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Honesty is as rare as a man without self-pity.
I have fallen in love with American names, the sharp names that never get fat.
Life is not lost by dying; life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging day, in all the thousand small uncaring ways.
We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom.
All the time spent idly, is spent wickedly, and is unfaithfulness to our masters.
As we depend upon our masters, for what we eat and drink and wear, and for all our comfortable things in this world, we cannot be happy, unless we please them.
Besides all this, if you are idle, and take to bad courses, you will hurt those of your brethren who are slaves, and do all in your power to prevent their being free.
But this will not do, God will certainly punish you for stealing and for being unfaithful.
Good servants frequently make good masters.
He will bring us all, rich and poor, white and black, to his judgment seat.
Hell is a place made for those who hate God, and are his enemies, and where they will be miserable to all eternity.
I have had more experience in the world than the most of you, and I have seen a great deal of the vanity, and wickedness of it.
I have heard some learned and good men say, that the heathen, and all that worshiped false Gods, never spoke lightly or irreverently of their Gods, they never took their names in vain, or jested with those things which they held sacred.
I suppose I have had more advantages and privileges than most of you, who are slaves have ever known, and I believe more than many white people have enjoyed, for which I desire to bless God, and pray that he may bless those who have given them to me.
If a servant strives to please his master and studies and takes pains to do it, I believe there are but few masters who would use such a servant cruelly.
If there was no Bible, it would be no matter whether you could read or not. Reading other books would do you no good.
If we are found among those who feared his name, and trembled at his word, we shall be called good and faithful servants.
If we should ever get to Heaven, we shall find nobody to reproach us for being black, or for being slaves.
If you see most people neglect the Bible, and many that can read never look into it, let it not harden you and make you think lightly of it, and that it is a book of no worth.
In hopes of this I will beg of you to spare no pains in trying to learn to read. If you are once engaged you may learn.
In the Bible God has told us every thing it is necessary we should know, in order to be happy here and hereafter.
It is at times, almost too much for human nature to bear, and I am obliged to turn my thoughts from the subject or endeavour to still my mind, by considering that it is permitted thus to be, by that God who governs all things, who seteth up one and pulleth down another.
It is our duty to be faithful, not with eye service as men pleasers.
It is very wicked for you not to take care of your masters goods, but how much worse is it to pilfer and steal from them, whenever you think you shall not be found out.
Let all the time you can get be spent in trying to learn to read.
Now the Bible tells us that we are all by nature, sinners, that we are slaves to sin and Satan, and that unless we are converted, or born again, we must be miserable forever.
Our slavery will be at an end, and though ever so mean, low, and despited in this world, we shall sit with God in his kingdom as Kings and Priests, and rejoice forever, and ever.
Riches and honours which drown the greater part of mankind, who have the gospel, in perdition, can be little or no temptations to us.
That liberty is a great thing we may know from our own feelings, and we may likewise judge so from the conduct of the white-people, in the late war.
The Bible is a revelation of the mind and will of God to men. Therein we may learn, what God is.
The next thing I would mention, and warn you against, is profaneness. This you know is forbidden by God.
There are but two places where all go after death, white and black, rich and poor ; those places are Heaven and Hell. Heaven is a place made for those, who are born again, and who love God, and it is a place where they will be happy for ever.
Those of you who can read I must beg you to read the Bible, and whenever you can get time, study the Bible, and if you can get no other time, spare some of your time from sleep, and learn what the mind and will of God is.
We cannot certainly, have any excuse either for taking any thing that belongs to our masters without their leave, or for being unfaithful in their business.
We live so little time in this world that it is no matter how wretched and miserable we are, if it prepares us for heaven.
When I was at Hartford in Connecticut, where I lived during the war, I published several pieces which were well received, not only by those of my own colour, but by a number of the white people, who thought they might do good among their servants.
You have discovered so much kindness and good will to those you thought were oppressed, and had no helper, that I am sure you will not despise what I have wrote, if you judge it will be of any service to them.
You know that murder is wicked. If you saw your master kill a man, do you suppose this would be any excuse for you, if you should commit the same crime?
A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.
A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval.
A man is never more truthful than when he acknowledges himself a liar.
A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.
A person who won't read has no advantage over one who can't read.
A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.
A round man cannot be expected to fit in a square hole right away. He must have time to modify his shape.
Action speaks louder than words but not nearly as often.
Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.
Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.
Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter.
All generalizations are false, including this one.
All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.
All you need is ignorance and confidence and the success is sure.
Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.
Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.
Apparently there is nothing that cannot happen today.
Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.
Be careless in your dress if you will, but keep a tidy soul.
Better a broken promise than none at all.
Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man. The biography of the man himself cannot be written.
By trying we can easily endure adversity. Another man's, I mean.
Cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.
Civilization is the limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.
Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get.
Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.
Deep down in me I knowed it was a lie, and He knowed it. You can't pray a lie - I found that out.
Denial ain't just a river in Egypt.
Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest.
Do the thing you fear most and the death of fear is certain.
Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.
Don't let schooling interfere with your education.
Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone, you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.
Don't say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream.
Don't tell fish stories where the people know you; but particularly, don't tell them where they know the fish.
Drag your thoughts away from your troubles... by the ears, by the heels, or any other way you can manage it.
Education consists mainly of what we have unlearned.
Everything has its limit - iron ore cannot be educated into gold.
Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.
Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable.
Familiarity breeds contempt - and children.
Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.
Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't.
Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heal that has crushed it.
George Washington, as a boy, was ignorant of the commonest accomplishments of youth. He could not even lie.
Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.
Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I've done it thousands of times.
Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.
God made the Idiot for practice, and then He made the School Board.
Going to law is losing a cow for the sake of a cat.
Golf is a good walk spoiled.
Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.
Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.
Grief can take care if itself, but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with.
Have a place for everything and keep the thing somewhere else; this is not advice, it is merely custom.
He is now rising from affluence to poverty.
He is useless on top of the ground; he ought to be under it, inspiring the cabbages.
Honesty is the best policy - when there is money in it.
Humor is mankind's greatest blessing.
I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.
I am opposed to millionaires, but it would be dangerous to offer me the position.
I can live for two months on a good compliment.
I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.
I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.
I don't like to commit myself about heaven and hell - you see, I have friends in both places.
I have been complimented many times and they always embarrass me; I always feel that they have not said enough.
I have made it a rule never to smoke more that one cigar at a time.
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
I have never taken any exercise except sleeping and resting.
I make it a rule never to smoke while I'm sleeping.
I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up.
I never let schooling interfere with my education.
I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn't know.
I've never let my school interfere with my education.
Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.
If man could be crossed with the cat, it would improve man but deteriorate the cat.
If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other way.
If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.
In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.
In the Spring, I have counted 136 different kinds of weather inside of 24 hours.
It ain't those parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.
It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.
It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native criminal class except Congress.
It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not deserve them.
It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.
It is better to take what does not belong to you than to let it lie around neglected.
It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.
It is easier to stay out than get out.
It is just like man's vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions.
It is not best that we should all think alike; it is a difference of opinion that makes horse races.
It used to take me all vacation to grow a new hide in place of the one they flogged off me during school term.
It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.
It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it.
It's good sportsmanship to not pick up lost golf balls while they are still rolling.
It's no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.
It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.
Laws control the lesser man... Right conduct controls the greater one.
Let us live so that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.
Let us make a special effort to stop communicating with each other, so we can have some conversation.
Let us not be too particular; it is better to have old secondhand diamonds than none at all.
Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.
Lord save us all from a hope tree that has lost the faculty of putting out blossoms.
Loyalty to petrified opinion never broke a chain or freed a human soul.
Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.
Loyalty to the country always. Loyalty to the government when it deserves it.
Man - a creature made at the end of the week's work when God was tired.
Man is the only animal that blushes - or needs to.
Man was made at the end of the week's work when God was tired.
Man will do many things to get himself loved, he will do all things to get himself envied.
Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.
Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.
My books are like water; those of the great geniuses are wine. (Fortunately) everybody drinks water.
My mother had a great deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed it.
Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident.
Necessity is the mother of taking chances.
Never put off till tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.
No sinner is ever saved after the first twenty minutes of a sermon.
Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she laid an asteroid.
Not until you become a stranger to yourself will you be able to make acquaintance with the Friend.
Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits.
Often it does seem a pity that Noah and his party did not miss the boat.
Once you've put one of his [Henry James] books down, you simply can't pick it up again.
One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat has only nine lives.
Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial "we."
Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet.
Part of the secret of a success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside.
Principles have no real force except when one is well-fed.
Prophesy is a good line of business, but it is full of risks.
Prosperity is the best protector of principle.
Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
Repartee is something we think of twenty-four hours too late.
Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run.
Sometimes too much to drink is barely enough.
Such is the human race, often it seems a pity that Noah... didn't miss the boat.
Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself.
The best way to cheer yourself up is to try to cheer somebody else up.
The Christian's Bible is a drug store. Its contents remain the same, but the medical practice changes.
The educated Southerner has no use for an 'R', except at the beginning of a word.
The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.
The first of April is the day we remember what we are the other 364 days of the year.
The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.
The human race is a race of cowards; and I am not only marching in that procession but carrying a banner.
The main difference between a cat and a lie is that a cat only has nine lives.
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.
The man who is a pessimist before 48 knows too much; if he is an optimist after it, he knows too little.
The Public is merely a multiplied "me."
The public is the only critic whose opinion is worth anything at all.
The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.
The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.
The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.
The secret source of humor is not joy but sorrow; there is no humor in Heaven.
The trouble ain't that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain't distributed right.
The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.
The wit knows that his place is at the tail of a procession.
There are lies, damned lies and statistics.
There are people who can do all fine and heroic things but one - keep from telling their happiness to the unhappy.
There are several good protections against temptation, but the surest is cowardice.
There are times when one would like to hang the whole human race, and finish the farce.
There is a charm about the forbidden that makes it unspeakably desirable.
There is no distinctly American criminal class - except Congress.
There is no sadder sight than a young pessimist.
Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered - either by themselves or by others.
Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is lightning that does the work.
To be good is noble; but to show others how to be good is nobler and no trouble.
To refuse awards is another way of accepting them with more noise than is normal.
To succeed in life, you need two things: ignorance and confidence.
Truth is mighty and will prevail. There is nothing wrong with this, except that it ain't so.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.
Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.
Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.
Water, taken in moderation, cannot hurt anybody.
We Americans... bear the ark of liberties of the world.
We are all alike, on the inside.
