Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
God knows I am not too hippy. Perhaps because I am too much around the hip and I fear fads for, like anybody else, I like something that tends to last.
What are heavy? sea-sand and sorrow. What are brief? today and tomorrow. What are frail? spring blossoms and youth. What are deep? the ocean and truth.
It is worse to stay where one does not belong at all than to wander about lost for a while and looking for the psychic and soulful kinship one requires
All the love and joy that a man has ever received in perception is laid up in him as the sunshine of a hundred years is laid up in the bole of the oak.
In America, the term younger poet is applied with chivalric liberality. It can be used to describe anyone not yet collecting a Social Security pension.
Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learn anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you.
I am open to squeezing in whatever I can in this wonderful life. Instead of asking, "Is that all there is?" I seem, lately, to be always saying, "Wow!"
Musical composition, about which I know little, is a complicated art, and some contemporary music may be the equivalent of a complex abstract painting.
The painter I really thought I could learn from was Cezanne - some sort of resemblance to oranges and greens and browns of the dry season in St. Lucia.
If we allow our thoughts to arise and dissolve by themselves, they will pass through our mind as a bird flies through the sky, without leaving a trace.
To be a woman and a writer is double mischief, for the world will slight her who slights "the servile house," and who would rather make odes than beds.
Miracles are to come. With you I leave a remembrance of miracles: they are by somebody who can love and who shall be continually reborn, a human being.
May my mind stroll about hungry and fearless and thirsty and supple and even if its sunday may i be wrong for whenever men are right they are not young
The trouble with most Englishwomen is that they will dress as if they had been a mouse in a previous incarnation they do not want to attract attention.
Do your heart and head keep pace? When does hoary Love expire, When do frosts put out the fire? Can its embers burn below All that chill December snow?
A narrow compass! and yet there Dwelt all that 's good, and all that 's fair; Give me but what this riband bound, Take all the rest the sun goes round.
Not for the flag Of any land because myself was born there Will I give up my life. But I will love that land where man is free, And that will I defend.
People love discovering you. The thing about not being historically a mainstream writer is that everyone feels like you're theirs, you're their friend.
Sometimes you get lit students that know a lot about the canon but virtually nothing about contemporary poetry and vice versa. I like to mix things up.
My only sketch, profile, of Heaven is a large blue sky, and larger than the biggest I have seen in June - and in it are my friends - every one of them.
I cried for madder music and for stronger wine, But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire, Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine.
Each Fall the graves of my grandfathers call me, the brown hills and red gullies of mississippi send out their electric messages, galvanizing my genes.
Usura slayeth the child in the womb It stayeth the young man's courting It hath brought palsey to bed, lyeth between the young bride and her bridegroom
We, all who live, have A life that is lived And another life that is thought, And the only life we have It's the one that is divided In right or wrong.
Nothing is ever done until everyone is convinced that it ought to be done, and has been convinced for so long that it is now time to do something else.
Physicians, of all men, are most happy; whatever good success soever they have, the world proclaimeth; and what faults they commit, the earth covereth.
I believe that we are conforming to the divine order and the will of Providence when we are doing even indifferent things that belong to our condition.
I was left with myself and had to do the one thing I could to survive. I knew it would be difficult to write, very difficult, but I set about doing it.
Have Faith. Where'er thy bark is driven, - The calm's disport, the tempest's mirth, - Know this: God rules the hosts of heaven, The habitants of earth.
Pursue not a victory too far. He hath conquered well that hath made his enemy fly; thou mayest beat him to a desperate resistance, which may ruin thee.
It's a kind of liberation to break free in language, if you can break free, but it's also a confinement, because form confines you - whatever the form.
It is a happy thing that there is no royal road to poetry. The world should know by this time that one cannot reach Parnassus except by flying thither.
Both the poet and scholar are trying to learn something. The poem for me is a pursuit. Some of the answers are within. Some of the answers are without.
Now is the time to know that all that you do is sacred... Now is the time for you to deeply compute the impossibility that there is anything but grace.
Intimate relationships cannot substitute for a life plan. But to have any meaning or viability at all, a life plan must include intimate relationships.
The woman who creates and sustains a home, and under whose hands children grow up to be strong and pure men and women, is a creator second only to God.
for ... austere and gracious allegory, as for so much of its mysticism and its chivalry, its ardours and its endurances, the world is in debt to Spain.
The heights by great men reached and kept were not attained by sudden flight, but they, while their companions slept, were toiling upward in the night.
Enjoy the Spring of Love and Youth, to some good angel leave the rest; For Time will teach thee soon the truth, there are no birds in last year's nest!
Our blossoms of passion, gay and luxuriant flowers, are bright and full of fragrance, but they beguile us and lead us astray, and their odor is deadly.
Bell, thou soundest merrily, When the bridal party To the church doth hie! Bell, thou soundest solemnly, When, on Sabbath morning, Fields deserted lie!
The poor peasant here hives under conditions quite different from those of Russia. Though often terrible, they are not as appalling as they were there.
Wisdom is nothing but a preparation of the soul, a capacity, a secret art of thinking, feeling and breathing thoughts of unity at every moment of life.
They both listened silently to the water, which to them was not just water, but the voice of life, the voice of Being, the voice of perpetual Becoming.
The river is everywhere at the same time . . . everywhere and the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past, nor the shadow of the future.
If you rank me with the lyric poets, my exalted head shall strike the stars. [Lat., Quod si me lyricis vatibus inseris, Sublimi feriam sidera vertice.]
I never abandoned either forms or freedom. I imagine that most of what could be called free verse is in my first book. I got through that fairly early.
Those that are huntedKnow this as their life,Their reward: to walkUnder such trees in full knowledgeOf what is in glory above them,And to feel no fear.
What means this glory round our feet, The Magi mused, "more bright than morn!" And voices chanted clear and sweet, "To-day the Prince of Peace is born.
The path of nature is, indeed, a narrow one, and it is only the immortals that seek it, and, when they find it, do not find themselves cramped therein.