Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
What's happening in Russia is devoid of autobiographical interest for me. Maybe it's egocentric. Whatever it is, feel free to use it.
I know I'm representing the Library of Congress, all the people of the United States and, of course, the Latinos and Latinas as well.
There are two ways to worry words. One is hoping for the greatest possible beauty in what is created. The other is to tell the truth.
The music of language became extremely important to me, and obvious to me. By the time I was seven I was writing myself. I was a poet
Do not keep the slanderer away, treat him with affection and honor: Body and soul, he scours all clean, babbling about this and that.
I don't think that the world will ever become an unpoliced place, sadly. But I do feel that there is relative freedom on the margins.
From a sensitive woman's heart springs the happiness of mankind, and from the kindness of her noble spirit comes mankind's affection.
You pray in your distress and in your need; would that you might also pray in the fullness of your joy and in your days of abundance.
Do not be merciful, but be just, for mercy is bestowed upon the guilty criminal, while Justice is all that the innocent man requires.
Beauty for some provides escape, who gain a happiness in eyeing the gorgeous buttocks of the ape or Autumn sunsets exquisitely dying.
Why has our poetry eschewed The rapture and response of food? What hymns are sung, what praises said For home-made miracles of bread?
I am certain that a Sewing Machine would relieve as much human suffering as a hundred Lunatic Asylums, and possibly a good deal more.
My brother and I were both good at science, and we were both good at English literature. Either one of us could have gone either way.
I didn't want him to become gray and multi-dimensional and complicated like everyone else. Was every Heathcliff a Linton in disguise?
Time is compressed like the fist I close on my knee... I hold inside it the clues and solutions and the power for what I must do now.
You can pretty much trace when the big individual indebtedness kicked in, and it was when the credit card became generally available.
Our daughters are the most precious of our treasures, the dearest possessions of our homes and the objects of our most watchful love.
I don't apologize for being sexually adventurous. Why not? It was often fun. When it wasn't - I didn't continue what wasn't pleasant.
My father used to say, "Superior people never make long visits, have to be shown Longfellows grave, or the glass flowers at Harvard."
Years hence, perhaps, may dawn an age, More fortunate, alas! than we, Which without hardness will be sage, And gay without frivolity.
There is no better motto which it [culture] can have than these words of Bishop Wilson, "To make reason and the will of God prevail."
When one's not writing poems - and I'm not at the moment - you wonder how you ever did it. It's like another country you can't reach.
The music industry has been hijacked by corporate interests, but the way music affects people and resonates with them hasn't changed.
To see people laughing or crying or listening, then being inspired to do their own thing? I can't think of anything better than that.
In the end, time is the best ally of poets. It clarifies their works and makes them accessible to an ever widening circle of readers.
Women in drudgery knew They must be one of four: Whores, artists, saints, and wives. There are composite lives that women always live
Where we live in the world is never one place. Our hearts, those dogged mirrors, keep flashing us moons before we are ready for them.
I find myself frequently introducing myself to someone, saying that, you know, I've grown up black and biracial in the United States.
What sets worlds in motion is the interplay of differences, their attractions and repulsions; life is plurality, death is uniformity.
Dogs display reluctance and wrath If you try to give them a bath. They bury bones in hideaways And half the time they trot sideaways.
A lady wants to be dressed exactly like everybody else but she gets pretty up- set if she sees anybody else dressed exactly like her.
For sheer excitement you can keep movie premieres and roller-coasters . An empty white canvas waiting to be filled. That's the thing.
It often occurs to me that we love most what makes us miserable. In my opinion the damned are damned because they enjoy being damned.
In the country places of Ireland, writing is held in certain awe: a writer was a dangerous man from whom they instinctively recoiled.
Gentlemen, in the little moment that remains to us between the crisis and the catastrophe, we may as well drink a glass of Champagne.
It's not as if I'm trying to write crossword puzzles to which one might find an answer at the back of the book or anything like that.
Liberty is the hardest test that one can inflict on a people. To know how to be free is not given equally to all men and all nations.
History justifies whatever we want it to. It teaches absolutely nothing, for it contains everything and gives examples of everything.
Hoop Dancer is a rendering of my understanding of the process by which one enters into timelessness -- that place where one is whole.
Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present.
Less is more. Happiness is found close to the necessities of life, not in needless complexity and meaningless multiplicity of choice.
Language is surely too small a vessel to contain these emotions of mind and body that have somehow awakened a response in the spirit.
Poetry wants to make things mean more than they mean, says someone, as if we knew how much things meant, and in what unit of measure.
Yet everything that touches us, me and you, takes us together like a violin's bow, which draws one voice out of two separate strings.
To be loved means to be consumed. To love is to give light with inexhaustible oil. To be loved is to pass away, to love is to endure.
And you should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is something in you that wants to move out of it.
Not all who seem to fail have failed indeed,Not all who fail have therefor worked in vain.There is no failure for the good and brave.
Assuming you can write clear English sentences, give up all worry about communication. If you want to communicate, use the telephone.
A lazy part of us is like a tumbleweed. It doesn’t move on its own. Sometimes it takes A lot of Depression to get tumbleweeds moving.
When a man's busy, why leisure Strikes him as wonderful pleasure: 'Faith, and at leisure once is he? Straightway he wants to be busy.