McKenzie > McKenzie's Quotes

“I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell and The Drunken Boat

“Imitation is suicide.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent”
― Victor Hugo

“Poetry is what gets lost in translation.”
― Robert Frost

“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.”
― Harry Crosby, Transit of Venus

“This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.”
― T.S. Eliot

“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my eyes and all is born again.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.”
― T.S. Eliot

“The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.”
― W.H. Auden, Selected Poems

“Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.”
― Novalis

“I?
I walk alone;
The midnight street
Spins itself from under my feet;
My eyes shut
These dreaming houses all snuff out;
Through a whim of mine
Over gables the moon's celestial onion
Hangs high.”
― Sylvia Plath

“Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.”
― William Butler Yeats, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

“The poetry of the earth is never dead.”
― John Keats

“A poet's work . . . to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

“A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.”
― W.H. Auden, The Complete Works of W.H. Auden: Prose, Volume II: 1939-1948

“See with your soul and not your eyes
because to dance with the beasts you
must penetrate their disguise.”
― P.C. Cast

“To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the music the words make.”
― Truman Capote, Truman Capote: Conversations

“Fuck You Poem #45

Fuck you in slang and conventional English.
Fuck you in lost and neglected lingoes.
Fuck you hungry and sated; faded, pock marked, and defaced.
Fuck you with orange rind, fennel and anchovy paste.
Fuck you with rosemary and thyme, and fried green olives on the side.
Fuck you humidly and icily.
Fuck you farsightedly and blindly.
Fuck you nude and draped in stolen finery.

Fuck you while cells divide wildly and birds trill.
Thank you for barring me from his bedside while he was ill.
Fuck you puce and chartreuse.
Fuck you postmodern and prehistoric.
Fuck you under the influence of opiun, codeine, laudanum, and paregoric.
Fuck every real and imagined country you fancied yourself princess of.
Fuck you on feast days and fast days, below and above.
Fuck you sleepless and shaking for nineteen nights running.
Fuck you ugly and fuck you stunning.

Fuck you shipwrecked on the barren island of your bed.
Fuck you marching in lockstep in the ranks of the dead.
Fuck you at low and high tide.
And fuck you astride
anyone who has the bad luck to fuck you, in dank hallways,
bathrooms, or kitchens.
Fuck you in gasps and whispered benedictions.

And fuck these curses, however heartfelt and true,
that bind me, till I forgive you, to you.”
― Amy Gerstler, Ghost Girl

“In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. (Mr. Dumby, Act III)”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

“Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.”
― Kahlil Gibran

“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets through many a dark night.”
― Nietzsche

“Behind every beautiful thing, there's some kind of pain.”
― Bob Dylan

“It ought to come like the leaves to the trees, or it better not come at all.”
― John Keats

“Touch has a memory.”
― John Keats

“Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.”
― Robert Frost

“Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire,
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.”
― Robert Frost

“Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.”
― Robert Frost

“It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves.”
― William Shakespeare