#poetry

The pen to a writer is like a cigarette to a smoker; they need it to take the edge off. ↗

— Kellie Elmore

#books #life #on-writing #philosophy #poetry

tell all the truth but tell it slant ↗

— Emily Dickinson

#life

When I throw back my head and howl People (women mostly) say But you've always done what you want, You always get your way - A perfectly vile and foul Inversion of all that's been. What the old ratbags mean Is I've never done what I don't. So the shit in the shuttered chateau Who does his five hundred words Then parts out the rest of the day Between bathing and booze and birds Is far off as ever, but so Is that spectacled schoolteaching sod (Six kids, and the wife in pod, And her parents coming to stay)... Life is an immobile, locked, Three-handed struggle between Your wants, the world's for you, and (worse) The unbeatable slow machine That brings what you'll get. Blocked, They strain round a hollow stasis Of havings-to, fear, faces. Days sift down it constantly. Years. --The Life with the Hole in It ↗

— Philip Larkin

#life

Life eats life to live. ↗

— Dejan Stojanovic

#dejan-stojanovic #eats #life #literature #literature-quotes

If words allow themselves to be handled, it is with the help of infinite carefulness. One has to welcome them, listen to the, before asking any service of them. Words are living things closely involved with human life. ↗

— Paul Nouge

#poetry #words #life

The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. ↗

— Robert Penn Warren

#life

Two such as you with such a master speed Cannot be parted nor be swept away From one another once you are agreed That life is only life forevermore Together wing to wing and oar to oar ↗

— Robert Frost

#poetry #robert-frost #life

I learned a world from each / one whom I loved ↗

— Allen Ginsberg

#life-lessons #poetry #life

You touched my flawed life so gently with love burning upward in dark steady flame burning me, burning me into healing. ↗

— Christy Brown

#life

I'll be writing as long as I can hold a pen in my curled, crimped arthritic hands and then I'll dictate it, if it comes to that. They'll have to pry my pen out of my cold, dead fingers - and even then, I'll fight 'em for it. Guaranteed. ↗

— Wanda Lea Brayton

#love #poetry #writing #life