top of page
.png){kind=small}
"Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed. Their highest merit is suggestiveness."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Poetry quotes
"I love writing poetry because it's pretty. I love writing pretty."
"A poet is not an inventor. A poet is a player that plays with words on the field of human imagination to excite a reader's mind with the colors of emotion."
"Amore is loveconfessed to you in haiku.Do you love me too?"
"The lamp hummed:'Regard the moon,La lune ne garde aucune rancune,She winks a feeble eye,She smiles into corners.She smoothes the hair of the grass.The moon has lost her memory.A washed-out smallpox cracks her face,Her hand twists a paper rose,That smells of dust and old Cologne,She is aloneWith all the old nocturnal smellsThat cross and cross across her brain."The reminiscence comesOf sunless dry geraniumsAnd dust in crevices,Smells of chestnuts in the streets,And female smells in shuttered rooms,And cigarettes in corridorsAnd cocktail smells in bars."
"Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them."
"In a real poem a sound does not swallow a letter, but a letter swallows a sound."
"Sometimes poets expect me to think far deeper than I'm willing to dig."
Explore more quotes by Nathaniel Hawthorne
"The whole forest was peopled with frightful sounds--the creaking of the trees, the howling of wild beasts, and the yell of Indians; while sometimes the wind tolled like a distant church bell, and sometimes gave a broad roar around the traveler, as if all Nature were laughing him to scorn. But he was himself the chief horror of the scene, and shrank not from its other horrors."
"He had that sense, or inward prophecy,-- which a young man had better never have been born than not to have, and a mature man had better die at once than utterly to relinquish,-- that we are not doomed to creep on forever in the old bad way, but that, this very now, there are harbingers abroad of a golden era, to be accomplished in his own lifetime."
"An infinite, inscrutable blackness has annihilated sight! Where is our universe? All crumbled away from us; and we, adrift in chaos, may hearken to the gusts of homeless wind, that go sighing and murmuring about in quest of what was once a world!"
"Lo! there ye stand, my children," said the figure, in a deep and solemn tone, almost sad, with its despairing awfulness, as if his once angelic nature could yet mourn for our miserable race. "Depending upon one another's hearts, ye had still hoped that virtue were not all a dream! Now are ye undeceived! Evil is the nature of mankind. Evil must be your only happiness."
"The horrible ugliness of this exposure of a sick and guilty heart to the very eye that would gloat over it!"
"Like all other music, it breathed passion and pathos, and emotions high or tender, in a tongue native to the human heart, wherever educated."
"That old woman taught me my catechism!" said the young man; and there was a world of meaning in this simple comment."
"Possibly, some cynic, at once merry and bitter, had desired to signify, in this pantomimic scene, that we mortals, whatever our business or amusement--however serious, however trifling--all dance to one identical tune, and, in spite of our ridiculous activity, bring nothing finally to pass."
bottom of page