Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I see my shows like Gandhi, and I've got little baby Gandhis, and they are changing the world. I know that I'm a bit delusional about that, but I do think of them like Gandhi. They are not celebrities: they are like Gandhi and Mother Teresa.
For something to be useful to the spirit is not very valuable to get your covered wagon across the desert. We have adopted that attitude so thoroughly that any American father whose son tells him he wants to write poetry will be embarrassed.
Those who seek liberation for themselves alone cannot become fully enlightened. Though it may be said that one who is not already liberated cannot liberate others, the very process of forgetting oneself to help others is in itself liberating
Ruy-Sanchez's works of fiction are always amazing: adventure, poetry and intelligence in a new geometry of words... His writing has nerve and agility, his intelligence is sharp without being cruel, his mood is sympathetic without complicity.
September is the month of maturity; the heaped basket and the garnered sheaf. It is the month of climax and completion. September! I never tire of turning it over and over in my mind. It has warmth, depth and colour. It glows like old amber.
I thought I had finished with romantic adventures, but half-way through life and well past the age for losing one's heart, I was suddenly swept off my feet by a new love, a passionate, tyrannical, all-absorbing emotion: the love of a garden.
EXPRESSIONS Look without! Behold the beauty of the day, The shout of color to glad color, rocks and trees, and sun and seas, and wind and sky: All these are God's expression, art work of His hand, which men must love ere they can understand.
Your hands hold roses always in a way that says They are not only yours; the beautiful changes In such kind ways, Wishing ever to sunder Things and things' selves for a second finding, to lose For a moment all that it touches back to wonder.
Under adversity, under oppression, the words begin to fail, the easy words begin to fail. In order to convey things accurately, the human being is almost forced to find the most precise words possible, which is a precondition for literature.
The great Creator to revere Must sure become the creature; But still the preaching cant forbear, And ev'n the rigid feature: Yet ne'er with wits profane to range Be complaisance extended;An atheist laugh's a poor exchange For deity offended.
Not the bee upon the blossom, In the pride o' sunny noon; Not the little sporting fairy, All beneath the simmer moon; Not the poet, in the moment Fancy lightens in his e'e, Kens the pleasure, feels the rapture, That thy presence gi'es to me.
You were saying that once when visiting Yale, you were struck that unlike Pound, Williams's thinking was volatile, I mean, did not stay locked into a pattern of concepts that then defined his subsequent necessary behavior, whereas Pound did.
A poem begins with a lump in the throat; a homesickness or a love sickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.
I revise the manuscript till I can't read it any longer, then I get somebody to type it. Then I revise the typing. Then it's retyped again. Then there's a third typing, which is the final one. Nothing should then remain that offends the eye.
To recommend a monarchy on account of the prosperity it gives the provinces seems to me like recommending that a man should have liberty to treat his children as slaves, if at the same time he treats his slaves with reasonable consideration.
To a frog that's never left his pond, the ocean seems like a gamble. Look what he's giving up: security, mastery of his world, recognition! The ocean frog just shakes his head. "I can't explain where I live, but someday I'll take you there."
Love isn't the work of the tender and the gentle; Love is the work of wrestlers. The one who becomes a servant of lovers is really a fortunate sovereign. Don't ask anyone about Love; ask Love about Love. Love is a cloud that scatters pearls.
If you want what visible reality can give, you are an employee. If you want the unseen world you are not living with your truth. Both wishes are foolish, but you'll be forgiven for forgetting that what you really want is loves confusing joy.
What poetry does above all else is develop sensibility. And that's what makes poetry so dangerous. That's why poetry is so good at undermining governments and so bad at building them. There's nothing harder to organize than a group of poets.
Let every book-worm, when in any fragrant, scarce old tome, he discovers a sentence, a story, an illustration, that does his heart good, hasten to give it the widest circulation that newspapers and magazines, penny and halfpenny, can afford.
When the aerials are down, and your spirit is covered with snows of cynicism and the ice of pessimism, then you are grown old, even at 20, but as long as your aerials are up, to catch waves of optimism, there is hope you may die young at 80.
It is always better to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning. For every one of us, living in this world means waiting for our end. Let whoever can win glory before death. When a warrior is gone, that will be his best and only bulwark.
And then I realized that my sister was trying to LIVE a romance novel. Man, that takes courage and imagination. Well, it also took some degree of mental illness, too, but I was suddenly happy for her. And a little scared. Well, a lot scared.
When I had no money, and a great book came out, I couldn't get it. I had to wait. I love the idea that I have hardcover books here and at home that I haven't read yet. That's how I view that I'm rich. I have hardcover books I may never read.
