Prose Poetry Quotes

“and i said to my body. softly. ‘i want to be your friend.’ it took a long breath. and replied ‘i have been waiting my whole life for this.”
― Nayyirah Waheed

“I am not collarbones or drunken letters never sent. I am not the way I leave or left or didn’t know how to handle anything,
at any time,
and I am not your fault.”
― Charlotte Eriksson

“So you will meet many ’someones’ who will give a new definition to your name.
And you can not build walls, must not close the door and please don’t hide,
because if you ask me about hurt
and love
I will say love. Love because the hurt will come and go no matter what, but only love makes it worth while. Only love can cure it.
Don’t be scared. Go. Love.”
― Charlotte Eriksson

“I am a free soul, singing my heart out by myself no matter where I go and I call strangers my friends because I learn things and find ways to fit them into my own world. I hear what people say, rearrange it, take away and tear apart until it finds value in my reality and there I make it work. I find spaces in between the cracks and cuts where it feels empty
and there I make it work.”
― Charlotte Eriksson

“I’m learning persistence and the closing of doors, the way the seasons come and go as I keep walking on these roads, back and forth, to find myself in new time zones, new arms with new phrases and new goals. And it hurts to become, hurts to find out about the poverty and gaps, the widow and the leavers. It hurts to accept that it hurts and it hurts to learn how easy it is for people to not need other people. Or how easy it is to need other people but that you can never build a home in someone’s arms because they will let go one day and you must build your own.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Another Vagabond Lost To Love: Berlin Stories on Leaving & Arriving

“Of the many forms that silence takes, the most memorable is the dry husk of the cicada.”
― Jon Davis

“You big ugly. You too empty. You desert with your nothing nothing nothing. You scorched suntanned. Old too quickly. Acres of suburbs watching the telly. You bore me. Freckle silly children. You nothing much. With your big sea. Beach beach beach. I’ve seen enough already. You dumb dirty city with bar stools. You’re ugly. You silly shopping town. You copy. You too far everywhere. You laugh at me. When I came this woman gave me a box of biscuits. You try to be friendly but you’re not very friendly. You never ask me to your house. You insult me. You don’t know how to be with me. Road road tree tree. I came from crowded and many. I came from rich. You have nothing to offer. You’re poor and spread thin. You big. So what. I’m small. It’s what’s in. You silent on Sunday. Nobody on your streets. You dead at night. You go to sleep too early. You don’t excite me. You scare me with your hopeless. Asleep when you walk. Too hot to think. You big awful. You don’t match me. You burnt out. You too big sky. You make me a dot in the nowhere. You laugh with your big healthy. You want everyone to be the same. You’re dumb. You do like anybody else. You engaged Doreen. You big cow. You average average. Cold day at school playing around at lunchtime. Running around for nothing. You never accept me. For your own. You always ask me where I’m from. You always ask me. You tell me I look strange. Different. You don’t adopt me. You laugh at the way I speak. You think you’re better than me. You don’t like me. You don’t have any interest in another country. Idiot centre of your own self. You think the rest of the world walks around without shoes or electric light. You don’t go anywhere. You stay at home. You like one another. You go crazy on Saturday night. You get drunk. You don’t like me and you don’t like women. You put your arm around men in bars. You’re rough. I can’t speak to you. You burly burly. You’re just silly to me. You big man. Poor with all your money. You ugly furniture. You ugly house. You relaxed in your summer stupor. All year. Never fully awake. Dull at school. Wait for other people to tell you what to do. Follow the leader. Can’t imagine. Workhorse. Thick legs. You go to work in the morning. You shiver on a tram.”
― Ania Walwicz

“With the rain falling
surgically against the roof,
I ate a dish of ice cream
that looked like Kafka's hat.
It was a dish of ice cream
tasting like an operating table
with the patient staring
up at the ceiling.”
― Richard Brautigan, Lay the Marble Tea

“A little rain, a little blood. Black fingernails in August; and going berserk, going bananas. As if entrapped in a tropical heatwave, with dozens of whirlwinds swirling in one’s mind, one thinks of a way out, or a way in: out of the scorching bosom of a volcano, and in – into the centre of a raging hurricane. And tracing the labyrinthine ways of your mind, the haphazard vagaries of your thoughts at ease, the odds and ends of your mental surplus you carelessly throw at the world, one wants to be at a loss, in a maze; amazed, and amazingly unabashed.”
― Adam Zagajewski

“About sexuality of English mice.

