Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Every time I go to Haiti after a season of busy work in Europe, I feel like I'm submerging into a certain state of mind, which is very productive.
I'm very grateful to all the people of Fresno, to Philip Levine and all the poets before me, and all the farmworkers. I didn't get here by myself.
And Life is Colour and Warmth and Light and a striving evermore for these; and he is dead, who will not fight; and who dies fighting has increase.
The savor of wandering in the ocean of deathless life has rid me of all my asking: As the tree is in the seed, so all diseases are in this asking.
Women who give up their children for adoption are years and years later talking about how painful it was, much more than women who have abortions.
Solitude is a silent storm that breaks down all our dead branches; yet it sends our living roots deeper into the living heart of the living earth.
Come with us to the field, or go with our brothers to the sea and cast your net. For the land and the sea shall be bountiful to you even as to us.
This morning I paid seventy cents for two little old dried-up slivers of bacon and one cockeyed egg. It took me till noon to get my appetite back.
Even the 'Negro' shows like 'Amos and Andy' and 'Beulah' are written largely by white writers - the better to preserve the stereotypes, I imagine.
Feeling indisposed towards the evening, I drove up the ancient plains. The setting sun is unspeakably beautiful, Only it is approaching nightfall.
Once you have a disease like cancer, you look at life a bit differently. Some things that were important no longer seem as important as they were.
As for the common men apart, Who sweat to keep their common breath, And have no hour for books or art-- What dreams have these to hide from death!
God, though this life is but a wraith, Although we know not what we use, Although we grope with little faith, Give me the heart to fight and lose.
For out of doubt In these affairs 'tis each man's will itself That gives the start, and hence throughout our limbs Incipient motions are diffused.
Way back when I was working at the dump, I saw that, even when living among the trash, that some people would decide to choose joy in their lives.
Does feminist mean large unpleasant person who'll shout at you or someone who believes women are human beings. To me it's the latter, so I sign up
The woman poet must be either a sexless, reclusive eccentric, with nothing to say specifically to women, or a brilliant, tragic, tortured suicide.
I have granted you much that you asked: and yet you never cease to ask of me. He who refuses nothing, Atticilla, will soon have nothing to refuse.
Time may restore us in his course Goethe's sage mind and Byron's force: But where will Europe's latter hour Again find Wordsworth's healing power?
Spare me the whispering, crowded room, the friends who come and gape and go, the ceremonious air of gloom - all, which makes death a hideous show.
I long for the bulbs to arrive, for the early autumn chores are melancholy, but the planting of bulbs is the work of hope and is always thrilling.
One could not live without delicacy, but when / I think of love I think of the big, clumsy-looking / hands of my grandmother, each knuckle a knob.
I keep thinking, we teach children to use language to solve their disputes. We teach them not to hit and fight and bite. Then look what adults do!
I don't believe that there are dangerous writers: the danger of certain books is not in the books themselves but in the passions of their readers.
Snow is all right while it is snowing; it is like inebriation because it is very pleasing when it is coming, but very unpleasing when it is going.
The most wretched fortune is safe; for there is no fear of anything worse. [Lat., Fortuna miserrima tuta est: Nam timor eventus deterioris abest.]
We hew and saw and plane facts to make them dovetail with our prejudices, so that they become mere ornaments with which to parade our objectivity.
Poetry is itself a thing of God; He made his prophets poets; and the more We feel of poesie do we become Like God in love and power,-under-makers.
My poems often start with an idea, some kind of inspiration. I don't expect anything. Every now and then something like "The One Truth" comes out.
Suddenly, I was reading these comics. I was looking at those bubbles, those dialogue bubbles, and suddenly there were words... recognizable words.
My quiltmaking is sandwiched, moved about, displaced between other activities and the crosscurrents of people's movements inside the place I live.
Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.
Love the questions themselves...Live the questions now and have confidence that someday far into the future, [I will live my] way into the answer.
I decided that Europeans and Americans are like men and women: they understand each other worse, and it matters less, than either of them suppose.
People had always seemed to Gertrude rather like the beasts in Animal Farm : all equally detestable, but some more equally detestable than others.
Back of the sound broods the silence, back of the gift stands the giving; Back of the hand that receives thrill the sensitive nerves of receiving.
Siblings tend not to care much about boundaries and borders. Having worn each others' T-shirts, it's unlikely that they'd go to war over a border.
The invention of Bob Dylan with his guitar belongs in its way to the same kind of tradition of something meant to be heard, as the songs of Homer.
One should indeed read Pope with his notes available, in the Twickenham edition possibly, to see what a vast amount he did understand about Homer.
Hate is a fear, and fear is rot That cankers root and fruit alike, Fight cleanly then, hate not, fear not, Strike with no madness when you strike.
A well-chosen anthology is a complete dispensary of medicine for the more common mental disorders, and may be used as much for prevention as cure.
A well chosen anthology is a complete dispensary of medicine for the more common mental disorders, and may be used as much for prevention as cure.
From his brimstone bed, at break of day, A-walking the Devil is gone, To look at his little snug farm of the World, And see how his stock went on.
Freud "interpreted" dreams by treating them as intellectual riddles whose details, once processed through free association, exposed hidden wishes.
Collaborating with someone who doesn't understand your language nor you theirs stretches you open even wider, into a sort of very large free fall.
Your earthly lover can be charming and coquettish but never very faithful. The true lover is the one who on your final day opens a thousand doors.
The agony of lovers burns with the fire of passion. Lovers leave traces of where they've been. The wailing of broken hearts is the doorway to God.
I cannot sleep in your presence In your absence, tears prevent me you watch me my beloved on each sleepiness night and Only you see the difference
A single thought is that which it is from other thoughts as a wave of the sea takes its form and shape from the waves which precede and follow it.
Perhaps 'tis pretty to force together Thoughts so all unlike each other; To mutter and mock a broken charm, To dally with wrong that does no harm.