Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Images split the truth in fractions.
There comes a time when only anger is love.
In certain ways writing is a form of prayer.
Breathe the sweetness that hovers in August.
The threat of world's end is the old threat.
We must breathe time as fishes breathe water.
The artist must create himself or be born again.
The world is not with us enough. O taste and see.
You have come to the shore. There are no instructions.
Marvelous Truth, confront us at every turn, in every guise.
Two girls discover the secret of life in a sudden line of poetry.
Don't eat those nice green dollars your wife gives you for breakfast.
What I heard was my whole self saying and singing what it knew: I can.
The fire in leaf and grass so green it seems each summer the last summer.
Affliction is more apt to suffocate the imagination than to stimulate it.
Every day, every day I hear enough to fill a year of nights with wondering.
I watch the clouds as I see them in pomp advancing, pursuing the fallen sun.
Grief is a hole you walk around in the daytime and at night you fall into it.
We call it "Nature"; only reluctantly admitting ourselves to be "Nature" too.
It is fatal to one's artistic life to talk about something that is in process.
So absolute, it is no other than happiness itself, a breathing too quiet to hear.
Both art and faith are dependent on imagination; both are ventures into the unknown.
Each part of speech a spark awaiting redemption, each a virtue, a power in abeyance.
But for us the road unfurls itself, we don't stop walking, we know there is far to go.
Insofar as poetry has a social function it is to awaken sleepers by other means than shock.
The last cobwebs of fog in the black firtrees are flakes of white ash in the world's hearth.
Love is a landscape the long mountains define but don't shut off from the unseeable distance.
I'm not very good at praying, but what I experience when I'm writing a poem is close to prayer.
Nothing we do has the quickness, the sureness, the deep intelligence living at peace would have.
We are so many and many within themselves travel to far islands but no one asks for their story.
Let me walk through the fields of paper touching with my wand dry stems and stunted butterflies.
There is no savor more sweet, more salt than to be glad to be what, woman, and who, myself, I am.
Hypocrite women, how seldom we speak of our own doubts, while dubiously we mother man in his doubt!
Praise the invisible sun burning beyond the white cold sky, giving us light and the chimney's shadow.
Writing poetry is a process of discovery...you can smell the poem before you see it....Like some animal.
slowly the pale dew-beads of light lapped up from flowers can thicken, darken to gold: honey of the human.
I like to find what's not found at once, but lies within something of another nature, in repose, distinct.
Beespittle, droppings, hairs of beefur: all become honey. Virulent micro-organisms cannot survive in honey.
And our dreams, with what frivolity we have pared them like toenails, clipped them like ends of split hair.
If woman is inconstant, good, I am faithful to ebb and flow, I fall in season and now is a time of ripening.
my pleasure was in the strength of my back, in my noble shoulders, the cool smooth flesh cylinders of my arms.
Mountain, mountain, mountain, marking time. Each nameless, wall beyond wall, wavering redefinition of horizon.
We have the words in our pockets, obscure directions. The old ones have taken away the light of their presence.
In city, in suburb, in forest, no way to stretch out the arms - so if you would grow, go straight up or deep down.
At Delphi I prayed to Apollo that he maintain in me the flame of the poem and I drank of the brackish spring there.
In June the bush we call alder was heavy, listless, its leaves studded with galls, growing wherever we didn't want it.
I learn to affirm Truth's light at strange turns of the mind's road, wrong turns that lead over the border into wonder.
Through the hollow globe, a ring of frayed rusty scrapiron, is it the sea that shines? Is it a road at the world's edge?
But we have only begun to love the earth. We have only begun to imagine the fullness of life. How could we tire of hope?-so much is in bud.
Mediocrity is perhaps due not so much to lack of imagination as to lack of faith in the imagination, lack of the capacity for this abandon.