Quote collection
57 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Oh, I've discarded a great many [poems]. And occasionally I've discarded and then resurrected. I would find a crumpled yellow ball of paper in the wastebasket, in the morning, and open it to see what the hell I'd been up to; and occasionally it was something that needed only a very slight change to be brought off, which I'd missed the day before."
"He whose first emotion, on the view of an excellent work, is to undervalue or depreciate it, will never have one of his own to show."
"Should I not hear, as I lie down in dust, The horns of glory blowing above my burial?"
"The wind shrieks, the wind grieves; It dashes the leaves on walls, it whirls then again; And the enormous sleeper vaguely and stupidly dreams And desires to stir, to resist a ghost of pain."
"Whitman had a profound influence on me. That was during my sophomore year when I came down with a bad attack of Whitmanitis. But he did me a lot of good, and I think the influence is discoverable."
"All that is beautiful, and all that looks on beauty with eyes filled with fire, like a lover's eyes: all of this is yours; you gave it to me, sunlight! all these stars are yours; you gave them to me, skies!"
"Death is one dream out of another flowing."
"The truth--a hideous spectacle!"
"Death is a meeting place of sea and sea."
"Poetry will absorb and transmute, as it always has done, and glorify, all that we can know."
"For in this walk, this voyage, it is yourself, the profound history of your 'self,' that now as always you encounter."
"Time is a dream ... a destroying dream; It lays great cities in dust, it fills the seas; It covers the face of beauty, and tumbles walls."
"I love you, what star do you live on?"
"The days, the nights, flow one by one above us. The hours go silently over our lifted faces. We are like dreamers who walk beneath a sea. Beneath high walls we flow in the sun together. We sleep, we wake, we laugh, we pursue, we flee."
"We were all born of flesh, in a flare of pain. We do not remember the red roots whence we rose, but we know that we rose and walked, that after a while we shall lie down again."
"One is least sure of one's self, sometimes, when one is most positive."
"You know, without my telling you, how sometimes a word or name eludes you, and you seek it through running ghosts of shadow -- leaping at it, lying in wait for it to spring upon it, spreading faint snares for it of sense or sound: until, of a sudden, as if in a phantom forest, you hear it, see it flash among the branches, and scarcely knowing how, suddenly have it."