disappearance

From the poem ‘Me with the Vanishing Point”
― Munia Khan, To Evince the Blue

“I am looking at him, I am witnessing a unique physiological phenomenon: John Shade perceiving and transforming the world, taking it in and taking it apart, re-combining its elements in the very process of storing them up so as to produce at some unspecified date an organic miracle, a fusion of image and music, a line of verse.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“Because to him, who ponders well,
My rhymes more than their rhyming tell
Of the dim wisdoms old and deep
That God gives unto man in sleep”
― W.B. Yeats, When You Are Old: Early Poems and Fairy Tales

“Versifying left her cold. Poems were too close to prayer, rousing regrettable passions. Waiting for God to rescue you when it was up to you. Poetry and prayer put ideas in people's heads that got them killed, distracting them from the ruthless mechanism of the world.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad

“Poetry simultaneously addresses our intellect and our physical senses, our emotions, imagination, intuition, and memory without asking us to divide them.”
― Dana Gioia, Poetry as Enchantment

“For thousands of years, poetry was taught badly, and consequently it was immensely popular.”
― Dana Gioia, Poetry as Enchantment