What a good thing Adam had. When he said a good thing he knew nobody had said it before.
What is the difference between a taxidermist and a tax collector? The taxidermist takes only your skin.
What would men be without women? Scarce, sir, mighty scarce.
When a person cannot deceive himself the chances are against his being able to deceive other people.
When angry, count to four; when very angry, swear.
When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it happened or not.
When in doubt tell the truth.
When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.
When your friends begin to flatter you on how young you look, it's a sure sign you're getting old.
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved.
Why shouldn't truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense.
Wit is the sudden marriage of ideas which before their union were not perceived to have any relation.
Words are only painted fire; a book is the fire itself.
Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do. Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.
Work is a necessary evil to be avoided.
Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.
You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.
Experience is what really happens to you in the long run; the truth that finally overtakes you.
Human life itself may be almost pure chaos, but the work of the artist is to take these handfuls of confusion and disparate things, things that seem to be irreconcilable, and put them together in a frame to give them some kind of shape and meaning.
I have not much interest in anyone's personal history after the tenth year, not even my own. Whatever one was going to be was all prepared before that.
I was right not to be afraid of any thief but myself, who will end by leaving me nothing.
It's a man's world, and you men can have it.
Our being is subject to all the chances of life. There are so many things we are capable of, that we could be or do. The potentialities are so great that we never, any of us, are more than one-fourth fulfilled.
Physical infidelity is the signal, the notice given, that all fidelities are undermined.
They had both noticed that a life of dissipation sometimes gave to a face the look of gaunt suffering spirituality that a life of asceticism was supposed to give and quite often did not.
You can't write about people out of textbooks, and you can't use jargon. You have to speak clearly and simply and purely in a language that a six-year-old child can understand; and yet have the meanings and the overtones of language, and the implications, that appeal to the highest intelligence.
Fear is a noose that binds until it strangles.
We learn the rope of life by untying its knots.
A pat on the back is only a few vertebrae removed from a kick in the pants, but is miles ahead in results.
All love that has not friendship for its base, is like a mansion built upon the sand.
Always continue the climb. It is possible for you to do whatever you choose, if you first get to know who you are and are willing to work with a power that is greater than ourselves to do it.
Come, cuddle your head on my shoulder, dear, your head like the golden-rod, and we will go sailing away from here to the beautiful land of Nod.
For an actress to be a success, she must have the face of Venus, the brains of a Minerva, the grace of Terpsichore, the memory of a Macaulay, the figure of Juno, and the hide of a rhinoceros.
Give us that grand word "woman" once again, and let's have done with "lady"; one's a term full of fine force, strong, beautiful, and firm, fit for the noblest use of tongue or pen; and one's a word for lackeys.
It has ever been since time began, and ever will be, till time lose breath, that love is a mood - no more - to man, and love to a woman is life or death.
Laugh, and the world laughs with you; Weep, and you weep alone; For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth, But has trouble enough of its own.
One ship drives east and other drives west by the same winds that blow. It's the set of the sails and not the gales that determines the way they go.
So many gods, so many creeds, so many paths that wind and wind while just the art of being kind is all the sad world needs.
The splendid discontent of God With chaos made the world. And from the discontent of man The worlds best progress springs.
The truest greatness lies in being kind, the truest wisdom in a happy mind.
There is no chance, no destiny, no fate, that can circumvent or hinder or control the firm resolve of a determined soul.
'Tis easy enough to be pleasant, When life flows along like a song; But the man worth while is the one who will smile when everything goes dead wrong.
When Christmas bells are swinging above the fields of snow, we hear sweet voices ringing from lands of long ago, and etched on vacant places are half-forgotten faces of friends we used to cherish, and loves we used to know.
With care, and skill, and cunning art, She parried Time's malicious dart, And kept the years at bay, Till passion entered in her heart and aged her in a day!
With every deed you are sowing a seed, though the harvest you may not see.
A single glance: a sudden dart of pain stitching her eyes before she made a sound.
Old myths, old gods, old heroes have never died. They are only sleeping at the bottom of our mind, waiting for our call. We have need for them. They represent the wisdom of our race.
Nations, like plants and human beings, grow. And if the development is thwarted they are dwarfed and overshadowed.
Upon the clothes behind the tenement, That hang like ghosts suspended from the lines, Linking each flat, but to each indifferent, Incongruous and strange the moonlight shines.
People say that a picture speaks a thousand words. With poetry, I can paint a picture, capture a moment, a smell, a scene in a handful of words.
He will therefore seek to establish for his country in the eyes of the world, such a character as shall make her not unworthy of the name of a Christian nation.
The patriot who feels himself in the service of God, who acknowledges Him in all his ways, has the promise of Almighty direction, and will find His Word in his greatest darkness.
Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps' pollution. No refuge could save the hireling and slave from the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave.
Then, in that hour of deliverance, my heart spoke. Does not such a country, and such defenders of their country, deserve a song?
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.
As charming as old people are, one doesn't want to have a 75-year-old baby. One wants to make something new.
As for political poetry, as it's usually defined, it seems there's very little good political poetry.
As I look over my work, I mean every time I look over my early work, I see, yes, I could do that then and then I could do that and that... That may be the hardest thing for a writer, at least for a poet, to tell what the identity of his work is.
As I understand the surrealist program, it was programmatically in favour of the unconscious as opposed to the conscious; programmatically in favour of chance, even programmatically in favour of a certain kind of violence and all that dream stuff.
Certainly, it seems true enough that there's a good deal of irony in the world... I mean, if you live in a world full of politicians and advertising, there's obviously a lot of deception.
I also have travelled in Africa, so there are about seven or eight stories about Africa. I've also been to China, so there are five or six stories about China, and some about Mexico. I was a little surprised after I'd completed the book to see how many took place in other countries.
I certainly have the feeling that I'm the same person even though I've changed a great deal.
I certainly think it's worth making an effort to write about certain important things, as I made an effort to write about the war.
I discovered modern poetry I think quite late, when I was 17, through an anthology, a Louis Untermeyer anthology. Of course, I was crazy about modern poetry as soon as I discovered it.
I got married, other people went off. We had sort of another public-we were our entire readership for many years, and we were very excited by each other.
I love painting and music, of course. I don't know nearly as much about them as I know about poetry. I've certainly been influenced by fiction. I was overwhelmed by War and Peace when I read it, and I didn't read it until I was in my late 20s.
I mean, there are excesses all over the place. People are always saying what are the different schools of American poetry.
I never thought of myself as a New York poet or as an American poet.
I saw a way that I could write fiction about my own experience and things that I've done and imagined. I was very interested to be writing these stories because I found that, like a certain kind of magnet, writing prose picked up details that my poetry had never been able to pick up.
I simply was ignoring the fact that The Waste Land indeed made it seem to many poets that one had to be depressed-not that The Waste Land is a bad poem, it's a wonderful poem-that one had to feel despair, that one had to think that the modern world was terrible.
I think my poetry was very influenced-it seems almost dumb to say it-but it was very influenced by Shakespeare. Very early on I read his plays... and, I don't know, I started speaking in blank verse at a rather early age.
I took a course at Harvard with Delmore Schwartz, a writing course, and there were about 30 of us... I don't really see vast movements full of wonderful poets all over the place.
I was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. My family was not nationally known as being a literary family, though my mother and my mother's side of the family in general were interested in literature.
I was excited by what my painter friends were doing, and they seemed to be interested in our poetry too, and that was a wonderful little, fizzy sort of world.
I was influenced by surrealist poetry and painting as were thousands of other people, and it seems to me to have become a part of the way I write, but it's not.
I wonder if I ever thought of an ideal reader... I guess when I was in my 20s and in New York and maybe even in my early 30s, I would write for my wife Janice... mainly for my poet friends and my wife, who was very smart about poetry.
I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.
I've had trouble with criticism, I guess. It's hard to know what role criticism plays in either encouraging poets or in getting other people to read them.
I've written fiction before... I had tried to write stories, almost true stories before, but I never had found a way to do it.
It seems everything is so full of possibilities one can hardly take it all in.
It takes a long time to publish a book.
It's a well known thing that ordinary perceptions can have a strange aspect when one is travelling.
It's enormously cheering to get a good review by someone who seems to understand your work.
It's not that I was indifferent ot the horrors of war, because that's what inspired the poem to a large extent, but I couldn't write about them.
Maybe there are three or four really good poets in a generation.
Of course, I like Byron enormously; I'm crazy about Don Juan. And of course Keats and Shelley and I suppose everyone that everyone likes.
Once I start writing about something, it goes off rather fast, and sometimes details which might be interesting such as what the room looked like or what somebody said that was not exactly on the same subject tend to get lost.
Picasso said once when being interviewed that one should not be one's own connoisseur.
Politics is there the way men and women are there, the way the Atlantic Ocean is there. Sometimes I've written about politics specifically, I mean about politics as it's understood on television and in newspapers.
Some of the French surrealists at the beginning of the war had come over to New York and they brought out this magazine. It was a big, glossy magazine full of surrealist things.
Some people who write about poetry seem to have had trouble with my poetry because it is sometimes comic. I don't think the nature of my poetry is satirical or even ironic, I think it's essentially lyrical, but again I don't know if it's my position to say what my poetry is like.
The subject matter of the stories on the surface... there seem to be a number of stories about travel.
There was a certain amount of humour in all our work... Maybe you can almost characterise the poetry of the New York School as having as one of its main subjects the fullness and richness of life and the richness of possibility and excitement and happiness.
When you finish a poem, it clicks shut like the top of a jewel box, but prose is endless. I haven't experienced an awful lot of clicking shut!
"Like architecture, poetry is an art that creates habitable structures within uninhabitable expanses through the use of repetition, proportion, and pattern. The poet, like the architect, is joyfully and painfully aware of both the provisional nature, and the complete necessity, of such habitable structures." --From an Interview in FULCRUM Magazine, 2005
All the windows of my heart I open to the day.
An ashen memory in its stead.
As a small businessperson, you have no greater leverage than the truth.
Before me, even as behind, God is, and all is well.
For all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are those 'It might have been.'
God's colors all are fast.
It is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is done.
It really costs me a lot emotionally to watch myself on-screen. I think of myself, and feel like I'm quite young, and then I look at this old man with the baggy chins and the tired eyes and the receding hairline and all that.
No longer forward nor behindI look in hope or fear;But, grateful, take the good I find,The best of now and here.
Peace hath higher tests of manhood, than battle ever knew.
