#poetry

The best ideas will eat at you for days, maybe even weeks, until something, some incident, some impulse, triggers you to finally express them. ↗

— Criss Jami

#contemplation #creativity #days #eat #expression

I started off in England and very few people knew I was Australian. I mean, the clues were in the poems, but they didn't read them very carefully, and so for years and years I was considered completely part of the English poetry scene. ↗

— Peter Porter

#carefully #clues #completely #considered #england

Authors can write stories without people assuming that they are autobiographies, but songwriters and poets are often considered to be the characters in their works. I like Michelangelo's vision, 'I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free. ↗

— Criss Jami

#art #artist #author #autobiography #character

I believe in spectacles, but I think eyes necessary too. ↗

— John Stuart Mill

#poetry #science #science

When magic through nerves and reason passes, Imagination, force, and passion will thunder. The portrait of the world is changed. ↗

— Dejan Stojanovic

#circling #dejan-stojanovic #force #imagination #literature

Don't be so quick to count out the teenagers. Some of the world's greatest changes, brilliant poetry, and innovations have come from the teenage mind. ↗

— Steve Maraboli

#children #innovations #kids #poetry #teenagers

For the Wife Beater's Wife With blue irises her face is blossomed. Blue Circling to yellow, circling to brown on her cheeks. The long bone of her jaw untracked She hides in our kitchen. He sleeps it off next door. Her chicken legs tucked under her She's frantic with lies, animated Before the swirling smoke. On her cigarette she leaves red prints, red Like a cut on the white cup. Like a skin she pulls her sweater around her. She's cold, She brings the cold in with her. In our kitchen she hides. He sleeps it off next door, his great Belly heaving with booze. Again and again she tells the story As if the details ever changed, As if blows to the face were somehow Different beating to beating. We reach for her but can't help. She retreats into her cold love of him And looks across the table at us As if across a sea. Next door he claws out of sleep. She says she thinks she'll do something After all, with her hair tonight. ↗

— Bruce Weigl

#domestic #domestic-abuse #domestic-violence #poetry #violence

Who would one rather be? The one who desires, or the object of desire? One's answer to this question might determine if he is meant to be a poet or something else entirely. ↗

— Lan Samantha Chang

#change

Courage is more important than to be deceived by shallow victory waiting for a delayed defeat. ↗

— Dejan Stojanovic

#deceived #defeat #dejan-stojanovic #delay #important

Once a hunter met a lion near the hungry critter's lair, and the way that lion mauled him was decidedly unfair; but the hunter never whimpered when the surgeons, with their thread, sewed up forty-seven gashes in his mutilated head; and he showed the scars in triumph, and they gave him pleasant fame, and he always blessed the lion that had camped upon his frame. Once that hunter, absent minded, sat upon a hill of ants, and about a million bit him, and you should have seen him dance! And he used up lots of language of a deep magenta tint, and apostrophized the insects in a style unfit to print. And it's thus with worldly troubles; when the big ones come along, we serenely go to meet them, feeling valiant, bold and strong, but the weary little worries with their poisoned stings and smarts, put the lid upon our courage, make us gray, and break our hearts. ↗

— Walt Mason

#life #poetry-life #courage