Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Life always holds in store surprises that are more complex and unforeseeable than any dream, and the secret is to let them come and not block them with castles in the air.
The urge to kill, like the urge to beget, Is blind and sinister. Its craving is set Today on the flesh of a hare: tomorrow it can Howl the same way for the flesh of a man.
Blind with love, my daughter has cried nightly for horses, those long-necked marchers and churners that she has mastered, any and all, reigning them in like a circus hand.
Take adultery or theft. Merely sins. It is evil who dines on the soul, stretching out its long bone tongue. It is evil who tweezers my heart, picking out its atomic worms.
Dance on, dance on, we see, we see Youth goes, alack, and with it glee, A boy the old man ne'er can be; Maternal thirty scarce can find The sweet sixteen long left behind.
The corporatist-economic model of society appears to be governing us. Economists, often in the pay of transnationals, are deciding, for us, what democracy is, and will be.
When I wrote I took on the role of the despondent and difficult to understand person. Whereas in life, I was easy to understand, to the point of being simple-minded maybe.
The literary world is so full of pretension, and there's such an enormous gap between how seriously poets take themselves and how widely they're ignored by everybody else.
The disappointing second novel is measured against the brilliant first novel - often no novel lives up to the first. Literary improvement seems like an unfair expectation.
I come here to speak poetry. It will always be in the grass. It will also be necessary to bend down to hear it. It will always be too simple to be discussed in assemblies.
To say the word Romanticism is to say modern art - that is, intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration towards the infinite, expressed by every means available to the arts.
Existence was not only absurd, it was plain hard work. Think of how many times you put on your underwear in a lifetime. It was appalling, it was disgusting, it was stupid.
I am not a man who looks for solutions in God or politics. If somebody else wants to do the dirty work and create a better world for us and he can do it, I will accept it.
Old Age, a second child, by nature curst With more and greater evils than the first, Weak, sickly, full of pains: in ev'ry breath Railing at life, and yet afraid of death.
In some small field each child should attain, within the limited range of its experience and observation, the power to draw a justly limited inference from observed facts.
If you've lost focus, just sit down and be still. Take the idea and rock it to and fro. Keep some of it and throw some away, and it will renew itself. You need do no more.
I treat myself as one of the sources. And, again, I think that’s accurate. One of the poets I read most frequently is myself. I really do. I read my own poems obsessively.
I know the colour rose, and it is lovely, But not when it ripens in a tumour; And healing greens, leaves and grass, so springlike, In limbs that fester are not springlike.
Sudden Light I have been here before, But when or how I cannot tell: I know the grass beyond the door, The sweet keen smell, The sighing sound, the light around the shore.
I don't necessarily believe in the ideology of cinema verité. I think by the very fact that you have a camera there you are affecting the story and you are influencing it.
Busy with the ugliness of the expensive success We forget the easiness of free beauty Lying sad right around the corner, Only an instant removed, Unnoticed and squandered.
The sigh of History rises over ruins, not over landscapes, and in the Antilles there are few ruins to sigh over, apart from the ruins of sugar estates and abandoned forts.
I do not read newspapers. I do not watch television. I am not interested in current events, although I will occasionally discuss them if other people want to discuss them.
Although I was paid a salary in Ann Arbor, my wife and children and I drank powdered milk at six cents a quart instead of the stuff that came in bottles. I was a tightwad.
Ah when will this long weary day have end, And lend me leave to come unto my love? How slowly do the hours their numbers spend! How slowly does sad Time his feathers move!
Sorrow like a ceaseless rain Beats upon my heart. People twist and scream in pain-- Dawn will find them still again; This has neither wax nor wane, Neither stop nor start.
Do not think too much of the dead husk of your friend, or mourn too much over it, but send your thoughts out towards the real soul or self which has escaped - to reach it.
The first time I voted, I voted for Eugene McCarthy and I knew he wouldn't win, but it felt so great to vote for him, to vote for the right guy - the one who wanted peace.
The two World Wars came in part, like much modern literature and art, because men, whose nature is to tire of everything in turn... tired of common sense and civilization.
I tend to integrate poet and scholar is by ironizing the scholarship. My hope is to disturb that space between the two so they can coexist in a kind of mutual uncertainty.
Surely no one can be sure he has visited Cienega; people say to themselves, do they not: 'Was it a vision; or have I, some time or other, seen dusk in a valley like this?'
Only through our connectedness to others can we really know and enhance the self. And only through working on the self can we begin to enhance our connectedness to others.
Reason exercises merely the function of preserving order, is, so to say, the police in the region of art. In life it is mostly a cold arithmetician summing up our follies.
Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear.
Then fell upon the house a sudden gloom, a shadow on those features fair and thin. And softly, from the hushed and darkened room, two angels issued, where but one went in.
I have a passion for ballad. . . . They are the gypsy children of song, born under green hedgerows in the leafy lanes and bypaths of literature,--in the genial Summertime.
But ah! what once has been shall be no more! The groaning earth in travail and in pain Brings forth its races, but does not restore, And the dead nations never rise again.
What discord should we bring into the universe if our prayers were all answered! Then we should govern the world, and not God. And do you think we should govern it better?
I was out of my bed in one second, trembling with excitement, and I dashed to the door and into the adjoining room, where I could watch the streets below from the windows.
It is not Kafka's fault that his wonderful writings have lately turned into a fad, and are read by people who have neither the ability nor the desire to absorb literature.
That man is best who sees the truth himself. Good too is he who listens to wise counsel. But who is neither wise himself nor willing to ponder wisdom is not worth a straw.
Pride and resentment are not indigenous to the human heart; and perhaps it is due to the gardener's innate love of the exotic that we take such pains to make them thrive".
Busy not yourself in looking forward to the events of to-morrow; but whatever may be those of the days Providence may yet assign you neglect not to turn them to advantage.
I consider racism to be a medical problem. Racists need serious medical and psychiatric help, because they are killing themselves and making others suffer along with them.
To say that its wrong to feel this way is not the point; you do feel it. All you see is a flash of fire and, depending on your altitude, you don't even see that sometimes.
When the great markets by the sea shut fastAll that calm Sunday that goes on and on:When even lovers find their peace at last,And Earth is but a star, that once had shone.
The iambic line, with its characteristic forward movement from short to long, or light to heavy, or unstressed to stressed, is the quintessential measure of English verse.
He puts his right hand lightly on the cup, I put my left, leaving the right free to transcribe, and away we go. We get, oh, 500 to 600 words an hour. Better than gasoline.
It is curious how tyrannical the habit of reading is, and what shifts we make to escape thinking. There is no bore we dread being left alone with so much as our own minds.
No man is born into the world whose work Is not born with him. There is always work, And tools to work withal, for those who will; And blessed are the horny hands of toil.