Somehow not only for Christmas but all the long year through, the joy that you give to othersIs the joy that comes back to you. And the more you spend in blessing the poor and lonely and sad, the more of your heart's possessing returns to make you glad.
The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests; just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes of our hearts.
The saddest are these: 'It might have been!'
Unknown to her the rigid rule, the dull restraint, the chiding frown, the weary torture of the school, the taming of wild nature down.
You don't always win your battles, but it's good to know you fought.
A play should give you something to think about. When I see a play and understand it the first time, then I know it can't be much good.
An election is coming. Universal peace is declared and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.
And we must think no further of you.
Anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity.
Any poet, if he is to survive beyond his 25th year, must alter; he must seek new literary influences; he will have different emotions to express.
April is the cruellest month.
As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.
At twenty you have many desires which hide the truth, but beyond forty there are only real and fragile truths -your abilities and your failings.
Business today consists in persuading crowds.
Footfalls echo in the memory, down the passage which we did not take, towards the door we never opened Into the rose-garden.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm. But the harm does not interest them.
Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics.
I don't believe one grows older. I think that what happens early on in life is that at a certain age one stands still and stagnates.
I had seen birth and death but had thought they were different.
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.
I must say Bernard Shaw is greatly improved by music.
If you aren't in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?
If you desire to drain to the dregs the fullest cup of scorn and hatred that a fellow human being can pour out for you, let a young mother hear you call dear baby "it."
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.
In my beginning is my end.
It is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.
It's strange that words are so inadequate. Yet, like the asthmatic struggling for breath, so the lover must struggle for words.
Let's not be narrow, nasty, and negative.
My greatest trouble is getting the curtain up and down.
Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.
Our difficulties of the moment must always be dealt with somehow, but our permanent difficulties are difficulties of every moment.
Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.
People to whom nothing has ever happened cannot understand the unimportance of events.
Playwriting gets into your blood and you can't stop it. At least not until the producers or the public tell you to.
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.
Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.
Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.
So the lover must struggle for words.
Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.
Television is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.
The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason.
The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.
The most important thing for poets to do is to write as little as possible.
The Nobel is a ticket to one's own funeral. No one has ever done anything after he got it.
There is no method but to be very intelligent.
There is not a more repulsive spectacle than on old man who will not forsake the world, which has already forsaken him.
This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.
This love is silent.
Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.
We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion.
We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.
What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.
Where is all the knowledge we lost with information?
Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
You are the music while the music lasts.
Find your place on the planet. Dig in, and take responsibility from there.
There are those who love to get dirty and fix things. They drink coffee at dawn, beer after work. And those who stay clean, just appreciate things. At breakfast they have milk and juice at night. There are those who do both, they drink tea.
Cruelty is a part of nature, at least of human nature, but it is the one thing that seems unnatural to us.
Look how noble the world is, the lonely-flowing waters, the secret-keeping stones, the flowing sky.
The deep dark-shining Pacific leans on the land Feeling his cold strength To the outmost margins.
As though there were a tie And obligation to posterity. We get them, bear them, breed, and nurse: What has posterity done for us. That we, lest they their rights should lose, Should trust our necks to gripe of noose?
But as some muskets so contrive it As oft to miss the mark they drive at, And though well aimed at duck or plover, Bear wide, and kick their owners over.
But optics sharp it needs, I ween, To see what is not to be seen.
No man e'er felt the halter draw, With good opinion of the law.
A little kingdom I possess, where thoughts and feelings dwell; And very hard the task I find of governing it well.
Conceit spoils the finest genius. There is not much danger that real talent or goodness will be overlooked long; even if it is, the consciousness of possessing and using it well should satisfy one, and the great charm of all power is modesty.
Do the things you know, and you shall learn the truth you need to know.
Far away there in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not reach them, but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them, and try to follow where they lead.
Father asked us what was God's noblest work. Anna said men, but I said babies. Men are often bad; babies never are.
Girls are so queer you never know what they mean. They say No when they mean Yes, and drive a man out of his wits for the fun of it.
Happy is the son whose faith in his mother remains unchallenged.
Have regular hours for work and play; make each day both useful and pleasant, and prove that you understand the worth of time by employing it well. Then youth will be delightful, old age will bring few regrets, and life will become a beautiful success.
He who believes is strong; he who doubts is weak. Strong convictions precede great actions.
Housekeeping ain't no joke.
I am not afraid of storms for I am learning how to sail my ship.
I like to help women help themselves, as that is, in my opinion, the best way to settle the woman question. Whatever we can do and do well we have a right to, and I don't think any one will deny us.
It takes people a long time to learn the difference between talent and genius, especially ambitious young men and women.
It takes two flints to make a fire.
Let my name stand among those who are willing to bear ridicule and reproach for the truth's sake, and so earn some right to rejoice when the victory is won.
Life is my college. May I graduate well, and earn some honors!
Love is a great beautifier.
Money is the root of all evil, and yet it is such a useful root that we cannot get on without it any more than we can without potatoes.
Painful as it may be, a significant emotional event can be the catalyst for choosing a direction that serves us-and those around us - more effectively. Look for the learning.
People don't have fortunes left them in that style nowadays; men have to work and women to marry for money. It's a dreadfully unjust world.
She had a womanly instinct that clothes possess an influence more powerful over many than the worth of character or the magic of manners.
"Stay" is a charming word in a friend's vocabulary.
Talent isn't genius, and no amount of energy can make it so. I want to be great, or nothing. I won't be a commonplace dauber, so I don't intend to try any more.
What do girls do who haven't any mothers to help them through their troubles?
Women have been called queens for a long time, but the kingdom given them isn't worth ruling.
You have a good many little gifts and virtues, but there is no need of parading them, for conceit spoils the finest genius. There is not much danger that real talent or goodness will be overlooked long, and the great charm of all power is modesty.
A great city is that which has the greatest men and women.
A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.
After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, and so on - have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear - what remains? Nature remains.
All faults may be forgiven of him who has perfect candor.
And there is no trade or employment but the young man following it may become a hero.
And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud.
And your very flesh shall be a great poem.
Baseball will take our people out-of-doors, fill them with oxygen, give them a larger physical stoicism. Tend to relieve us from being a nervous, dyspeptic set. Repair these losses, and be a blessing to us.
Be curious, not judgmental.
Behold I do not give lectures or a little charity, When I give I give myself.
Camerado, I give you my hand, I give you my love more precious than money, I give you myself before preaching or law; Will you give me yourself?
Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.
Do you know that Old Age may come after you with equal grace, force, fascination?
Every moment of light and dark is a miracle.
Freedom - to walk free and own no superior.
Give me odorous at sunrise a garden of beautiful flowers where I can walk undisturbed.
Have you heard that it was good to gain the day? I also say it is good to fall, battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won.
Have you learned the lessons only of those who admired you, and were tender with you, and stood aside for you? Have you not learned great lessons from those who braced themselves against you, and disputed passage with you?
He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher.
Henceforth I ask not good fortune. I myself am good fortune.
Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely.
How beggarly appear arguments before a defiant deed!
I accept reality and dare not question it.
I am as bad as the worst, but, thank God, I am as good as the best.
I am for those who believe in loose delights, I share the midnight orgies of young men, I dance with the dancers and drink with the drinkers.
I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.
I cannot be awake for nothing looks to me as it did before, Or else I am awake for the first time, and all before has been a mean sleep.
I celebrate myself, and sing myself.
I celebrate myself, and what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease... observing a spear of summer grass.
I dote on myself, there is that lot of me and all so luscious.
I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones.
I have learned that to be with those I like is enough.
I heard what was said of the universe, heard it and heard it of several thousand years; it is middling well as far as it goes - but is that all?
I no doubt deserved my enemies, but I don't believe I deserved my friends.
I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences.
I say to mankind, Be not curious about God. For I, who am curious about each, am not curious about God - I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least.
I see great things in baseball. It's our game - the American game.
If any thing is sacred, the human body is sacred.
If you done it, it ain't bragging.
Judging from the main portions of the history of the world, so far, justice is always in jeopardy.
Let that which stood in front go behind, let that which was behind advance to the front, let bigots, fools, unclean persons, offer new propositions, let the old propositions be postponed.
Nothing can happen more beautiful than death.
Nothing endures but personal qualities.
Now I see the secret of making the best person: it is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.
O lands! O all so dear to me - what you are, I become part of that, whatever it is.
O public road, I say back I am not afraid to leave you, yet I love you, you express me better than I can express myself.
O the joy of the strong-brawn'd fighter, towering in the arena in perfect condition, conscious of power, thirsting to meet his opponent.
Oh while I live, to be the ruler of life, not a slave, to meet life as a powerful conqueror, and nothing exterior to me will ever take command of me.
Other lands have their vitality in a few, a class, but we have it in the bulk of our people.
Press close bare-bosomed night - press close magnetic nourishing night! Night of south winds! night of the large few stars! Still nodding night! mad naked summer night.
Produce great men, the rest follows.
Re-examine all that you have been told... dismiss that which insults your soul.
Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle.
Speech is the twin of my vision, it is unequal to measure itself, it provokes me forever, it says sarcastically, Walt you contain enough, why don't you let it out then?
The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.
The beautiful uncut hair of graves.
The beauty of independence, departure, actions that rely on themselves.
The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul.
The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book.
The genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges, or churches, or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors, but always most in the common people.
The great city is that which has the greatest man or woman: if it be a few ragged huts, it is still the greatest city in the whole world.
The shallow consider liberty a release from all law, from every constraint. The wise man sees in it, on the contrary, the potent Law of Laws.
The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.
The whole theory of the universe is directed unerringly to one single individual.
The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything.
There is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheeled universe.
There is no week nor day nor hour when tyranny may not enter upon this country, if the people lose their roughness and spirit of defiance.
There is that indescribable freshness and unconsciousness about an illiterate person that humbles and mocks the power of the noblest expressive genius.
This face is a dog's snout sniffing for garbage, snakes nest in that mouth, I hear the sibilant threat.
To die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.
To have great poets, there must be great audiences too.
To have great poets, there must be great audiences.
To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle. Every cubic inch of space is a miracle.
To me, every hour of the day and night is an unspeakably perfect miracle.
To the real artist in humanity, what are called bad manners are often the most picturesque and significant of all.
Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all.
We convince by our presence.
