Free Verse Poetry Quotes

“When did you first fall in love?"

"I think, I first fell in love
when I was in fifth grade
with this boy who kept his glass ruler in the sunlight
and made rainbows on my desk with it.”
― Saiber, Stardust and Sheets

“vers libre," (free verse) or nine-tenths of it, is not a new metre any more than sleeping in a ditch is a new school of architecture.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Fancies Versus Fads

“And stay, my dear
stay...
forever, as my quiet song,
in my lilac dawn.”
― Sanober Khan, A Thousand Flamingos

“I feel as though dispossessed from the semblances of some crystalline reality to which I’d grown accustomed, and to some degree, had engaged in as a participant, but to which I had, nevertheless, grown inexplicably irrelevant. But the elements of this phenomenon are now quickly dissolving from memory and being replaced by reverse-engineered Random Access actualizations of junk code/DNA consciousness, the retro-coded catalysts of rogue cellular activity. The steel meshing titters musically and in its song, I hear a forgotten tale of the Interstitial gaps that form pinpoint vortexes at which fibers (quanta, as it were) of Reason come to a standstill, like light on the edge of a Singularity. The gaps, along their ridges, seasonally infected by the incidental wildfires in the collective unconscious substrata.

Heat flanks passageways down the Interstices. Wildfires cluster—spread down the base trunk Axon in a definitive roar: hitting branches, flaring out to Dendrites to give rise to this release of the very chemical seeds through which sentience is begotten.

Float about the ether, gliding a gentle current, before skimming down, to a skip over the surface of a sea of deep black with glimmering waves. And then, come to a stop, still inanimate and naked before any trespass into the Field, with all its layers that serve to veil. Plunge downward into the trenches. Swim backwards, upstream, and down through these spiraling jets of bubbles. Plummet past the threshold to trace the living history of shadows back to their source virus. And acquire this sense that the viruses as a sample, all of the outlying populations withstanding: they have their own sense of self-importance, too. Their own religion. And they mine their hosts barren with the utilitarian wherewithal that can only be expected of beings with self-preservationist motives.”
― Ashim Shanker, Sinew of the Social Species

“Our beauty unfolds, we become.
The ones that truly value you
And the pricelessness of your presence
Will stick around to watch the full beauty of the sunset
As they gaze through to your soul
And feel warmed by your charm
As you unfold, as you become”
― Christine Evangelou, Exit Point: Arrows From a Rebel Heart

“It is not good form to take a Trick out unless one is so firmly established as to be able to afford being associated with someone who might at any given moment write a poem in public.”
― Fran Lebowitz, Metropolitan Life

“There's a beautiful sound you hear
When you learn to drown out the noise and chatter from other people
It is you, the sound of your truth
Your heart, your voice
Untouchable and loud with love”
― Christine Evangelou, Exit Point: Arrows From a Rebel Heart

“You cannot be open to fully feel love
And all its beauty
Until you can be open to fully feel pain
In all its sorrow
In the strength of my heart
I saw the fragility of yours”
― Christine Evangelou, The Touch of 10,000 Words: Musings and Poetry: Love, Life, Inner Magic and the Pursuit of Dreams

“Tough times are kept for the most angelic souls
Pushed to their greatness by a universe
That loves them with a fiery rush of love
Through the essence of God in showers of the divine
Something that can never be extinguished
Broken or untied
Star-lit souls with tenacious hearts
The ones that blossom while healing their scars
Tough times there are
But fade they will
And you will go on
To rise more wonderfully than ever before”
― Christine Evangelou, The Touch of 10,000 Words: Musings and Poetry: Love, Life, Inner Magic and the Pursuit of Dreams

“Survive, because of the fire that burns within
It sits inside you and melts through pain
And lights the shadows with embers of love
Survive because your heart makes you great
It beats the rhythm to your bones
And sings lullabies to your soul
Survive because your strength lies in all you overcome
It shakes you to lift you and take you bravely home”
― Christine Evangelou, The Touch of 10,000 Words: Musings and Poetry: Love, Life, Inner Magic and the Pursuit of Dreams

“I am bothered by poems I don't understand.”
― Joyce Rachelle

“You cannot lose or choose to forget someone you loved
Without first losing or denying a vital part of yourself
We are all pieces of the same puzzle
Connected by threads of love
Each a mirror to what we hold onto
And what we let go of”
― Christine Evangelou, Exit Point: Arrows From a Rebel Heart

“There’s a great deal of life in a dance, one must know,
full of twirling anticipation and gliding wonder.

It has the power to bring strangers together,
To open one’s soul to the possibilities of love.
It reminds us of the unspoken truth—that we are all children,
In need of a wild song and bit of careless freedom.”
― Erin Forbes

“De Guiche: Alright - yes - I'm meeting a woman here for sex. Satisfied?

Cyrano: Yes, yes - very understandable:
you look like a man, but in fact you are an animal.

De Guiche: Do I know you?

Cyrano: Know me? Only if you've studied moon-life very closely.

De Guiche: Life? There's no life on the moon. Now leave.

Cyrano: No life? - really? - is that seriously what you believe?
Well yes - maybe there is no air -
but all the same there's moon-men everywhere -
the nights are ice
but in the day it's paradise:
trees, flowers, sparkling streams,
are what we see on waking from our dreams.
We drink hot coffee. Then look! - Earth rises! -
a haze of blue masks all its earthly vices -
war - lust - greed - the violence of the crowd -
are hidden by its spiral threads of cloud
and from the moon all that we moon men see's
a turning planet with no history.

De Guiche: You're mad.

Cyrano: Nobody starves. Women are respected.
Men are not animals. Nobody's infected
with hate - or fear - there are no slaves
or calculated massacres - no shallow graves.
No - seen from the moon the Earth's devoid of vice:
and this of course is why our morning coffee
tastes so nice.”
― Martin Crimp, Cyrano de Bergerac: in a free adaptation

“You are little, just a baby, and butterflies flutter in your stomach.
You do not understand.
"What is happening?" you ask, but your inexperienced mind can't explain.
You can't ask others -- you don't know, not yet, how to put it in words.

You grow up, and now you have learned many words for it.
But you have also learned not to talk about it.
Living your life has become daunting ... exhausting.
Your family worries, so you pretend to be alright.

You gather courage and talk to those who will listen.
Sometimes they don't judge, they try to empathise.
They try hard, but they fail.
You feel more frustrated, more lonely.

It never goes away,
You are high and happy, then you think of it, and slowly your happiness fades.
You are low and sad, and you feel relieved.
You know it is going to happen, you can't help but feel this way.

It gets suppressed, but it is there.
You are afraid, cautious, for you know it is going to resurface,
When you are least expecting.
Like a beast lurking at the edge, ready to pull you into the dark abyss.

It strikes in that one unsuspecting moment.
You don't want to kill yourself,
Because it will hurt the people you love.
But you really really ... really wish you never existed.

Then one day you stand against it.
Whether you like it or not, you are here ... you exist.
If everything is meaningless, then why should you be afraid.
So you decide to fight ... to write….

But this dread never goes away.”
― Shon Mehta, The Uncharted Mind