A warm perfume is growing little by little in the room. An orchard scent, a caramelized sugar scent. Mrs. MOUSE roasts apples in the chimney. The apple fruits smell grass of England and the pastry oven. On a thread drawn in the flames, the apples, from the buried autumn, turn a golden color and grind in tempting bubbles.
But I have the feeling that you already worry. Mrs. MOUSE in a Laura Ashley apron, pink and white stripes, with a big purple satin bow on her belt, Mrs. MOUSE is certainly not a free mouse? Certainly she cooks all day long lemon meringue tarts, puddings and cheese pies, in the kitchen of the burrow. She suffocates a bit in the sweet steams, looks with a sigh the patched socks trickling, hanging from the ceiling, between mint leaves and pomegranates. Surely Mrs. MOUSE just knows the inside, and all the evening flavours are just good for Mrs. MOUSE flabbiness.
You are totally wrong - we can forgive you – we don’t know enough that the life in the burrow is totally communal. To pick the blackberries, the purplish red elderberries, the beechnuts and the sloes Mr. and Mrs. MOUSE escape in turn, and glean in the bushes the winter gatherings. After, with frozen paws, intoxicated with cold wind, they come back in the burrow, and it’s a good time when the little door, rond little oak wood door brings a yellow ray in the blue of the evening. Mr. and Mrs. MOUSE are from outside and from inside, in the most complete commonality of wealth and climate.
While Mrs. MOUSE prepares the hot wine, Mr. MOUSE takes care of the children. On the top of the bunk bed Thimoty is reading a cartoon, Mr. MOUSE helps Benjamin to put a fleece-lined pyjama, one in a very sweet milky blue for snow dreams.
That’s it … children are in bed ….
Mrs. MOUSE blazes the hot wine near the chimney, it smells lemon, cinnamon, big dry flames, a blue tempest. Mr. and Mrs. MOUSE can wait and watch. They drink slowly, and then .... they will make love ….You didn’t know? It’s true, we need to guess it. Don’t expect me to tell you in details the mice love in patchwork duvets, the deep cherry wood bed. It’s just good enough not to speak about it. Because, to be able to speak about it, it would need all the perfumes, all the silent, all the talent and all the colors of the day. We already make love preparing the blackberries wine, the lemon meringue pie, we already make love going outside in the coldness to earn the wish of warmness and come back. We make love downstream of the day, as we take care of our patiences.
It’s a love very warm, very present and yet invisible, mice’s love in the duvets.
Imagine, dream a bit ….. Don’t speak too badly about English mice’s sexuality …..”
― Philippe DELERM

“Swirled tight, trussed, manic, most trusted. You love hills, swells, waves of sand, waves of water. You love traffic on bridges that might split in two. You love stairs leading to stairs leading to ice cream stands. Shards of pottery as good as a map. You love fractured control towers and the very broken Alaskan Way Viaduct. You love squat corner stores and barber-pole signs. You love the idea of privacy in a city of windows, the idea of light in a city of shadows.”
― Carol Guess, Tinderbox Lawn

“The Nantucketer, he alone resides and riots on the sea; he alone, in Bible language, goes down to it in ships; to and fro ploughing it as is own special plantation. There is his home; there lies his business, which a Noah’s flood would not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the millions in China. He lives on the sea, as prairie cocks in the prairie; he hides among the waves, he climbs them as chamois hunters climb the Alps. For years he knows not the land; so that when he comes to it at last, it smells like another world, more strangely than the moon would to an Earthsman. With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between billows; so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“In the mountains they saw deer in the headlights and in the headlights the deer were pale as ghosts and as soundless. They turned their red eyes toward this unreckoned sun and sidled and grouped and leapt the bar ditch by ones and twos. A small doe lost her footing on the macadam and scrabbled wildly and sank onto her hindquarters and rose again and vanished with the others into the chaparral beyond the roadside.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain

