Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The primal duties shine aloft, like stars; The charities that soothe, and heal, and bless, Are scattered at the feet of Man, like flowers.
I look for ghosts; but none will force Their way to me. 'Tis falsely said That there was ever intercourse Between the living and the dead.
I thank You Lord for creating the world beautiful and various and if this is Your seduction I am seduced for good and past all forgiveness
Who made the world I cannot tell; 'Tis made, and here am I in hell. My hand, though now my knuckles bleed, I never soiled with such a deed.
I take the walk to be the externalization of an interior seeking so that the analogy is first of all between the external and the internal.
With luck, a writer capable of producing both Slouching Towards Kalamazoo and The Blood of the Lamb will not remain unappreciated for long.
motherhood is the great mesh in which all human relations are entangled, in which lurk our most elemental assumptions about love and power.
Find, if you can, in what you cannot change. Manners with fortunes, humours turn with climes, Tenets with books, and principles with times.
One never hugs one's good luck so affectionately as when listening to the relation of some horrible misfortunes which has overtaken others.
Ring out the old, ring in the new, Ring, happy bells, across the snow: The year is going, let him go; Ring out the false, ring in the true.
Ring in the valiant man and free, The larger heart, the kindlier hand; Ring out the darkness of the land; Ring in the Christ that is to be.
So I find every pleasant spot In which we two were wont to meet, The field, the chamber, and the street, For all is dark where thou art not
Who trusted God was love indeed And love Creation's final law Though Nature, red in tooth and claw With ravine, shrieked against his creed.
Not what we think, but what we do, / Makes saints of us: all stiff and cold, / The outlines of the corpse show through / The cloth of gold.
How does one happen to write a poem: where does it come from? That is the question asked by the psychologists or the geneticists of poetry.
Peering, I heard the hooves come down the hill. The posse passed, twelve horse; the leader's face Was worn as limestone on an ancient sill.
Hey, are you a boy or a — never mind, can I have a push on the swing?” And some day, y’all, when we grow up, it’s all gonna be that simple.
Fiction allows you to embody certain ideas and give them an emotional reality. The characters allow you to get close viscerally to an idea.
Frog has no nerves. Frog is as old as a cockroach. Frog is my father's genitals. Frog is a malformed doorknob. Frog is a soft bag of green.
I write, or used to write, to explain to myself situations I couldn't otherwise solve or understand. Meditation comes very naturally to me.
Avoid pulpits, platforms, stages and pedestals. Keep to the hard ground. It is the only way you can judge your approximate status as a man.
We are as great as our belief in human liberty - no greater. And our belief in human liberty is only ours when it is larger than ourselves.
What voice did on my spirit fall, Peschiera, when thy bridge I crost? 'Tis better to have fought and lost That never to have fought at all!
Don't despair too much if you see beautiful things destroyed, if you see them perish. Because the best things are always growing in secret.
I got to thinking that poems were like people. Some people you got right off the bat. Some people you just didn't get--and never would get.
Love is also like a coconut which is good while it is fresh, but you have to spit it out when the juice is gone, what's left tastes bitter.
Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.
I love to tell stories. I love to tell stories the way I tell them, not the way anybody else tells them. I am all the time writing a novel.
Like the sand and the oyster, it's a creative irritant. In each poem, I'm trying to reveal a truth, so it can't have a fictional beginning.
Work alone isn't enough for me and mine; we know how to break our backs, but the great dream Of my fathers was to be good at doing nothing.
It had to happen to you, to concentrate your whole life on one point, and then discover that you can do anything except live at that point.
Modernity signifies the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art of which the other half is the eternal and the immutable.
The streets were full of insane & dull people. Most of them lived in nice houses and didn't seem to work, and you wondered how they did it.
There will always be something to ruin our lives, it all depends on what or which finds us first. We are always ripe and ready to be taken.
There's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out but I'm too tough for him, I say, stay in there, I'm not going to let anybody see you.
Find what you love and let it kill you. For all things will kill you, both slowly and fastly, but it’s much better to be killed by a lover.
I am too sick to lay down the sidewalks frighten me the whole damned city frightens me, what I will become what I have become frightens me.
Too often the people complain that they have done nothing with their lives and then they wait for somebody to tell them that this isn't so.
When I take up my pen to write, I feel the strength of standing up and refusing to be silent. In an oppressive situation, silence is death.
Forgive: Make a conscious decision to cease to harbor resentment, which includes forgiving a debt and giving up one's resolve to retaliate.
He is next to the gods whom reason, and not passion, impels; and who, after weighing the facts, can measure the punishment with discretion.
For we must be one thing or the other, an asset or a liability, the sinew in your wing to help you soar, or the chain to bind you to earth.
To one who waits, all things reveal themselves so long as you have the courage not to deny in the darkness what you have seen in the light.
I am interested only in "nonsense"; only in that which makes no practical sense. I am interested in life only in its absurd manifestations.
I wanted to be an inventor, whatever I thought that meant then. I guess I was thinking of Edison or maybe James Watt. Or maybe even Newton.
What we strive for in perfection is not what turns us into the lit angel we desire what disturbs and then nourishes has everything we need.
There are millions of people living Thoreau's life of quiet desperation, and they do not have the language to escape from that desperation.
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.
Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.