#poetry

...But...to sing, to dream, to smile, to walk, to be alone, be free, with a voice that stirs and an eye that still can see! To cock your hat to one side, when you please at a yes, a no, to fight, or- make poetry! To work without a thought of fame or fortune, on that journey, that you dream of, to the moon! Never to write a line that's not your own... ↗

— Edmond Rostand

#poetry #writers-quotes #dreams

...my dreams are tangled in images of stars and clouds and firelight - we go camping at night - it's my lucid dream of being with you... ↗

— John Geddes

#clouds #dreams #firelight #love #night

The soil under the grass is dreaming of a young forest, and under the pavement the soil is dreaming of grass. ↗

— Wendell Berry

#poetry #dreams

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise, Into the living sea of waking dreams, Where there is neither sense of life or joys, But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems; And e'en the dearest--that I love the best-- Are strange--nay, rather stranger than the rest. ↗

— John Clare

#dreams

Clear, unscaleable ahead, Rise the mountains of instead From whose cold, cascading streams None may drink except in dreams ↗

— W.H. Auden

#poetry #dreams

Poetry = Anger x Imagination ↗

— Sherman Alexie

#equations #imagination #poetry #anger

Great poetry needs no interpreter other than a responsive heart. ↗

— Helen Keller

#poetry #education

I had let it all grow. I had supposed It was all OK. Your life Was a liner I voyaged in. Costly education had fitted you out. Financiers and committees and consultants Effaced themselves in the gleam of your finish. You trembled with the new life of those engines. That first morning, Before your first class at College, you sat there Sipping coffee. Now I know, as I did not, What eyes waited at the back of the class To check your first professional performance Against their expectations. What assessors Waited to see you justify the cost And redeem their gamble. What a furnace Of eyes waited to prove your metal. I watched The strange dummy stiffness, the misery, Of your blue flannel suit, its straitjacket, ugly Half-approximation to your idea Of the properties you hoped to ease into, And your horror in it. And the tanned Almost green undertinge of your face Shrunk to its wick, your scar lumpish, your plaited Head pathetically tiny. You waited, Knowing yourself helpless in the tweezers Of the life that judges you, and I saw The flayed nerve, the unhealable face-wound Which was all you had for courage. I saw that what you gripped, as you sipped, Were terrors that killed you once already. Now I see, I saw, sitting, the lonely Girl who was going to die. That blue suit. A mad, execution uniform, Survived your sentence. But then I sat, stilled, Unable to fathom what stilled you As I looked at you, as I am stilled Permanently now, permanently Bending so briefly at your open coffin. ↗

— Ted Hughes

#poetry-quotes #the-blue-flannel-suit #courage

A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her understanding, or will refuse, though the rapier is denied him, to run through the body with his pen. ↗

— Virginia Woolf

#dignity #double-standards #empowerment #equality #feminism

Take the blinders from your vision take the padding from your ears and confess you've heard me crying and admit you've seen my tears. ↗

— Maya Angelou

#poetry-quotes #equality