Having settled down in the promised land of money and adventure - returning to a land of your parents last days can be a big dilemma to many. Isn't your greatest wealth your parents, and the best adventure - to see them happy before they go.
Why am I obsessed with the idea I can justify myself by getting manuscripts published? Is it an escape-an excuse for any social failure-so I can say "No, I don't go out for many extracurricular activities, but I spend a lot of time writing."
And so I rehabilitate myself - staying up late this Friday night in spite of vowing to go to bed early, because it is more important to capture moments like this, keen shifts in mood, sudden veering of direction - than to lose it in slumber.
I think the sea swallowed dozens of tea sets - tossed in abandon off liners or consigned to the tide by jilted brides. I collected a shiver of china bits, with borders of larkspur and birds or braids of daisies. No two patterns ever matched.
A habit leads a man so gently in the beginning that he does not perceive he is led - with what silken threads and down what pleasant avenues it leads him! By and by, the soft silk threads become iron chains, and the pleasant avenues Avernus!
Fundamental assumptions in general and scientific assumptions in particular are so hard to overturn because they are based on belief. Beliefs are so hard to overcome because they are irrational and therefore do not yield to logical argument.
Rather than numbing or drowning out the difficult-to-describe but urgently sensed feelings that are part of being human, poetry invites us to tease them out, to draw them into language that is rooted in intricate thought and strange impulse.
Oh, I have walked in Kansas Through many a harvest field, And piled the sheaves of glory there And down the wild rows reeled: Each sheaf a little yellow sun, A heap of hot-rayed gold; Each binder like Creation's hand To mold suns, as of old.
Nations, like stars, are entitled to eclipse. All is well, provided the light returns and the eclipse does not become endless night. Dawn and resurrection are synonymous. The reappearance of the light is the same as the survival of the soul.
A society that admits misery, a humanity that admits war, seem to me an inferior society and a debased humanity; it is a higher society and a more elevated humanity at which I am aiming - a society without kings, a humanity without barriers.
Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another...
I think this is one of the benefits of getting older: that one has that perspective on things farther away. One is so caught up in middle years in the idea of accomplishing something when, in fact, the full accomplishment is always with one.
this is thy hour o soul, thy free flight into the wordless, away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done, thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best, night, sleep, death and the stars.
But all art is sensual and poetry particularly so. It is directly, that is, of the senses, and since the senses do not exist without an object for their employment all art is necessarily objective. It doesn't declaim or explain, it presents.
Sacred interpreter of human thought, How few respect or use thee as they ought! But all shall give account of every wrong, Who dare dishonor or defile the tongue; Who prostitute it in the cause of vice, Or sell their glory at a market-price!
True modesty is a discerning grace And only blushes in the proper place; But counterfeit is blind, and skulks through fear, Where 'tis a shame to be asham'd t' appear: Humility the parent of the first, The last by vanity produc'd and nurs'd.
For the success, Although particular, shall give a scantling Of good or bad unto the general; And in such indexes, although small pricks To their subsequent volumes, there is seen The baby figure of the giant mass Of things to come at large.
LEONATO Neighbours, you are tedious. DOGBERRY It pleases your worship to say so, but we are the poor duke's officers; but truly, for mine own part, if I were as tedious as a king, I could find it in my heart to bestow it all of your worship.
Where is Polonius? HAMLET In heaven. Send hither to see. If your messenger find him not there, seek him i' th' other place yourself. But if indeed you find him not within this month, you shall nose him as you go up the stairs into the lobby.
Bright flower! whose home is everywhere Bold in maternal nature's care And all the long year through the heir Of joy or sorrow, Methinks that there abides in thee Some concord with humanity, Given to no other flower I see The forest through.
Professors of literature, who for the most part are genteel but mediocre men, can make but a poor defense of their profession, and the professors of science, who are frequently men of great intelligence but of limited interests and education
Poetry can add its grain to an accumulation of consciousness against the idea that there is no alternative - that we're just in the great flow of capitalism and it can never be any different - that this is human destiny, this is human nature.
We see daily that our lives are terrible and little, without continuity, buyable and salable at any moment, mere blips on a screen, that this is the way we live now. Memory marketed as nostalgia; terror reduced to mere suspense, to melodrama.
Placed on this isthmus of a middle state, A being darkly wise and rudely great... He hangs between; in doubt to act or rest; In doubt to deem himself a god, or beast; In doubt his mind or body to prefer; Born to die, and reasoning but to err.
I think, then, that man, after having satisfied his first longing for facts, wanted something fuller - some grouping, some adaptation to his capacity and experience, of the links of this vast chain of events which his sight could not take in.
The splendour falls on castle walls And snowy summits old in story: The long light shakes across the lakes, And the wild cataract leaps in glory. Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying, Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.