“I still feel that poetry is not medicine — it’s an X-ray. It helps you see the wound and understand it.”— Dunya Mikhail, npr.org
“If you’re angry, you don’t have to write a poem dealing with the cause of your anger. But it needs to be an angry poem. So go ahead… write one. I know you’re at least a little bit angry with me. And when you’re done with your poem, decipher it as if you’d just found it printed in a textbook and know…”— Jay Asher, amazon.com
“In a way, you are poetry material; You are full of cloudy subtleties I am willing to spend a lifetime figuring out. Words burst in your essence and you carry their dust in the pores of your ethereal individuality.”— Franz Kafka, amazon.com
“The romantic poetry and fiction of the last 200 years has quite blinded us to the fact that emotions are an active and harmful form of stupor.”— Timothy Leary, luminist.org
“It is absurd to think that the only way to tell if a poem is lasting is to wait and see if it lasts. The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken an immortal wound—that he will never get over it.”— Robert Frost, en.wikiquote.org
“A poem...begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion finds the thought and the thought finds the words.”— Robert Frost, en.wikiquote.org
“But in my experience poetry speaks to you either at first sight or not at all. A flash of revelation and a flash of response. Like lightning. Like falling in love.”— J.M. Coetzee, amazon.com
“Let your life lightly dance on the edges of Time like dew on the tip of a leaf.”— Rabindranath Tagore, amazon.com
“If a poem hasn’t ripped apart your soul; you haven’t experienced poetry.”— Edgar Allan Poe, goodreads.com
“We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.”— John Fowles, amazon.com
“I’m not against sentimentality. I think you need it. I mean, I don’t think you get a true picture of people without it in writing… It’s a kind of poetry, it’s an emotional poetry, and, to bring it back to the literary scene, I don’t think anything is true that doesn’t have it, that doesn’t have poet…”— Nelson Algren, amazon.com