What a devil art thou, Poverty! How many desires - how many aspirations after goodness and truth - how many noble thoughts, loving wishes toward our fellows, beautiful imaginings thou hast crushed under thy heel, without remorse or pause!
Whatever satisfies the soul is truth.
When I give I give myself.
Wisdom is not finally tested in the schools, Wisdom cannot be pass'd from one having it to another not having it, Wisdom is of the soul, is not susceptible of proof, is its own proof.
You must not know too much or be too precise or scientific about birds and trees and flowers and watercraft; a certain free-margin, and even vagueness - ignorance, credulity - helps your enjoyment of these things.
Agriculture embraced Industry, Mammothly, on public walls. Meanwhile we camped out underneath Great smiles on billboards fading.
How shall I speak of Doom, and ours in special, But as of something altogether common?
If he could sleep on it. He would make his bed with white sheets And disappear into the white, Like a man diving, If he could be certain That the light Would not keep him awake, The light that reaches To the bottom.
Men at forty Learn to close softly The doors to rooms they will not be Coming back to.
Now comes the evening of the mind. Here are the fireflies twitching in the blood.
There is no way to ease the burden. The voyage leads on from harm to harm, A land of others and of silence.
Already old, the question Who shall die? Becomes unspoken Who is innocent?
And in a comic mood, In mid-air take to bed a wife.
But this invites the occult mind, Cancels our physics with a sneer, And spatters all we knew of denouement,Across the expedient and wicked stones.
But with exquisite breathing you smile, with satisfaction of love, And I touch you again as you tick in the silence and settle in sleep.
Flouncing your skirts, you blueness of joy, you flirt of politeness, You leap, you intelligence, essence of wheelness with silvery nose, And your platinum clocks of excitement stir like the hairs of a fern.
Give me the free and poor inheritance, Of our own kind, not furniture, Of education, or the prophet's pose, The general cause of words, the hero's stance, The ambitions incommensurable with flesh.
Haul up the flag, you mourners, Not half-mast but all the way; The funeral is done and disbanded; The devil's had the final say.
He shall eat flowers, Chew honey and spit out gall. They shall all smile, and love and pity him. His death shall be by drowning.
However others calculate the cost, To us the final aggregate is one, One with a name, one transferred to the blest; And though another stoops and takes the gun, We cannot add the second to the first.
I see slip to the curb the long machines, Out of whose warm and windowed rooms pirouette, Shellacked with silk and light, The hard legs of our women.
In the tight belly of the dead, Burrow with hungry head, And inlay maggots like a jewel.
Lastly, his tomb shall list and founder in the troughs of grass. And none shall speak his name.
Laughter and grief join hands. Always the heart Clumps in the breast with heavy stride; The face grows lined and wrinkled like a chart, The eyes bloodshot with tears and tide. Let the wind blow, for many a man shall die.
My soul is now her day, my day her night, So I lie down, and so I rise.
O hideous little bat, the size of snot, With polyhedral eye and shabby clothes.
Oh, it is I, Incredibly skinny, stooped, and neat as pie, Ignorant as dirt, erotic as an ape, Dreamy as puberty - with dirty hair!
Poetry is innocent, not wise. It does not learn from experience, because each poetic experience is unique.
Sentio ergo sum: he feels his way And words themselves stand up for him like Braille, And punch and perforate his parchment ear.
Sunday at noon through hyaline thin air, Sees down the street, And in the camera of my eye depicts, Row-houses and row-lives: Glass after glass, door after door the same.
The body, what is it, Father, but a sign To love the force that grows us, to give back What in Thy palm is senselessness and mud?
The doctor punched my vein,The captain called me Cain, Upon my belly sat the sow of fear.
The good poet sticks to his real loves, those within the realm of possibility. He never tries to hold hands with God or the human race.
The roof of England fell, Great Paris tolled her bell, And China staunched her milk and wept for bread.
There is nothing so subject to the inconstancy of fortune as war. Cervantes Every war has its own excuse. That's why they're all surrounded with ideals. That's why they're all crusades.
To girls and wives always alive and fated; To men and scholars always dead like Greek And always mistranslated.
To make the child in your own image is a capital crime, for your image is not worth repeating. The child knows this and you know it. Consequently you hate each other.
We are deranged, walking among the cops, Who sweep glass and are large and composed.
We ask for no statistics of the killed, For nothing political impinges on This single casualty, or all those gone, Missing or healing, sinking or dispersed, Hundreds of thousands counted, millions lost.
If you want to be found stand where the seeker seeks.
Music is love in search of a word.
Virtues are acquired through endeavor, which rests wholly upon yourself.
Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry.
Flight is intolerable contradiction.
However confused the scene of our life appears, however torn we may be who now do face that scene, it can be faced, and we can go on to be whole.
I hear the singing of the lives of women. They clear mystery, the offering, and pride.
I think there is choice possible to us at any moment, as long as we live. But there is no sacrifice. There is a choice, and the rest falls away. Second choice does not exist. Beware of those who talk about sacrifice.
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.
Nourish beginnings, let us nourish beginnings. Not all things are blest, but the seeds of all things are blest.The blessing is in the seed.
The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.
A habitual disuse of physical forces totally destroys the moral; and men lose at once the power of protecting themselves, and of discerning the cause of their oppression.
How could you fear a dearth? Have not mankind tho' slain by millions, millions left behind?
I sing the sweets I know, the charms I feel, my morning incense, and my evening meal, the sweets of hasty pudding.
It is because the people are citizens that they are with safety armed.
There are many advantages in their being accustomed to the use of arms, and no possible disadvantage.
My poetry, I think, has become the way of my giving out what music is within me.
A goose flies by a chart which the Royal Geographical Society could not mend.
A man may fulfill the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer, and attempting a task he cannot achieve.
A new untruth is better than an old truth.
A person is always startled when he hears himself called old for the first time.
A pun does not commonly justify a blow in return. But if a blow were given for such cause, and death ensued, the jury would be judges both of the facts and of the pun, and might, if the latter were of an aggravated character, return a verdict of justifiable homicide.
A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times.
Apology is only egotism wrong side out.
Between two groups of people who want to make inconsistent kinds of worlds, I see no remedy but force.
Beware how you take away hope from another human being.
Chicago sounds rough to the maker of verse. One comfort we have - Cincinnati sounds worse.
Death tugs at my ear and says: "Live, I am coming".
Do not be bullied out of your common sense by the specialist; two to one, he is a pedant.
Don't be "consistent" but be simple true.
Don't flatter yourself that friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable things to your intimates. The nearer you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become.
Don't you stay at home of evenings? Don you love a cushioned seat in a corner, by the fireside, with your slippers on your feet?
Even for practical purposes theory generally turns out the most important thing in the end.
Every idea is an incitement...Eloquence may set fire to reason.
Every real thought on every real subject knocks the wind out of somebody or other.
Fame usually comes to those who are thinking about something else.
Fresh air is good if you do not take too much of it; most of the achievements and pleasures of life are in bad air.
Grow we must, if we outgrow all that loves us.
Happiness consists in activity. It is running steam, not a stagnant pool.
Have the courage to act instead of react.
He has half the deed done who has made a beginning.
How many people live on the reputation of the reputation they might have made!
I don't generally feel anything until noon, then it's time for my nap.
I hate facts. I always say the chief end of man is to form general propositions - adding that no general proposition is worth a damn.
I think that, as life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived.
I won't accept anything less than the best a player's capable of doing... and he has the right to expect the best that I can do for him and the team!
If I had a formula for bypassing trouble, I would not pass it round. Trouble creates a capacity to handle it. I don't embrace trouble; that's as bad as treating it as an enemy. But I do say meet it as a friend, for you'll see a lot of it and had better be on speaking terms with it.
If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought, not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.
Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.
It is by no means certain that our individual personality is the single inhabitant of these our corporeal frames... We all do things both awake and asleep which surprise us. Perhaps we have cotenants in this house we live in.
It's faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes life worth living.
Knowledge like timber shouldn't be mush use till they are seasoned.
Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.
Life and language are alike sacred. Homicide and verbicide - that is, violent treatment of a word with fatal results to its legitimate meaning, which is its life - are alike forbidden.
Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.
Little-minded people's thoughts move in such small circles that five minutes conversation gives you an arc long enough to determine their whole curve.
Love is the master key that opens the gates of happiness.
Love prefers twilight to daylight.
Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprung up.
Many people die with their music still in them. Why is this so? Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it, time runs out.
Memories, imagination, old sentiments, and associations are more readily reached through the sense of smell than through any other channel.
Memory is a net: one that finds it full of fish when he takes it from the brook, but a dozen miles of water have run through it without sticking.
Men do not quit playing because they grow old; they grow old because they quit playing.
Old age is fifteen years older than I am.
One's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.
Our brains are seventy-year clocks. The Angel of Life winds them up once for all, then closes the case, and gives the key into the hand of the Angel of the Resurrection.
People who honestly mean to be true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try to be 'consistent'.
People who make puns are like wanton boys that put coppers on the railroad tracks. They amuse themselves and other children, but their little trick may upset a freight train of conversation for the sake of a battered witticism.
Pick my left pocket of its silver dime, but spare the right - it holds my golden time!
Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by children.
Rough work, iconoclasm, but the only way to get at truth.
Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground floor.
Several years before birth, advertise for a couple of parents belonging to long-lived families.
Simple people... are very quick to see the live facts which are going on about them.
Some people are so heavenly minded that they are no earthly good.
Speak clearly, if you speak at all; carve every word before you let it fall.
Stupidity often saves a man from going mad.
Sweet is the scene where genial friendship plays the pleasing game of interchanging praise.
The advice of the elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.
The Amen of nature is always a flower.
The books we read should be chosen with great care, that they may be, as an Egyptian king wrote over his library, "The medicines of the soul."
The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts but learning how to make facts live.
The man who is always worrying about whether or not his soul would be damned generally has a soul that isn't worth a damn.
The mind, once expanded to the dimensions of larger ideas, never returns to its original size.
The minute a phrase, becomes current, it becomes an apology for not thinking accurately to the end of the sentence.
The mode by which the inevitable comes to pass is effort.
The sound of a kiss is not so loud as that of a cannon, but its echo lasts a great deal longer.
The very aim and end of our institutions is just this: that we may think what we like and say what we think.
The world is always ready to receive talent with open arms. Very often it does not know what to do with genius.
The world's great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men.
The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions.
This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice.
Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing.
To reach a port we must sail, sometimes with the wind, and sometimes against it. But we must not drift or lie at anchor.
