Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Life has been some combination of fairy-tale coincidence and joie de vivre and shocks of beauty together with some hurtful self-questioning.
Arrogant, I think I have written lines which qualify me to be The Poetess of America (as Ted will be The Poet of England and her dominions).
T'was Spring, t'was Summer, all was gay Now Autumn bears a cloud brow The flowers of Spring are swept way And Summer fruits desert the bough
What is a modern poet's fate? / To write his thoughts upon a slate; / The critic spits on what is done, / Gives it a wipe - and all is gone.
Like great art, something essential dies when great jokes are explained. So what's the key to telling a good joke/creating great art timing.
What appears to us solid is ultimately both a particle and a wavelength, and on that realm everything behaves as both a particle and a wave.
Strange to say, the luminous world is the invisible world; the luminous world is that which we do not see. Our eyes of flesh see only night.
The omnipotence of evil has never resulted in anything but fruitless efforts. Our thoughts always escape from whoever tries to smother them.
There is one spectacle grander than the sea, that is the sky; there is one spectacle grander than the sky, that is the interior of the soul.
I think I love humor in poetry, but not that slapstick cheap easy humor, but that uncomfortable, "did she say that out loud?" kind of humor.
After all my years of playing soldiers, and then of reading History, I have almost a mania to be in the East, to see fighting, and to serve.
He loves to sit and hear me sing, Then, laughing, sports and plays with me; Then stretches out my golden wing, And mocks my loss of liberty.
I always think a great speaker convinces us not by force of reasoning, but because he is visibly enjoying the beliefs he wants us to accept.
Consume my heart away, sick with desire And fastened to a dying animal It knows not what it is, and gather me Into the artifice of eternity.
Being young you have not known The fool's triumph, nor yet Love lost as soon as won, Nor the best labourer dead And all the sheaves to bind.
The true faith discovered was When painted panel, statuary, Glass-mosaic, window-glass, Amended what was told awry By some peasant gospeler.
For how can you compete Being honour bred, with one Who, were it proved he lies, Were neither shamed in his own Nor in his neighbour's eyes?
But 'neath yon crimson tree Lover to listening maid might breathe his flame, Nor mark, within its roseate canopy, Her blush of maiden shame.
I'll write whatever I damn please, whenever I damn please and as I damn please and it'll be good if the authentic spirit of change is on it.
Hell take curtains! Go with some show of inconvenience; sit openly - to the weather as to grief. Or do you think you can shut your grief in?
He that has seen both sides of fifty has lived to little purpose if he has no other views of the world than he had when he was much younger.
Solitude bears the same relation to the mind that sleep does to the body. It affords it the necessary opportunities for repose and recovery.
If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge?
Feed on her damask cheek: she pined in thought, And with a green and yellow melancholy She sat like patience on a monument, Smiling at grief
The setting sun, and the music at the close, As the last taste of sweets, is sweetest last, Writ in rememberance more than long things past.
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting. Not in entire forgetfulness, and not in utter nakedness, but trailing clouds of glory do we come.
The softest breeze to fairest flowers gives birth: Think not that Prudence dwells in dark abodes, She scans the future with the eye of gods.
And when a damp Fell round the path of Milton, in his hand The thing became a trumpet; whence he blew Soul-animating strains,-alas! too few.
Yet sometimes, when the secret cup Of still and serious thought went round, It seemed as if he drank it up, He felt with spirit so profound.
But they know about us, they know, the four corners, and the chairs nearby us. Discerning shadows also know, and even the table keeps quiet.
The land is numb. It stands beneath the feet, and one may come Walking securely, till the sea extends Its limber margin, and precision ends.
forgive me also that I didn't fight like Lord Byron for the happiness of captive peoples that I watched only risings of the moon and museums
The poet exposes himself to the risk. All that has been said about poetry, all that he has learned about poetry, is only a partial assurance.
The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.
I slept with faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening; I drank and danced all night with doubt and found her a virgin in the morning.
When you have proved that God is merely a name for the sex instinct, it appears to me not far to the perception that the sex instinct is God.
Women, as they are like riddles in being unintelligible, so generally resemble them in this, that they please us no longer once we know them.
Seated in my library at night, and looking on the silent faces of my books, I am occasionally visited by a strange sense of the supernatural.
I thought I could not breathe in that fine air That pure severity of perfect light I yearned for warmth and colour which I found In Lancelot.
Bring the buds of the hazel-copse, Where two lovers kissed at noon; Bring the crushed red wild-thyme tops Where they murmured under the moon.
Heart's ease of pansy, pleasure or thought, Which would the picture give us of these? Surely the heart that conceived it sought Heart's ease.
Nobody saves America by sniffing cocaine. Jiggling your knees blankeyed in the rain, when it snows in your nose you catch cold in your brain.
Polyphonic prose is a kind of free verse, except that it is still freer. Polyphonic makes full use of cadence, rime, alliteration, assonance.
This universe is a fan of you. Watch the flowers in the morning, how they open towards the same sun that spends it's whole day following you.
The clouds are scudding across the moon, A misty light is on the sea; The wind in the shrouds has a wintry tune, And the foam is flying free.
The story and the poem are obviously changed by being placed in the novel, so in a sense they're no longer the works that preceded the novel.
I wondered about the science of storms and how sometimes it seemed that a storm wanted to break the world and how the world refused to break.
I wondered what that was like, to hold someone’s hand. I bet you could sometimes find all of the mysteries of the universe in someone’s hand.
Like those great sphinxes lounging through eternity in noble attitudes upon the desert sand, they gaze incuriously at nothing, calm and wise.
Even though I write about the human race, the further away from them, the better I feel. Two miles is great; two thousand miles is beautiful.