“are you a Fool for love?
aren't we all Fools for something?
don't you wish we could be Kings and Queens
be the Jack of All, but the Joker to None
reign over foreign territories
of diamonds, clubs, and spades
but forever elusive; the heart
a territory no one can claim”
― Jaay Vanmeer, ...dark thoughts // they come in the light of day...

“All we want...
Is what we cast out.”
― Jaay Vanmeer, ...dark thoughts // they come in the light of day...

“Launching REM state... I N I T I A T E
I ask myself: Which me am I now?
But before I can figure out
Oh -- we're rolling. Lights, Camera, Action!”
― Jaay Vanmeer, ...dark thoughts // they come in the light of day...

“Sonnet of Poetry

Poet is no servant of the dictionary,
Dictionary is servant to the poet.
Poet is no servant of language,
Language is servant to the poet.
It's poetry that makes the language,
Language makes no poetry, my friend.
Poet exists not to serve a linguist's whim,
But to breathe life into human language.
I've said repeatedly, language has limitations,
Only with poetry we can surpass some of 'em.
Sticklers for grammar make lousy poets,
If feeling doesn't surpass grammar, poetry it ain't.
Poetry is the most potent of all literary forms.
If prose is candle light, poetry is dawn.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Honor He Wrote: 100 Sonnets For Humans Not Vegetables

“You are what you believe you are. Your thoughts become reality. "I can" and "I will" should always be your mentality.”
― Beverly Sade, Through Her Eyes Behind Her Smile

“The thrum of oviparous children of twilight pang like a jettisoned shadowy hand tattooed with god's eye in an anteroom”
― Harry Edgar Palacio, Sutras of Tiny Jazz

“Crying heart verses in somber embrace, I cried into the night for so many.”
― Katri Maree, Coagulated Memories: A Coming of Age Collection of Poetry, Prose and Illustrations

“That evening, when we parted with just a bye, as if we had thousands of encounters left - if only I knew that would be our last, I would have smiled a little more. I would have made you laugh a little more. I would have held onto your bag a little more tightly. I would have watched less of sceneries and more of you. I would have bravely held your hands. I would have told you how grateful I was, to be loved this way – innocent and warm. I would have told you how much I cherish all our little moments. Even though all we ever exchanged were toffees, how happy I was to receive them. I would have told you to live a happy life. I would have told you to miss me, just once in a while. Because I will be doing that, all the time. You would have smiled a little more then, my last image of you would have been a happier one.”
― Athira Krishnakumar

“سيستغرق الجرح وقتاً ليكتشف الليل حزن القمرْ…
هنا الأرض أضيق من رغبتي بالبكاء،
وهذي السماء،على الرغم من كل بهجتها في المساء…
ورغم اتساع المدى واخضرار الشجرْ…
عروقيَ خيطان طائرةً في بلادي،
وقلبي حجرْ…
دعيني أصدّق عينيك يا حلوتي،
كلّ من كان خان،
دعيني أصدق أنّ يديك اهتدائي الأخير إلى لغتي الواعدةْ…
دعيني أفسر جوع العصافير وهي تحوم على سورة المائدةْ!
دعيني أفكر بي، وبنا، وبمن قال إن الهويات نصلٌ بأحلامنا الهامدةْ…
لماذا تظل البلاد التي عذبتنا طويلاً ندوباً بأرواحنا الباردةْ؟
وهل نحن نرحل ما دام تبقى البيوت ثقوباً بأجسادنا الشاردةْ!
لقد قطّعتنا البلاد إلى حطب من رحيلٍ،
وقد أحرقتنا اشتياقاً،
لماذا تحنّ الغصون إلى الريح والشجرة الجاحدة؟
ولماذا
على غرقٍ أبيض حين أكتب
أسكب كل القصائد
في دمعة واحدةْ؟”
― Mahdi Mansour