Truth, when not sought after, rarely comes to light.
We do not quit playing because we grow old, we grow old because we quit playing.
When in doubt, do it.
Where we love is home - home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.
Why can't somebody give us a list of things that everybody thinks and nobody says, and another list of things that everybody says and nobody thinks.
Without wearing any mask we are conscious of, we have a special face for each friend.
American poets have been criticized for anything you can think of. For being too English, recently for not being English enough.
Back then, I couldn't have left a poem a year and gone back to it.
But I'm too old to be written about as a young poet.
But most commonly, it's one poem that I work on with a lot of intensity.
Detroit was just a Levine-size town.
For sure I once thought of myself as the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion.
I have a sense that many Americans, especially those like me with European or foreign parents, feel they have to invent their families just as they have to invent themselves.
I listen to jazz about three hours a day. I love Louis Armstrong.
I realized poetry's the thing that I can do 'cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity.
I started listening to music when I wrote when I had three sons at home.
I think Coltrane at a certain point was fabulous, and then he sort of went off into wail and shmail, and you know, you can have it.
I think in the best poems I make a lot of discoveries about voice, about subject, about what my real feelings are.
I was eighteen or nineteen years old, and I'd get these genius ideas for novels and try to finish then in three or four days without going to sleep.
I was very lucky to have a mother who encouraged me to become a poet.
I write what's given me to write.
I'm afraid we live at the mercy of a power, maybe a God, without mercy. And yet we find it, as I have, from others.
I'm in a situation now, and I have been for ten or fifteen years, where there's no point in my being in a hurry.
I'm saying look, here they come, pay attention. Let your eyes transform what appears ordinary, commonplace, into what it is, a moment in time, an observed fragment of eternity.
I'm seventy-one now, so it's hard to imagine a dramatic change.
I've never known where I'm going until I've gone and come back, and then it takes me ages to see what the trip was about.
If that voice that you created that is most alive in the poem isn't carried throughout the whole poem, then I destroy where it's not there, and I reconstruct it so that that voice is the dominant voice in the poem.
In my twenties, before I learned how to write poems of work, I thought of myself as the person who would capture this world.
It would be nice to stumble onto one of those great projects so I could stay busy right through my dotage, but I'm not counting on it.
It's ironic that while I was a worker in Detroit, which I left when I was twenty six, my sense was that the thing that's going to stop me from being a poet is the fact that I'm doing this crummy work.
Let's say I live to be eighty - I'm seventy-one now - nothing I do between now and eighty is going to change the way people think about my poetry.
Meet some people who care about poetry the way you do. You'll have that readership. Keep going until you know you're doing work that's worthy. And then see what happens. That's my advice.
My father died when I was five, but I grew up in a strong family.
My father's life seemed and still seems utterly mysterious to me. He came alone to the States from Russia at age eleven.
My mother carried on and supported us; her ambition had been to write poetry and songs.
My mother worked full-time so I was largely ungoverned, free to roam the streets of Detroit from an early age and research the poems to come, a tiny Walt Whitman going among powerful, uneducated people.
My sense of a poem - my notion of how you revise - is: you get yourself into a state where what you are intensely conscious of is not why you wrote it or how you wrote it, but what you wrote.
My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.
No one can write like Vallejo and not sound like a fraud. He's just too much himself and not you.
Now I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion, but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it's the home of the extraordinary, the only home.
The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry.
There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.
Well, don't kid yourself, I got plenty of crummy poems that I think I might use.
When I started writing, I wanted to be a fiction writer. I wanted to be a novelist.
Innocence of heart and violence of feeling are necessary in any kind of superior achievement: The arts cannot exist without them.
Your work is carved out of agony as a statue is carved out of marble.
At the time, there were very few foreign names in the press and they were all factory workers. I thought I'd never get a job at a university with a foreign name.
Friends are not made, but recognized.
I fell in love with social work, and that was my undoing as a poet.
All my life I have lived and behaved very much like the sandpiper - just running down the edges of different countries and continents, 'looking for something'.
I know what I know, says the almanac.
The armored cars of dreams, contrived to let us do so many a dangerous thing.
The bight is littered with old correspondences.
The pigs stuck out their little feet and snored.
The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat.
I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.
Kids: they dance before they learn there is anything that isn't music.
As a teacher you are more or less obliged to pay the same amount of attention to everything. That can wear you down.
As an editor, I continually felt honored by the work I was doing. Putting together a journal is essentially compiling an anthology, and inviting the reader to contrast and compare, to consider the way the juxtapositions play off each other.
Clearly, once the student is no longer a student the possibilities of relationship are enlarged.
Community means people spending time together here, and I don't think there's really that.
Editing a journal is a different kind of engagement. You are free to engage yourself only with the work that first engages you, whether it's by someone by whom nobody has yet read a line, or by Adrienne Rich or Hayden Carruth.
Everyone thinks they're going to write one book of poems or one novel.
For me, editing can be frustrating, but invigorating - something I love to do. Until I was editor of The Kenyon Review, it was mostly something I did without pay, a habit I had to feed by doing other work.
From here you can still walk almost everywhere. In a reasonable amount of time you can be at the canal, in Belleville or Menilmontant, at Pere Lachaise, across the river in the 5th, or 6th. In 15 minutes on foot you're entirely elsewhere.
Given the devaluation of literature and of the study of foreign languages per se in the United States, as well as the preponderance of theory over text in graduate literature studies, creative writing programs keep literature courses populated.
Good writing gives energy, whatever it is about.
I consciously wanted to be the editor of a literary magazine, which I was on several occasions, most notably at the Kenyon Review from 1990-1994, and which is perhaps related to teaching.
I do have a degree in French literature, though living a language and writing term papers in it are different experiences!
I don't know whether a poem has be there to help to develop something. I think it's there for itself, for what the reader finds in it.
I don't think it's by accident that I was first attracted to translating two French women poets.
I first encountered Venus Khoury-Ghata's work in an anthology on which I was asked to write a reader's report in 1998. Her poems fascinated me, and I sought out more, translated one.
I have experienced healing through other writers' poetry, but there's no way I can sit down to write in the hope a poem will have healing potential. If I do, I'll write a bad poem.
I haven't been working yet with poets who are doing strictly rhymed and metered forms, of which there aren't many contemporaries, though there are some, and not negligible ones. I admire Jacques Roubaud's sonnets and Jacques Reda's rhymed and metered urban landscape poems.
I lived in the studio apartment that I bought for four years before I bought it in 1989, so I was already in it. I began living there in 1985, so I've had the same address and phone number since then.
I started to send my work to journals when I was 26, which was just a question of when I got the courage up. They were mostly journals I had been reading for the previous six or seven years.
I tend to use iambic pentameter instead of the Alexandrine, which sounds odd in English, which is more abbreviated than French anyway. It's a pleasant challenge, and it's an interesting form.
I think it's curious that there are Americans who I never see in the states because we're a million miles away from each other, like Carolyn Kizer and Sandra Gilbert, but I see them here, because when we're here we're neighbors.
I think there is something about coming to a city to work that puts you in touch with it in a different way.
I try to write everyday. I do that much better over here than when I'm teaching. I always rewrite, usually fairly close-on which is to say first draft, then put it aside for 24 hours then more drafts.
I wonder what it means about American literary culture and its transmission when I consider the number of American poets who earn their living teaching creative writing in universities. I've ended up doing that myself.
I worked at all kinds of jobs, mostly commercial editing.
I wouldn't recommend that anyone go to university at 15. It really is like giving a fifty-dollar bill to a child and turning her loose in a Godiva chocolate shop.
I'm addicted to email, but other than that, there are practical things - being able to buy a book on the internet that you can't find in your local bookshop. This could be a lifeline if you live further from the sources.
I've always had a penchant for the crown of sonnets, where one sonnet leads to another sonnet and then another, as in John Donne's The Corona.
I've been an inveterate reader of literary magazines since I was a teenager. There are always discoveries. You're sitting in your easy chair, reading; you realize you've read a story or a group of poems four times, and you know, Yes, I want to go farther with this writer.
I've been in Paris as much as I could be, which includes living here for longer stretches of time, then eventually just living here tout court.
In France, the initial entry into publication in journals depends much more upon pre-existing connections and allegiances.
In this neighborhood things have been changing fast, too fast. I can remember when the endless clothing boutiques in the rue des Francs-Bourgeois were grocery shops, bakeries, newsagents.
It is interesting to be working with poets whose work is so different from my own, and who are very different from each other.
It's one thing to have street names of something that's taking place on the corner of rue St Anne and the rue de Turenne, but another to have something French at random. The worst is when you know there's a word and you can't think of the name.
It's rather paradoxical that the major strains of contemporary French poetry move rather far from what I'm doing.
Mavis Gallant, another brilliant Canadian, is completely bilingual in her life and reading, has lived here for 52 years and always writes in English, even conducting interviews with the French press in English.
My mother was told she couldn't go to medical school because she was a woman and a Jew. So she became a teacher in the New York City public school system.
Neither Claire nor Venus would, I think, identify herself as a feminist: that word is much more easily accepted in the Anglophone world.
Of the individual poems, some are more lyric and some are more descriptive or narrative. Each poem is fixed in a moment. All those moments written or read together take on the movement and architecture of a narrative.
Paris is a wonderful city. I can't say I belong to an especially anglophone community.
Perhaps first and foremost is the challenge of taking what I find as a reader and making it into a poem that, primarily, has to be a plausible poem in English.
Praise Voltaire, there are no flags except on municipal buildings!
Roubaud writes sonnets that sound like John Donne in French - something that you read with the same kind of shock and rightness and wit that you feel when you read John Donne, of a little knife going in.
The ambiguities of language, both in terms of vocabulary and syntax, are fascinating: how important connotation is, what is lost and what is gained in the linguistic transition.
The narrative quality of Khoury-Ghata's work-narrative inflected by surrealism and by tropes from Arabic poetry - appeals to me.
The phenomenon of university creative writing programs doesn't exist in France. The whole idea is regarded as a novelty, or an oddity.
The pleasure that I take in writing gets me interested in writing a poem. It's not a statement about what I think anybody else should be doing. For me, it's an interesting tension between interior and exterior.
The pull between sound and syntax creates a kind of musical tension in the language that interests me.
There is a certain openness in American and British poetry circles that manifests itself, for example, in magazine editors' willingness to read unsolicited manuscripts by writers whose names they've never seen before.
