#poetry

Conscience is no more than the dead speaking to us. ↗

— Jim Carroll

#conscience #death #ghosts #poetry #death

If after I die, people want to write my biography, there is nothing simpler. They only need two dates: the date of my birth and the date of my death. Between one and another, every day is mine. ↗

— Fernando Pessoa

#death #intimacy #life #poetry #privacy

Before she knew it, she was just another set of eyes in a dusty attic, waiting for the stairs to creak. ↗

— Kelly Moran

#death #ghosts #poetry-quotes #death

On Living Living is no laughing matter: You must take it seriously. So much so and to such a degree that, for example, your hands tied behind your back, your back to the wall or else in a laboratory in your white coat and safety glasses, you can die for people – even for people whose faces you’ve never seen, even though you know living is the most real, most beautiful thing. I mean, you must take living so seriously that even at seventy, for example, you’ll plant olive trees – and not for your children, either, but because, although you fear death you don’t believe it, because living, I mean, weighs heavier. ↗

— Nâzım Hikmet

#poetry #beauty

Science ask facts and religion ask faith, humans are confused between life and death. ↗

— Santosh Kalwar

#inspirational #life #poetry #religion #science

This morning could have been perfect. The cruel truth is they have never been. Give us loneliness or give us death. ↗

— Sean Gabler

#loneliness #love #poetry #sex #death

Be my lover between two wars waged in the mirror, she said. I don't want to return now to the fortress of my father's house. Take me to your vineyard. Let me meet your mother. Perfume me with basil water. Arrange me on silver dishes, comb me, imprison me in your name, let love kill me. ↗

— Mahmoud Darwish

#poetry #the-death-of-the-phoenix #death

We never said farewell, not even looked Our last upon each other, for no sign Was made when we the linked chain unhooked And broke the level line. And here we dwell together, side by side, Our places fixed for life upon the chart, Two islands that the roaring seas divide Are not more far apart. ↗

— Mary Elizabeth Coleridge

#poetry #death

When the lad for longing sighs, Mute and dull of cheer and pale, If at death's own door he lies, Maiden, you can heal his ail. Lovers' ills are all to buy: The wan look, the hollow tone, The hung head, the sunken eye, You can have them for your own. Buy them, buy them: eve and morn Lovers' ills are all to sell. Then you can lie down forlorn; But the lover will be well. ↗

— A.E. Housman

#death

O, were I loved as I desire to be! What is there in the great sphere of the earth, Or range of evil between death and birth, That I should fear, - if I were loved by thee! All the inner, all the outer world of pain, Clear love would pierce and cleave, if thou wert mine; As I have heard that somewhere in the main Fresh-water springs come up through bitter brine. ‘I were joy, not fear, clasped hand in hand with thee, To wait for death - mute - careless of all ills, Apart upon a mountain, though the surge Of some new deluge from a thousand hills Flung leagues of roaring foam into the gorge Below us, as far on as eye could see. ↗

— Alfred Tennyson

#poetry #death