“الأدراج: قصائد المدن نحو معانيها العالية…

على أيّ درب أواعدُ عينيكِ...
والأمنيات ثكالى
وكلّ الدروبِ بلا آخرِ...
تعبنا نفتّش عن حلمٍ واحدٍ للبقاء..
فلمْ تلتفت نجمةٌ في الحنين إلى غربةِ العابرِ
نُسينا وحيدين حتى تقاسَمنا الوجدُ والطارئون
فما همَّ من باع عهد الضياع ومن يشتري
وصافحني سيف هذا الرحيل..
وقد كنت غمداً أصيلاً
فلم أخسر العنفوانَ ولم تخسري”
― Mahdi Mansour

“ما من مكان سكنته إلا وسكنني..
‏ أشعر أني مدينة ...”
― Mahdi Mansour

“في حضنها كن ندى.. كن غيمةً... مطرا‬
واغمض يديك على نيرانها لترى
لن تفهم الحب، حاول إن وقعت به
أن تفهم الفأس لا أن تفهم الشجرا...
ولا تفكّر كثيراً، دع غداً لغدٍ
كن عاشقاً، أجمل الأغصان ما انكسرا

خف من بقائكما لا من رحيلكما
لن تحبس الريح مهما تحبس الوترا
لا ورد يملك عطراً، وهو يسكنه
والليل مهما سرى لن يملك القمرا
دعها تحبك... دعها أن تحب... غداً
يبقى من العمر... حبّ كان... وانتثرا...”
― Mahdi Mansour

“كلّ سهمٍ في أضلعي وفؤادي
جاء ممّن أحبّهم يا بلادي..”
― Mahdi Mansour

“منتظراً، مثلكِ، وعداً من خلف البحرِ
ومنهمراً مثل الأمطارِ على بيروتَ،
وأقنعُ نفسي ألا ضير بقفزٍ من سطح الغيم إلى بئر الحب..
وأكتبُ: في موت القطراتِ حياةْ
كالموجِ أميلُ يساراً جهةَ القلبِ، أفكرُ أين سأصبح بعد كتابين من الآن،
أصوّرُ نفسي حتى لا أتصوّرُ نفسي من غير يديك وأحلمُ بالآتْ...
ضوءُ نهارٍ آخرَ فوق الشاطئ ماتْ
تنكسرُ على قدم المقهى أحلامُ البحرِ وأمواجُ العاشرِ من آذار... كما تنكسر على شفتي الكلماتْ
في آخرِ سطرٍ في دفتر هذي الليلةِ أكتبُ:
كفّاكِ سفينةُ نوحٍ...
صدركِ: ذهبُ الله الأبيضُ..
قلبكِ: كبريتٌ يشتعلُ جمالاً وطموحْ
شفتاكِ: عناقيدٌ تحلمُ أن تُعتصرَ نبيذاَ أبدياً...
وتُعتّق في خابيةِ الروحْ
هل قلتُ يداكِ سفينةُ نوحٍ..
نسيتُ التوضيح:
حياتي نوحْ...”
― Mahdi Mansour

“Bless the shadows
you’ve been taught
to fear, and through
them birth a light
that clears any doubt
for your capacity to
love and be loved.”
― Brenda DeNoyer Girolamo, Psalms of the Dragonfly Turtle: Inspirations of Love, Transformation, Wisdom and Healing

“Prose appeals the mind,
Poetry sinks in to your soul.”
― Siya Taara

“I look you in the eyes, and you come to rest in the presence of my unspoken opinion. At last, you gained the clarity you were searching for. And after receiving the long-awaited answer, you join me in the warm gaze at the summer life behind the window. Finally, it was clear to the both of us, that the thinking was over, and we no longer had to play the game of "Figure It Out".”
― Elliott Black