There is a way in which all writing is connected. In a second language, for example, a workshop can liberate the students' use of the vocabulary they're acquiring.
There is something very satisfactory about being in the middle of something.
Translation is an interestingly different way to be involved both with poetry and with the language that I've found myself living in much of the time. I think the two feed each other.
Translation makes me look at how a poem is put together in a different way, without the personal investment of the poem I'm writing myself, but equally closely technically.
Various on-line discussion groups are ways to find out about books and writers that one might have remained ignorant of otherwise.
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.
When I edited Thirteenth Moon, a feminist literary magazine, I basically supported it myself with an essential grant here and there.
When you are in a university, paradoxically, it makes those intergenerational relationships between writers more problematic.
When you translate poetry in particular, you're obliged to look at how the writer with whom you're working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence.
Writers are dealing with essential issues, some are themselves HIV-positive or writing with cancer or AIDS, or as health-care givers, legal advisors, teachers, outreach workers, witnesses - I think that's a necessary integration of literary writing with what's actually going on in our world.
You are almost not free, if you are teaching a group of graduate students, to become friends with one of them. I don't mean anything erotically charged, just a friendship.
Beware of the man who rises to power from one suspender.
How shall the soul of a man be larger than the life he has lived?
Immortality is not a gift, Immortality is an achievement; And only those who strive mightily Shall possess it.
Those who first oppose a good work, seize it and make it their own, when the cornerstone is laid and memorial tablets are erected.
To put meaning in one's life may end in madness, But life without meaning is the torture Of restlessness and vague desire-It is a boat longing for the sea and yet afraid.
Young man, young man, your arm's too short to box with God.
However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it.
However, intention needn't enter in, and if a reader sees things in a religious way, and the work is dogmatically acceptable, then I don't see why it should not be interpreted in that way, as well as in others.
I do not usually revise much, though I often cut, particularly the end or toward the end of a poem.
In the past I have declined to comment on my own work: because, it seems to me, a poem is what it is; because a poem is itself a definition, and to try to redefine it is to be apt to falsify it; and because the author is the person least able to consider his work objectively.
It is always pleasant to learn that someone takes an interest in a work which one enjoyed writing.
It seems to me that readers sometimes make the genesis of a poem more mysterious than it is (by that I perhaps mean, think of it as something outside their own experience).
One tends to write beyond what's needed.
The aim of the poet, or other artist, is first to make something; and it's impossible to make something out of words and not communicate.
To change your phrase somewhat, I know that I like an art where disparate elements form an entity.
Well, if this is poetry, I'm certainly never going to write any myself.
And that is life.
But a prayer that he sends from his heart's deep core.
Just a wee cot - the crickets chirr - love and the smiling face of her.
The anger of a person who is strong, can always bide its time.
The most essential factor is persistence - the determination never to allow your energy or enthusiasm to be dampened by the discouragement that must inevitably come.
When I see a bird that walks like a duck and swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck.
When you awaken some morning and hear that somebody or other has been discovered, you can put it down as a fact that he discovered himself years ago - since that time he has been toiling, working, and striving to make himself worthy of general discovery.
Why, rain's my choice.
I prefer to explore the most intimate moments, the smaller, crystallized details we all hinge our lives on.
If only the sun-drenched celebrities are being noticed and worshiped, then our children are going to have a tough time seeing the value in the shadows, where the thinkers, probers and scientists are keeping society together.
Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.
I know a lot of men who are healthier at age fifty than they have ever been before, because a lot of their fear is gone.
It is surely a great calamity for a human being to have no obsessions.
The beginning of love is a horror of emptiness.
All that is really necessary for survival of the fittest, it seems, is an interest in life, good, bad or peculiar.
Let us go forth with fear and courage and rage to save the world.
Rosiness is not a worse windowpane than gloomy gray when viewing the world.
The word career is a divisive word. It's a word that divides the normal life from business or professional life.
You become a writer because you need to become a writer - nothing else.
No one worth possessing can be quite possessed.
And taken in exchange - my youth.
Call him wise whose actions, words, and steps are all a clear because to a clear why.
I have no riches but my thoughts. Yet these are wealth enough for me.
I make the most of all that comes and the least of all that goes.
Life has loveliness to sell, all beautiful and splendid things, blue waves whitened on a cliff, soaring fire that sways and sings, and children's faces looking up, holding wonder like a cup.
Life is a frail moth flyingCaught in the web of the years that pass.
Life is but thought.
Oh who can tell the range of joy or set the bounds of beauty?
Then, like an old-time orator impressively he rose; I make the most of all that comes and the least of all that goes.
There's nothing half so real in life as the things you've done...inexorably, unalterably done.
When I can look life in the eyes, grown calm and very coldly wise, life will have given me the truth, and taken in exchange - my youth.
A bizarre sensation pervades a relationship of pretense. No truth seems true. A simple morning's greeting and response appear loaded with innuendo and fraught with implications. Each nicety becomes more sterile and each withdrawal more permanent.
Achievement brings its own anticlimax.
All great achievements require time.
All men are prepared to accomplish the incredible if their ideals are threatened.
Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.
As far as I knew white women were never lonely, except in books. White men adored them, Black men desired them and Black women worked for them.
At fifteen life had taught me undeniably that surrender, in its place, was as honorable as resistance, especially if one had no choice.
Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean.
Children's talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives.
Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can't practice any other virtue consistently. You can practice any virtue erratically, but nothing consistently without courage.
Education helps one case cease being intimidated by strange situations.
Effective action is always unjust.
For Africa to me... is more than a glamorous fact. It is a historical truth. No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.
How important it is for us to recognize and celebrate our heroes and she-roes!
I am overwhelmed by the grace and persistence of my people.
I answer the heroic question "Death, where is they sting?" with "It is here in my heart and mind and memories."
I believe that every person is born with talent.
I believe we are still so innocent. The species are still so innocent that a person who is apt to be murdered believes that the murderer, just before he puts the final wrench on his throat, will have enough compassion to give him one sweet cup of water.
I find it interresting that the meanest life, the poorest existence, is attributed to God's will, but as human beings become more affluent, as their living standard and style begin to ascend the material scale, God descends the scale of responsibility at commensurate speed.
I love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels. Life's a bitch. You've got to go out and kick ass.
If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can totally transform a million realities.
If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can totally transform one million realities.
If we lose love and self respect for each other, this is how we finally die.
If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude. Don't complain.
If you find it in your heart to care for somebody else, you will have succeeded.
If you have only one smile in you, give it to the people you love. Don't be surly at home, then go out in the street and start grinning 'Good morning' at total strangers.
It is time for parents to teach young people early on that in diversity there is beauty and there is strength.
Life loves the liver of it.
Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told: ''I'm with you kid. Let's go.''
Most plain girls are virtuous because of the scarcity of opportunity to be otherwise.
Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.
My great hope is to laugh as much as I cry; to get my work done and try to love somebody and have the courage to accept the love in return.
My life has been one great big joke, a dance that's walked a song that's spoke, I laugh so hard I almost choke when I think about myself.
My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent than college professors.
Nature has no mercy at all. Nature says, "I'm going to snow. If you have on a bikini and no snowshoes, that's tough. I am going to snow anyway."
Nothing will work unless you do.
Of all the needs (there are none imaginary) a lonely child has, the one that must be satisfied, if there is going to be hope and a hope of wholeness, is the unshaken need for an unshakable God.
One isn't necessarily born with courage, but one is born with potential. Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can't be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.
Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.
Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible.
Self-pity in its early stages is as snug as a feather mattress. Only when it hardens does it become uncomfortable.
Since time is the one immaterial object which we cannot influence - neither speed up nor slow down, add to nor diminish - it is an imponderably valuable gift.
Some critics will write 'Maya Angelou is a natural writer' - which is right after being a natural heart surgeon.
Something made greater by ourselves and in turn that makes us greater.
The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerance. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors, and deserves respect if not enthusiastic acceptance.
The need for change bulldozed road down the center of my mind.
The quality of strength lined with tenderness is an unbeatable combination, as are intelligence and necessity when unblunted by formal education.
The sadness of the women's movement is that they don't allow the necessity of love. See, I don't personally trust any revolution where love is not allowed.
There is a very fine line between loving life and being greedy for it.
There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.
There is nothing so pitiful as a young cynic because he has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing.
There's a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure the truth.
We all should know that diversity makes for a rich tapestry, and we must understand that all the threads of the tapestry are equal in value no matter what their color.
We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone, alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders.
We may encounter many defeats but we must not be defeated.
While I know myself as a creation of God, I am also obligated to realize and remember that everyone else and everything else are also God's creation.
Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with deeper meaning.
A lively understandable spirit Once entertained you. It will come again. Be still. Wait.
By daily dying I have come to be.
Deep in their roots, all flowers keep the light.
Love begets love. This torment is my joy.
Over every mountain there is a path, although it may not be seen from the valley.
What we need is more people who specialize in the impossible.
Ah, March! we know thou art Kind-hearted, spite of ugly looks and threats, And, out of sight, art nursing April's violets!
All summer she scattered the daisy leaves; They only mocked her as they fell. She said: "The daisy but deceives; 'He loves me not,' 'he loves me will,' One story no two daisies tell. Ah foolish heart, which waits and grieves Under the daisy's mocking spell."
As soon as I began, it seemed impossible to write fast enough - I wrote faster than I would write a letter - two thousand to three thousand words in a morning, and I cannot help it.
Bee to the blossom, moth to the flame; Each to his passion; what's in a name?
But all lost things are in the angels' keeping, Love; No past is dead for us, but only sleeping, Love; The years of Heaven with all earth's little pain Make Good Together there we can begin again, In babyhood.
But great loves, to the last, have pulses red; All great loves that have ever died dropped dead.
By all these lovely tokens September days are here, With summer's best of weather And autumn's best of cheer.
For April sobs while these are so glad, April weeps while these are so gay, - Weeps like a tired child who had, Playing with flowers, lost its way.
Friend, ahoy! Farewell! farewell! Grief unto grief, joy into joy, Greeting and help the echoes tell Faint, but eternal - Friend, ahoy!
Great loves, to the last, have pulses red; All great loves that have ever died dropped dead.
I know the lands are lit,With all the autumn blaze of Goldenrod.
If I can do one hundredth part for the Indian that Mrs. Stowe did for the Negro, I will be thankful.
Love has a tide!
