Quotes ….. about Haiku

We shall never understand one another until we reduce the language to seven words.
― Kahlil Gibran

I had never thought of haiku, or any kind of poetry for that matter, as a social activity.
― Abigail Friedman, The Haiku Apprentice: Memoirs of Writing Poetry in Japan

The haiku that reveals seventy to eighty percent of its subject is good. Those that reveal fifty to sixty percent, we never tire of.
― Matsuo Basho

When composing a verse let there not be a hair’s breath separating your mind from what you write; composition of a poem must be done in an instant, like a woodcutter felling a huge tree or a swordsman leaping at a dangerous enemy.
― Matsuo Bashō

Haiku sounds like I’m
Saying hi to someone named
Ku. Hi, Ku. Hello.
― Ellen DeGeneres, Seriously… I’m Kidding

I guess haiku is an inspiration for me. Everyday, simple moments.
― Misha Collins

These are some of the characteristics of the state of mind which the creation and appreciation of haiku demand: Selflessness, Loneliness, Grateful Acceptance, Wordlessness, Non-intellectuality, Contradictoriness, Humor, Freedom, Non-morality, Simplicity, Materiality, Love, and Courage.
― R.H. Blyth

Haiku are meant to evoke an emotional response from the reader … to light the spark that triggers creative rumination … They act as literary manifestations … visions of nature’s seasonal modulations … They’re emotionally tinged words, barely perceptible sensory flickers … literary etchings of lucid visions transposed into the minds of its readers … They’re meant to act as sensory catalysts … like the passing of a penciled baton laid out upon a piece of paper that a reader might grasp for in their mind’s eye … all of which prompts the reader to continue exploring the sensory experience elicited from the writer’s pen … This is how the literary sketching of poets are intended to function … as creative muses with which readers can draw from and viscerally apply to their own artistic idioms … from that lucid space within their heads … where their mind’s eye can spark their own creative visions
― Bukusai Ashagawa

Haiku is not a shriek, a howl, a sigh, or a yawn; rather, it is the deep breath of life.
― Santōka Taneda, Mountain Tasting: Haiku and Journals of Santoka Taneda

Real haiku is the soul of poetry. Anything that is not actually present in one’s heart is not haiku. The moon glows, flowers bloom, insects cry, water flows. There is no place we cannot find flowers or think of the moon. This is the essence of haiku. Go beyond the restrictions of your era, forget about purpose or meaning, separate yourself from historical limitations—there you will find the essence of true art, religion, and science.
― Santōka Taneda, Mountain Tasting: Haiku and Journals of Santoka Taneda

I would hate to see seventeen people with monosyllabic names like Mike or Ann die, but if they did, and you wrote down all their names in groups of 5-7-5, you’d have one tragic haiku.
― Jarod Kintz, This Book is Not FOR SALE

Someday I want to write a sixteen-syllable Haiku about the death and disappearance of a monosyllabic word.
― Jarod Kintz, This Book is Not FOR SALE

The love of nature is religion, and that religion is poetry; these three things are one thing. This is the unspoken creed of haiku poets.
― R.H. Blyth

Besides, if you want to write something perfect, write a haiku. Anything longer is bound to have a few passages that don’t work as well as they might.
― Philip Pullman

You were almost like a haiku: said so little, but meant so much.
― Abraham Algahanem

Reading haiku is as much an art as writing it. The reader needs to pause and listen to the silences, to feel the spaces between the words, and to journey into the depths of many multi-colored worlds.
― Harley King, Mother, Don’t Lock Me In That Closet!

Reading haiku is like viewing a photograph or a painting. A haiku is a moment of time, isolated, and held up for viewing.
― Harley King, Mother, Don’t Lock Me In That Closet!

Haiku does not express emotion from the inside out by displaying the mind of a character. Haiku builds the emotional thrust, makes the artistic statement from the outside in, from the physical world to the mind of the reader.
― Harley King, Mother, Don’t Lock Me In That Closet!

If death is like a sonnet then life would be a haiku. The sonnet, a lyrical poem, the beauty and magic with the last breath~ love, words fading and floating off into the abyss that is space whilst our everyday lives or days more important than normal become just a mere whisper in only a few short syllables through which we convey with our hearts the truth of the universe in a single moment briefly.
― R.M. Engelhardt

I recently got into Haiku in Japan and I just think it’s fantastic. Obviously, when you get rid of a whole section of illusion in your mind you’re left with great precision.
― John Lennon

Haiku is a snapshot in time. no veils, no mystery—it is exactly as it reads. The mind perceives everything moment by moment. The haiku is a moment in time, pure and unblemished. Put to paper (or computer) in a short form most imitating a … moment.
― Mestre

This is for all the people I’ll never meet. This is for the person I might have kissed had I taken a different subway line on Saturday and the person I might have been if that boy hadn’t broken my mother’s teenage heart. This is for the people I would have loved if last winter hasn’t been so cold and for the city I would have called home if I had written haikus on napkins and carried pens in dress pockets and in the knots of my hair. This is for who I was, who I am, who I might be. This is for you.
― Chuck Pulaski

I was satisfied with haiku until I met you, jar of octopus, cuckoo’s cry, 5-7-5, but now I want a Russian novel, a 50-page description of you sleeping, another 75 of what you think staring at your window.
― Dean Young

Meaning lies as much in the mind of the reader as in the Haiku.
― Douglas R. Hofstadter

The sun shines, snow falls, mountains rise and valleys sink, night deepens and pales into day, but it is only very seldom that we attend to such things. . . . When we are grasping the inexpressible meaning of these things, this is life, this is living. To do this twenty-four hours a day is the Way of Haiku. It is having life more abundantly.
― R.H. Blyth

So I don’t think I’ll make Poet Laureate, but I swear I’m not twisted and bitter. If finely-wrought talents don’t weigh in the balance, I can always write haiku on Twitter.
― Rosy Cole

Haiku is a particularly Zen form of poetry; for Zen detests egoism in the form of calculated effects or self-glorification of any sort. The author of haiku should be absent, and only the haiku present.
― Anne Bancroft

The haiku reproduces the designating gesture of the child pointing at whatever it is (the haiku shows no partiality for the subject), merely saying: that!
― Roland Barthes

Haiku is a way of culling things from the stream of things that rush past the senses.
― Michael J. Rosen

Yoko [Ono] was showing me some of these Haiku in the original. The difference between them and Longfellow is immense. Instead of a long flowery poem the Haiku would say ‘Yellow flower in white bowl on wooden table‘ which gives you the whole picture.
― John Lennon

He who creates three to five haiku poems during a lifetime is a haiku poet. He who attains to complete ten is a master.
― Matsuo Basho

A Haiku is just like a normal American poem except that it doesn’t rhyme and it’s totally stupid.
― Trey and Matt Stone Parker

 

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