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" A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. "

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" I often say of George Washington that he was one of the few in the whole history of the world who was not carried away by power. "

" A theology should be like poetry, which takes us to the end of what words and thoughts can do. "

Karen Armstrong

" There's a reason poets often say, 'Poetry saved my life,' for often the blank page is the only one listening to the soul's suffering, the only one registering the story completely, the only one receiving all softly and without condemnation. "

Clarissa Pinkola Estes

" You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you. "

" And were an epitaph to be my story I'd have a short one ready for my own. I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover's quarrel with the world. "

" I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; - poetry = the best words in the best order. "

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

" What's the function of poetry? It's to express general truths, to connect with the reader and make him think: 'Wow, I've experienced that, but you've expressed it so much better.' "

" Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead. "

" We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry. "

William Butler Yeats

" I thought to spend my declining years writing poetry and teaching - but that won't pay the Bergdorf's bill. I think I'll move to somewhere life is cheaper. "

" What has always attracted me in life is poetry. Any genre can have poetry. For me, poetry contains truth. "

" A great many people seem to think writing poetry is worthwhile, even though it pays next to nothing and is not as widely read as it should be. "

" Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down. "

" Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind. "

Thomas Babington Macaulay

" I was a victim of a stereotype. There were only two of us Negro kids in the whole class, and our English teacher was always stressing the importance of rhythm in poetry. Well, everybody knows - except us - that all Negroes have rhythms, so they elected me class poet. "

Langston Hughes

" As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines. "

Thomas Babington Macaulay

" I am fascinated by the engineering. The science of constructing and understanding why it stands. And I am drawn by the madness, the beauty, the theatricality, the poetry and soul of the wire. And you cannot be a wire-walker without mingling those two ways of seeing life. "

" I think music is poetry in the sense that I think the condition of poetry I'm going for has some qualities of music that it aspires to. "

" What we know is that Shakespeare wrote perhaps the most remarkable body of passionate love poetry in the English language to a young man. "

Stephen Greenblatt

" You don't help people in your poems. I've been trying to help people all my life - that's my trouble. "

" In high school I was very much involved in poetry. You cannot read a poem quickly. There's too much going on there. There are rhythms and alliterations. You have to read poetry slow, slow, slow to absorb it all. "

Eugene H. Peterson

" In the total darkness, poetry is still there, and it is there for you. "

Abbas Kiarostami

" When I was young, I reached a point where I found myself unable to pray. I was devastated by it. I missed being able to say words in my head that I believed could be heard by a being, a consciousness outside me. That is when I turned to poetry. "

" Poetry isn't a profession, it's a way of life. It's an empty basket; you put your life into it and make something out of that. "

" Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason. "

" One culture I find fascinating to juxtapose against American culture is the culture of Germany. They've gone through a long process through their art, poetry, public discourse, their politics, of owning the fact of their complicity in what happened in World War II. It's still a topic of everyday conversation in Germany. "

" I think that the job of poetry, its political job, is to refresh the idea of justice, which is going dead in us all the time. "

" The poetry I grew up on is really an intense form of poetry; it's so pure and powerful. "

" And the second question, can poetry be taught? I didn't think so. "

" It's always a combination of physics and poetry that I find inspiring. It's hard to wrap your head around things like the Hubble scope. "