Motherhood is priced Of God, at price no man may dare To lessen or misunderstand.
Now and then one sees a face which has kept its smile pure and undefiled. Such a smile transfigures; such a smile, if the artful but know it, is the greatest weapon a face can have.
O May, sweet-voice one, going thus before, Forever June may pour her warm red wine Of life and passions, - sweeter days are thine!
O month when they who love must love and wed.
O suns and skies and clouds of June, And flowers of June together, Ye cannot rival for one hour October's bright blue weather.
O sweet, delusive Noon, Which the morning climbs to find, O moment sped too soon, And morning left behind.
Oh, write of me, not "Died in bitter pains," But "Emigrated to another star!"
On the king's gate the moss grew gray; The king came not. They call'd him dead; And made his eldest son, one day, Slave in his father's stead.
The goldenrod is yellow, The corn is turning brown, The trees in apple orchards With fruit are bending down.
The mighty are brought low by many a thing Too small to name. Beneath the daisy's disk Lies hid the pebble for the fatal sling.
The new is older than the old; And newest friend is oldest friend in this: That, waiting him, we longest grieved to miss One thing we sought.
There cannot be found in the animal kingdom a bat, or any other creature, so blind in its own range of circumstance and connection, as the greater majority of human beings are in the bosoms of their families.
There is nothing so skillful in its own defense as imperious pride.
Think, while thou sunnest thyself in Joy's estate, Mayhap thou canst not ripen without frost.
When love is at its best, one loves so much that he cannot forget.
When the baby dies, On every side Rose stranger's voices, hard and harsh and loud. The baby was not wrapped in any shroud. The mother made no sound. Her head was bowed That men's eyes might not see Her misery.
When Time is spent, Eternity begins.
Who longest waits most surely wins.
Who waits until the wind shall silent keep. Will never find the ready hour to sow.
Wondrous interlacement! Holding fast to threads by green and silky rings, With the dawn it spreads its white and purple wings; Generous in its bloom, and sheltering while it clings, Sturdy morning-glory.
Words are less needful to sorrow than to joy.
Wounded vanity knows when it is mortally hurt; and limps off the field, piteous, all disguises thrown away. But pride carries its banner to the last; and fast as it is driven from one field unfurls it in another.
Beauty for some provides escape, who gain a happiness in eyeing the gorgeous buttocks of the ape or Autumn sunsets exquisitely dying.
Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken winged bird that cannot fly.
Humor is laughing at what you haven't got when you ought to have it.
I swear to the Lord,I still can't see,Why Democracy means,Everybody but me.
Let the rain kiss you. Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops. Let the rain sing you a lullaby.
Like a welcome summer rain, humor may suddenly cleanse and cool the earth, the air and you.
When peoples care for you and cry for you, they can straighten out your soul.
A masterpiece... may be unwelcome but it is never dull.
A vegetable garden in the beginning looks so promising and then after all little by little it grows nothing but vegetables, nothing, nothing but vegetables.
A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears.
Americans are very friendly and very suspicious, that is what Americans are and that is what always upsets the foreigner, who deals with them, they are so friendly how can they be so suspicious they are so suspicious how can they be so friendly but they just are.
Communists are people who fancied that they had an unhappy childhood.
Considering how dangerous everything is, nothing is really very frightening.
Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.
Everybody knows if you are too careful you are so occupied in being careful that you are sure to stumble over something.
Hemingway's remarks are not literature.
I do want to get rich but I never want to do what there is to do to get rich.
I like a view but I like to sit with my back turned to it.
I've been rich and I've been poor. It's better to be rich.
If you can do it then why do it?
In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. That is what makes America what it is.
It is extraordinary that whole populations have no projects for the future, none at all. It certainly is extraordinary, but it is certainly true.
It is the soothing thing about history that it does repeat itself.
It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.
Let me listen to me and not to them.
Money is always there but the pockets change; it is not in the same pockets after a change, and that is all there is to say about money.
Silent gratitude isn't very much to anyone.
The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.
The minute you or anybody else knows what you are you are not it, you are what you or anybody else knows you are and as everything in living is made up of finding out what you are it is extraordinarily difficult really not to know what you are and yet to be that thing.
The nineteenth century believed in science but the twentieth century does not.
There ain't no answer. There ain't gonna be any answer. There never has been an answer. That's the answer.
We are always the same age inside.
What is the answer? In that case, what is the question?
When they are alone they want to be with others, and when they are with others they want to be alone. After all, human beings are like that.
A lot of the fun lies in trying to penetrate the mystery; and this is best done by saying over the lines to yourself again and again, till they pass through the stage of sounding like nonsense, and finally return to a full sense that had at first escaped notice.
Children know from a remarkably early age that things are being kept from them, that grown-ups participate in a world of mysteries.
I had a vision of my body in mid-Atlantic, hanging unsupported just about three feet above the white caps, looking as if you could pass steel hoops along it from end to end by way of demonstrating that there were no wires or hidden brackets to keep it aloft.
It doesn't seem to me strange that children should like the macabre, the sensational, and the forbidden.
Mandelstam's wife committed all his poems to memory in fear that both he and his poems would be destroyed by Stalin.
Mysteries, like the Masonic rites, are ones parents and elders are sworn not to reveal to the uninitiated, which include all children. And so we sought for signs.
Poetry operates by hints and dark suggestions. It is full of secrets and hidden formulae, like a witch's brew.
There's not a good poet I know who has not at the beck and call of his memory a vast quantity of poetry that composes his mental library.
These questions absorbed me at an age when I was supposed to be getting down the rudimentary facts of American history, which I carelessly neglected.
A strong woman is a woman determined to do something others are determined not be done.
If you want to be listened to, you should put in time listening.
It is not sex that gives the pleasure, but the lover.
Never doubt that you can change history. You already have.
A good action is never lost; it is a treasure laid up and guarded for the doer's need.
Ah, great it is to believe the dream as we stand in youth by the starry stream; but a greater thing is to fight life through and say at the end, the dream is true!
Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans upon his hoe and gazes on the ground, the emptiness of ages in his face, and on his back the burden of the world.
By a divine paradox, wherever there is one slave there are two. So in the wonderful reciprocities of being, we can never reach the higher levels until all our fellows ascend with us.
Defeat may serve as well as victory to shake the soul and let the glory out.
For all your days be prepared, and meet them ever alike. When you are the anvil, bear - when you are the hammer, strike.
He drew a circle that shut me out Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout But love and I had the wit to win; We drew a circle that took him in.
I have felt it like a glory in my heart.
It is better to rust out than wear out.
The crest and crowning of all good, life's final star, is Brotherhood.
The thing that is incredible is life itself. Why should we be here in this sun-illuminated universe? Why should there be green earth under our feet?
There is a destiny that makes us brothers; None goes his way alone; All that we send into the lives of others Comes back into our own.
We have committed the Golden Rule to memory; let us now commit it to life.
When man to man shall be friend and brother.
It is true that the poet does not directly address his neighbors; but he does address a great congress of persons who dwell at the back of his mind, a congress of all those who have taught him and whom he has admired; they constitute his ideal audience and his better self.
To this congress the poet speaks not of peculiar and personal things, but of what in himself is most common, most anonymous, most fundamental, most true of all men.
What is the opposite of two? A lonely me, a lonely you.
Every sin is the result of collaboration.
A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of.
A family is a unit composed not only of children but of men, women, an occasional animal, and the common cold.
A husband is a guy who tells you when you've got on too much lipstick and helps you with your girdle when your hips stick.
An occasional lucky guess as to what makes a wife tick is the best a man can hope for, Even then, no sooner has he learned how to cope with the tick than she tocks.
Basketball, a game which won't be fit for people until they set the basket umbilicus-high and return the giraffes to the zoo.
Candy is dandy but liquor is quicker.
Children aren't happy with nothing to ignore, and that's what parents were created for.
Commitments the voters don't know about can't hurt you.
Door: What a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of.
Happiness is having a scratch for every itch.
Here is a pen and here is a pencil, here's a typewriter, here's a stencil, here's a list of today's appointments, and all the flies in all the ointments, the daily woes that a man endures - take them, George, they're yours!
I don't mind their having a lot of money, and I don't care how they employ it, but I do think that they damn well ought to admit they enjoy it.
I think remorse ought to stop biting the consciences that feed it.
I think that I shall never see a billboard lovely as a tree. Perhaps, unless the billboards fall, I'll never see a tree at all.
I would live all my life in nonchalance and insouciance, Were it not for making a living, which is rather a nouciance.
Indoors or out, no one relaxes in March, that month of wind and taxes, the wind will presently disappear, the taxes last us all the year.
Marriage is the alliance of two people, one of whom never remembers birthdays and the other who never forgets them.
Middle age is when you've met so many people that every new person you meet reminds you of someone else.
No matter how deep and dark your pit, how dank your shroud, their heads are heroically unbloody and unbowed.
Oh, what a tangled web do parents weave when they think that their children are naive.
One man's remorse is another man's reminiscence.
Parents were invented to make children happy by giving them something to ignore.
People who have what they want are fond of telling people who haven't what they want that they really don't want it.
People who work sitting down get paid more than people who work standing up.
Professional men, they have no cares; whatever happens, they get theirs.
Progress might have been alright once, but it has gone on too long.
Remorse is a violent dyspepsia of the mind.
Sleep is perverse as human nature, Sleep is perverse as a legislature, Sleep is as forward as hives or goiters, And where it is least desired, it loiters.
The bed is a bundle of paradoxes: we go to it with reluctance, yet we quit it with regret; we make up our minds every night to leave it early, but we make up our bodies every morning to keep it late.
The cow is of the bovine ilk; one end is moo, the other milk.
The only people who should really sin are the people who can sin and grin.
The trouble with a kitten is that when it grows up, it's always a cat.
There is only one way to achieve happiness on this terrestrial ball, and that is to have either a clear conscience or none at all.
They take the paper and they read the headlines. So they've heard of unemployment and they've heard of bread-lines. And they philanthropically cure them all by getting up a costume charity ball.
To keep your marriage brimming, With love in the loving cup, Whenever you're wrong, admit it; Whenever you're right, shut up.
Too clever is dumb.
Whether elected or appointed he considers himself the Lord's anointed, and indeed the ointment lingers on him so thick you can't get your fingers on him.
Never mind. The self is the least of it. Let our scars fall in love.
The first step... shall be to lose the way.
I have died so little today, friend, forgive me.
A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man's life as in a book. Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping. Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars.
