Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
And she finds it difficult to believe—that a person would love her even when she isn't trying. Trying to figure out what other people need, trying to be worthy.
He doesn't know which is worse, a past he can't regain or a present that will destroy him if he looks at it too clearly. Then there's the future. Sheer vertigo.
Pink is supposed to weaken your enemies, make them go soft on you, which must be why it's used for baby girls. It's a wonder the military hasn't got on to this.
Poetry isn't written from the idea down. It's written from the phrase, line and stanza up, which is different from what your teacher taught you to do in school.
If you really want to stay the same age you are now forever and ever, she'd be thinking, try jumping off the roof: death's a sure-fire method for stopping time.
No matter how much you've been warned, Death always comes without knocking. Why now? is the cry. Why so soon? It's the cry of a child being called home at dusk.
Love and grief enable us to feel how we're all at heart the same. In love and grief, which is always very personal, the distinctions that separate us melt away.
Heart's ease! one could look for half a day Upon this flower, and shape in fancy out Full twenty different tales of love and sorrow, That gave this gentle name.
You have to be in the world to understand what the spiritual is about, and you have to be spiritual in order to truly be able to accept what the world is about.
I do love the prose poem because it's such a perverse and provocative little box - always asking to be questioned, never giving a straight or definitive answer.
Poetry is a beautiful way of expressing feelings - happy, sad, angry, caring. It's also a way that we share with other people, to help them with those feelings.
Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace.
We have an idea - a very modern idea - that dying is undignified. But I think this is because we have the illusion that we can control our bodies and our fates.
In our period, they say there is free speech. They say there is no penalty for poets, There is no penalty for writing poems. They say this. This is the penalty.
The American: a titan enamored of progress, a fanatical giant who worships "getting things done" but never asks himself what he is doing nor why he is doing it.
America does not seem to remember that it derived its wealth, its values, its food, much of its medicine, and a large part of its "dream" from Native Americans.
We look before and after, And pine for what is not; Our sincerest laughter With some pain is fraught; Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
Every fanatic or enemy of virtue is not at liberty to misrepresent the greatest geniuses and most heroic defenders of all that is valuable in this mortal world.
What I liked about Greece was [...] the impressive force of the language itself, unconfined by dictionaries, spoken in the streets, in cafés and in the country.
So many things I had thought forgotten Return to my mind with stranger pain: Like letters that arrive addressed to someone Who left the house so many years ago.
Women are only told that they resemble angels when they are young and beautiful; consequently, it is their persons, not their virtues, that procure them homage.
Vanity, in a fairy tale, will make you evil. Vanity in the real world will drive you nuts. Vanity makes you say things like “I deserved a better life than this.
Wearing your clothes or standing in the shower for over an hour, pretending that this skin is your skin, these hands your hands, these shins, these soapy flanks
People write me from all over the country, asking me, and sometimes even telling me, what they think a poet laureate should do. I found that immensely valuable.
I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet When far away an interrupted cry Came over houses from another street, But not to call me back or say good-bye.
But he had gone his way, the grass all mown, And I must be, as he had been - alone, As all must be, I said within my heart, Whether they work together or apart.
No poem is worth anything unless it starts from a poetic trance, out of which you can be wakened by interruption as from a dream. In fact, it is the same thing.
Sometimes from this hillside just after sunset The rim of the sky takes on a tinge Of the palest green, like the flesh of a cucumber When you peel it carefully.
History has to live with what was here, clutching and close to fumbling all we had - it is so dull and gruesome how we die, unlike writing, life never finishes.
There is a void in your soul, ready to be filled. You feel it, don't you? You feel the separation from the Beloved. Invite Him to fill you up, embrace the fire.
I am bewildered by the magnificence of your beauty; and wish to see you with a hundred eyes . . . I am in the house of mercy, and my heart is a place of prayer.
The form I most enjoy writing is the sonnet or sonnet-like forms, where you have a - you know, three stanzas or two stanzas that lead into a concluding couplet.
I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust.
If you were going to choose a way of making your way in this world and a place to start from, you might not choose poetry and you might not choose Huddersfield.
The discussion of ideas as opposed to the American narcissistic obsession with what's going on with the self, that's the general thing people are talking about.
There's a Welsh poet, R.S. Thomas. He was a very crotchety, strange man, but his poems are wonderful. He was nominated for the Nobel in the 1990s but never won.
I think continually of those who were truly great...Born of the sun they traveled a short while towards the sun, and left the vivid air signed with their honor.
I must be free... free to do what I like, say what I like, write what I like, within the limits prescribed for me by my own sense of what is seemly and fitting.
I had assumed that I would age with all my friends growing old around me, dying off very gradually one by one. And here was a plague that cut them off so early.
The thing one reads and likes, and then forgets, is of no account. The thing that stays, and haunts one, and refuses to be forgotten, that is the sincere thing.
Put a thorn in every enjoyment, a worm in every gourd, that would either prevent my being wholly thine, or in any measure retard my progress in the divine life.
Thy spirit, Independence, let me share! Lord of the lion-heart and eagle-eye thy steps I follow with my bosom bare, nor heed the storm that howls along the sky.
Go out in the world and work like money doesn't matter, sing as if no one is listening, love as if you have never been hurt, and dance as if no one is watching.
You look at a star for two reasons, because it is luminous, and because it is impenetrable. You have beside you a sweeter radiance and a greater mystery, woman.
Winter is on my head, but eternal spring is in my heart; I breathe at this hour the fragrance of the lilacs, the violets, and the roses, as at twenty years ago.
But secondly you say 'society must exact vengeance, and society must punish'. Wrong on both counts. Vengeance comes from the individual and punishment from God.
Into this neutral air Where blind skyscrapers use Their full height to proclaim The strength of Collective Man, Each language pours its vain Competitive excuse.
What is one man among so many men? What are so many men in such a world? Can one man think one thing and think it long? Can one man be one thing and be it long?
It gives a man character as a poet to have a daily contact with a job. I doubt whether I've lost a thing by leading an exceedingly regular and disciplined life.
Day full-blown and splendid-day of the immense sun, action, ambition, laughter, The Night follows close with millions of suns, and sleep and restoring darkness.