Quote collection
274 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The leaves hop, scraping on the ground. It is deep January. The sky is hard. The stalks are firmly rooted in ice. It is in this solitude, a syllable, Out of these gawky flitterings, Intones its single emptiness, The savagest hollow of winter-sound."
"behold The approach of him whom none believes, Whom all believe that all believe, A pagan in a varnished car."
"What is there in life except one's ideas, Good air, good friend, what is there in life?"
"This mangled, smutted semi-world hacked out Of dirt . . . It is not possible for the moon To blot this with its dove-winged blendings."
"After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption."
"Key West, unfortunately, is becoming rather literary and artistic."
"The grackles sing avant the spring Most spiss oh! Yes, most spissantly. They sing right puissantly."
"LIGHT FROM WITHIN my friend, cancer got you damn it: you had it beat for seven years at least. how did it come back? Why all that pain. again. and you, such a fighter you fought me over and over with tears and words and promises. you fought for me with honesty and a light so bright it hurts my heart. sweet lorna. at peace now finally no more battles, just light from within a flickering candle in the dark burns with you."
"What's down below is in the past Like last night's crickets, far below."
"Already the new-born children interpret love In the voices of mothers."
"It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place, It has to face the man of the time."
"Thus the theory of description matters most. It is the theory of the word for those For whom the word is the making of the world, The buzzing world and lisping firmament."
"It is easy to suppose that few people realize on that occasion, which comes to all of us, when we look at the blue sky for the first time, that is to say: not merely see it, but look at it and experience it and for the first time have a sense that we live in the center of a physical poetry, a geography that would be intolerable except for the non-geography that exists there - few people realize that they are looking at the world of their own thoughts and the world of their own feelings."
"The soul, O ganders, flies beyond the parks And far beyond the discords of the wind."
"For the listener, who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is."
"One sparrow is worth a thousand gulls, When it sings. The gull sits on chimney-tops. He mocks the guinea, challenges The crow, inciting various modes. The sparrow requites one, without intent."
"The mind is the terriblest force in the world, father, Because, in chief, it, only, can defend Against itself. At its mercy, we depend Upon it."
"Poetry is a response to the daily necessity of getting the world right."
"People ought to like poetry the way a child likes snow & they would if poets wrote it."
"A languid janitor bears His lantern through colonnades And the architecture swoons."