Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Sensing us, the trees tremble in their sleep, The living leaves recoil before our fires, Baring to us war-charred and broken branches, And seeing theirs, we for our own destruction weep.
Also, I liked John Cage's music. I liked it for its craziness, the use of silence, the boldness-anything to get me away from writing about.. I don't know what academic poets write about.
Mysticism, in the narrow sense, implies a specific experience which is foreign to most poets and most men, but on the other hand, it represents an instinct which is a human sine qua non.
The instant of birth is exquisite. Pain and joy are one at this moment. Ever after, the dim recollection is so sweet that we speak to our children with a gratitude they never understand.
This is the solstice, the still point of the sun, its cusp and midnight, the year's threshold and unlocking, where the past lets go of and becomes the future; the place of caught breath.
The goals of the feminist movement have not been achieved, and those who claim we're living in a post-feminist era are either sadly mistaken or tired of thinking about the whole subject.
Those who live alone slide into the habit of vertical eating: why bother with the niceties when there's no one to share or censure? But laxity in one area may lead to derangement in all.
A good writer cannot avoid having social consciousness. I don't mean this about small pieces of writing, but about a big book. If it's a big book, there has to be more than one undertow.
We sometimes received - and I would read - 200 manuscripts a week. Some of them were wonderful, some were terrible; most were mediocre. It was like the gifts of the good and bad fairies.
I do not like the man who squanders life for fame; give me the man who living makes a name. [Lat., Nolo virum facili redimit qui sanquine famam; Hunc volo laudari qui sine morte potest.]
Our works and our play. All our pleasures experienced as the pleasure of love. What could be better that? To feel in one's work the tender and flushed substance of one's dearest concern.
As poets, we're writing into the void, and we're not writing to be bestsellers. Whatever individual responses we get, whether at a reading, by a conversation or a letter, mean the world.
You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
I've gotten books published. I've met famous people that are very nice. I look back and I say, 'Wow. Thank you, God, for giving me this gift. And thank you for helping me to keep going.'
Men are trained to like this version of womanhood, and when someone comes along smashing the table and messing up the party, it's a bit like, 'Get out; why are you disturbing the peace?'
Hasten slowly, and without losing heart, put your work twenty times upon the anvil. [Fr., Hatez-vous lentement; et, sans perdre courage, Vingt fois sur le metier remettez votre ouvrage.]
There are some friends you don't meet for twenty years and when you meet them again it's as if no twenty years has happened - you're lucky when that happens. I feel the same about books.
Authors of all races, be they Greeks, Romans, Teutons, or Celts, Can't seem just to say anything is the thing it is but have to go out of their way to say that it is like something else.
Don’t bring the ocean if I feel thirsty, nor heaven if I ask for a light; but bring a hint, some dew, a particle, as birds carry only drops away from water, and the wind a grain of salt.
The wounded limb shrinks from the slightest touch; and a slight shadow alarms the nervous. [Lat., Membra reformidant mollem quoque saucia tactum: Vanaque sollicitis incutit umbra metum.]
The mind is sicker than the sick body; in contemplation of its sufferings it becomes hopeless. [Lat., Corpore sed mens est aegro magis aegra; malique In circumspectu stat sine fine sui.]
....the ancient ritual of the earth; ploughing and planting, reaping and threshing. The fundamental business remains unaltered; it is only the methods and tools that science is changing.
I never feel more alone than when I'm traveling. Alone and, to some extent, helpless. The world expects a certain level of competence and can be merciless when this expectation is unmet.
Come Sleep! Oh Sleep, the certain knot of peace, the baiting-place of wit, the balm of woe, the poor man's wealth, the prisoner's release, the indifferent judge between the high and low.
A recurring ideal, I find, is that of simplicity. At times there comes the desire to write with great precision and clarity, words so simple and moving that they bring tears to the eyes.
I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.
The usual criticism of a novel about an artist is that, no matter how real he is as a man, he is not real to us as an artist, since we have to take on trust the works of art he produces.
You would think the fury of aerial bombardment would rouse God to relent; the infinite spaces Are still silent. He looks on shock-pried faces. History, even, does not know what is meant.
I change jobs like drinking water ... And as I grow accustomed to the new flavor of a drink I regard as delicious, yes, vital, something fades, life balks. So I break camp; I shed skins.
Whither, O splendid ship, thy white sails crowding,Leaning across the bosom of the urgent West,That fearest nor sea rising, nor sky clouding,Whither away, fair rover, and what thy quest?
The common problem, yours, mine, everyone's Is ? not to fancy what were fair in life Provided it could be ? but, finding first What may be, then find how to make it fair Up to our means.
Love, if you love me, lie next to me. Be for me, like rain, the getting out of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi- lust of intentional indifference. Be wet with a decent happiness.
There are three things, after all, that a poem must reach: the eye, the ear, and what we may call the heart or the mind. It is the most important of all to reach the heart of the reader.
One way to escape the universe in which everything is a kind of media cartoon is to write about the part of your life that doesn't feel like a cartoon, and how the cartoon comes into it.
Time wears all his locks before,Take thy hold upon his forehead;When he flies he turns no more,And behind his scalp is naked.Works adjourn'd have many stays,Long demurs breed new delays.
It’s not good enough to imitate the models proposed for us that are answers to circumstances other than our own. It isn’t even enough to discover who we are. We have to invent ourselves.
There is a community of the spirit . . . Open your hands if you want to be held . . . Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking . . . Flow down and down in always widening rings of being.
The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am.
Democracy is the healthful lifeblood which circulates through the veins and arteries, which supports the system, but which ought never to appear externally, and as the mere blood itself.
I must reject fluids and ethers of all kinds, magnetical, electrical, and universal, to whatever quintessential thinness they may be treble distilled, and as it were super-substantiated.
Maybe we can use a metaphor for it, out of dance. I think for many years I was aware of the need, in dance and in life, to breathe deeply and to take in more air than we usually take in.
Unlike landed white men, she didn't need to climb mountains to experience mystic panic. All she needed was to set her alarm dock for the next morning, wake when it rang, and go to class.
My parents banned nothing, though the Christian fundamentalists in my tribe held book-and-record burnings every now and again. So, yes, fundamentalist assholes can also be brown-skinned.
The women laughed and wept; the crowd stamped their feet enthusiastically, for at that moment Quasimodo was really beautiful. He was handsome — this orphan, this foundling, this outcast.
A phenomenon often seen. A sceptic adhering to a believer; that is as simple as the law of the complementary colours. What we lack attracts us. Nobody loves the light like the blind man.
Men are still men. The despot's wickedness Comes of ill teaching, and of power's excess,-- Comes of the purple he from childhood wears, Slaves would be tyrants if the chance were theirs.
I am always reading, always, and tons of things at once. I wouldn't say I'm a voracious reader, though. I never finish books that fast, because I'm always reading so many things at once.
We're all just a part of this large, spiraling, constantly fluid hierarchy and changing. At some points in your life, you feel crushed by that, depending on who you come in contact with.
My life all-around is really different than a lot of other poets. Not poets that are parents, too, but just that I can hardly find anyone who works in the industries that I've worked in.
I would say that when I write prose I'm a more socially responsible person. I'm much more a citizen of the world. But the instability of the poetry, the emotional jaggedness, is also me.