A kitten is so flexible that she is almost double; the hind parts are equivalent to another kitten with which the forepart plays. She does not discover that her tail belongs to her until you tread on it.
A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.
A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought; as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure.
A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.
Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.
All endeavor calls for the ability to tramp the last mile, shape the last plan, endure the last hours toil. The fight to the finish spirit is the one... characteristic we must posses if we are to face the future as finishers.
All this worldly wisdom was once the unamiable heresy of some wise man.
An early-morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.
Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.
As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.
As for doing good; that is one of the professions which is full. Moreover I have tried it fairly and, strange as it may seem, am satisfied that it does not agree with my constitution.
As if we could kill time without injuring eternity!
As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.
Be not simply good - be good for something.
Be true to your work, your word, and your friend.
Being is the great explainer.
Beware of all enterprises that require a new set of clothes.
Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.
Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.
Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.
Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.
Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends... Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.
Do not worry if you have built your castles in the air. They are where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
Dreams are the touchstones of our character.
Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it.
Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.
Faith keeps many doubts in her pay. If I could not doubt, I should not believe.
For what are the classics but the noblest thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old.
Friends... they cherish one another's hopes. They are kind to one another's dreams.
Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.
Goodness is the only investment that never fails.
Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.
How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?
How does it become a man to behave towards the American government today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.
How earthy old people become - moldy as the grave! Their wisdom smacks of the earth. There is no foretaste of immortality in it. They remind me of earthworms and mole crickets.
How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book! The book exists for us, perchance, that will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered.
How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
However mean your life is, meet it and live it: do not shun it and call it hard names. Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Things do not change, we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.
I am sorry to think that you do not get a man's most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness.
I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.
I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech-tree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines.
I have a great deal of company in the house, especially in the morning when nobody calls.
I have learned, that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
I have never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.
I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.
I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.
I never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude.
I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment, while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance that I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn.
I put a piece of paper under my pillow, and when I could not sleep I wrote in the dark.
I say beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.
I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.
If a man constantly aspires is he not elevated?
If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
If a man loses pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music in which he hears, however measured, or far away.
If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.
If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.
If I seem to boast more than is becoming, my excuse is that I brag for humanity rather than for myself.
If misery loves company, misery has company enough.
If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with success unexpected in common hours.
If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.
If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment.
If you give money, spend yourself with it.
If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. Men will believe what they see.
In human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood.
In the long run, men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, they had better aim at something high.
It appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature.
It is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.
It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes.
It is never too late to give up our prejudices.
It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.
It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?
It is the greatest of all advantages to enjoy no advantage at all.
It is usually the imagination that is wounded first, rather than the heart; it being much more sensitive.
It takes two to speak the truth: one to speak, and another to hear.
It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.
Law never made men a whit more just.
Live your life, do your work, then take your hat.
Make the most of your regrets; never smother your sorrow, but tend and cherish it till it comes to have a separate and integral interest. To regret deeply is to live afresh.
Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.
Men are born to succeed, not to fail.
Men have become the tools of their tools.
Money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul.
Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.
Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.
Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.
Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.
None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.
Not only must we be good, but we must also be good for something.
Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.
Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are.
Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes.
Only he is successful in his business who makes that pursuit which affords him the highest pleasure sustain him.
Only nature has a right to grieve perpetually, for she only is innocent. Soon the ice will melt, and the blackbirds sing along the river which he frequented, as pleasantly as ever. The same everlasting serenity will appear in this face of God, and we will not be sorrowful, if he is not.
Only that day dawns to which we are awake.
Our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed by them.
Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end.
Our life is frittered away by detail... simplify, simplify.
Our moments of inspiration are not lost though we have no particular poem to show for them; for those experiences have left an indelible impression, and we are ever and anon reminded of them.
Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.
Politics is the gizzard of society, full of grit and gravel, and the two political parties are its opposite halves - sometimes split into quarters - which grind on each other. Not only individuals but states have thus a confirmed dyspepsia.
Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.
Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.
Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.
Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself.
Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail.
Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.
Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.
That man is rich whose pleasures are the cheapest.
Thaw with her gentle persuasion is more powerful than Thor with his hammer. The one melts, the other breaks into pieces.
The Artist is he who detects and applies the law from observation of the works of Genius, whether of man or Nature. The Artisan is he who merely applies the rules which others have detected.
The bluebird carries the sky on his back.
The Brahmins say that in their books there are many predictions of times in which it will rain. But press those books as strongly as you can, you can not get out of them a drop of water. So you can not get out of all the books that contain the best precepts the smallest good deed.
The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.
The fibers of all things have their tension and are strained like the strings of an instrument.
The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools, but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time.
The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.
The heart is forever inexperienced.
The language of friendship is not words but meanings.
The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.
The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready.
The man who is dissatisfied with himself, what can he do?
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
The most I can do for my friend is simply be his friend.
The perception of beauty is a moral test.
The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.
The savage in man is never quite eradicated.
The squirrel that you kill in jest, dies in earnest.
The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or, perchance, a palace or temple on the earth, and, at length, the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them.
There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.
There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.
There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted.
There is no remedy for love but to love more.
There is no rule more invariable than that we are paid for our suspicions by finding what we suspect.
There is no value in life except what you choose to place upon it and no happiness in any place except what you bring to it yourself.
Things do not change; we change.
This world is but a canvas to our imagination.
Through our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of our neighbors.
Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.
To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.
To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.
To have done anything just for money is to have been truly idle.
To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any other exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object.
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.
Visit the Navy-Yard, and behold a marine, such a man as an American government can make, or such as it can make a man with its black arts - a mere shadow and reminiscence of humanity, a man laid out alive and standing, and already, as one may say, buried under arms with funeral accompaniments.
We are always paid for our suspicion by finding what we suspect.
We know but a few men, a great many coats and breeches.
We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aid, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn.
We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal, and then leap in the dark to our success.
We shall see but a little way if we require to understand what we see.
We should distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.
What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.
What is called genius is the abundance of life and health.
What is human warfare but just this; an effort to make the laws of God and nature take sides with one party.
What is once well done is done forever.
What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?
What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us.
What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.
What you get by achieving your goals is to as important as what you become by achieving your goals.
What's the use of a fine house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?
When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest.
Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.
God has been replaced, as he has all over the West, with respectability and air conditioning.
To name something is to wait for it in the place you think it will pass.
All partisan movements add to the fullness of our understanding of society as a whole. They never detract; or, in any case, one must not allow them to do so. Experience adds to experience.
Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me.
Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book, If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.
Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise.
For in the end, freedom is a personal and lonely battle; and one faces down fears of today so that those of tomorrow might be engaged.
Helped are those who create anything at all, for they shall relive the thrill of their own conception and realize a partnership in the creation of the Universe that keeps them responsible and cheerful.
How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers names.
I have learned not to worry about love; but to honor its coming with all my heart.
I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.
I think we have to own the fears that we have of each other, and then, in some practical way, some daily way, figure out how to see people differently than the way we were brought up to.
I'm always amazed that people will actually choose to sit in front of the television and just be savaged by stuff that belittles their intelligence.
In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they're still beautiful.
In search of my mother's garden, I found my own.
It is healthier, in any case, to write for the adults one's children will become than for the children one's "mature" critics often are.
It no longer bothers me that I may be constantly searching for father figures; by this time, I have found several and dearly enjoyed knowing them all.
It seems our fate to be incorrect (look where we live, for example), and in our incorrectness stand.
It's so clear that you have to cherish everyone. I think that's what I get from these older black women, that every soul is to be cherished, that every flower Is to bloom.
Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it.
Never be the only one, except, possibly, in your own home.
No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.
Nobody is as powerful as we make them out to be.
People do not wish to appear foolish; to avoid the appearance of foolishness, they are willing to remain actually fools.
Tea to the English is really a picnic indoors.
The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men.
The experience of God, or in any case the possibility of experiencing God, is innate.
The gift of loneliness is sometimes a radical vision of society or one's people that has not previously been taken into account.
The most important question in the world is, 'Why is the child crying?'
The quietly pacifist peaceful always die to make room for men who shout.
Us sing and dance, make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved. You ever notice that trees do everything to git attention we do, except walk?
Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.
Yes, Mother. I can see you are flawed. You have not hidden it. That is your greatest gift to me.
Sometimes questions are more important than answers.
I should like you to consider this letter as a resignation; I want to resign as one of your most studious and faithful admirers.
Time is the school in which we learn, time is the fire in which we burn.
A civilized man is one who will give a serious answer to a serious question. Civilization itself is a certain sane balance of values.
A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression.
A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.
And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there... Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.
Any general statement is like a check drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it.
As a bathtub lined with white porcelain, when the hot water gives out or goes tepid, so is the slow cooling of our chivalrous passion, o my much praised but-not-altogether-satisfactory lady.
But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.
Either move or be moved.
Genius... is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one.
Good art however "immoral" is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.
Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.
Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.
I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.
I could I trust starve like a gentleman. It's listed as part of the poetic training, you know.
I dunno what my 23 infantile years in America signify. I left as soon as motion was autarchic - I mean my motion.
I guess the definition of a lunatic is a man surrounded by them.
If a patron buys from an artist who needs money, the patron then makes himself equal to the artist; he is building art into the world; he creates.
If the individual, or heretic, gets hold of some essential truth, or sees some error in the system being practiced, he commits so many marginal errors himself that he is worn out before he can establish his point.
It ought to be illegal for an artist to marry. If the artist must marry let him find someone more interested in art, or his art, or the artist part of him, than in him. After which let them take tea together three times a week.
Literature is news that stays news.
Men do not understand books until they have a certain amount of life, or at any rate no man understands a deep book, until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.
Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance... poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.
No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.
Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.
One measure of a civilization, either of an age or of a single individual, is what that age or person really wishes to do. A man's hope measures his civilization. The attainability of the hope measures, or may measure, the civilization of his nation and time.
People find ideas a bore because they do not distinguish between live ones and stuffed ones on a shelf.
Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.
Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.
The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.
The real meditation is... the meditation on one's identity. Ah, voila une chose! You try it. You try finding out why you're you and not somebody else. And who in the blazes are you anyhow? Ah, voila une chose!
The worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism.
There is natural ignorance and there is artificial ignorance. I should say at the present moment the artificial ignorance is about eighty-five per cent.
There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and forty-eight.
There once was a brainy baboon who always breathed down a bassoon for he said, "It appears that in billions of years I shall certainly hit on a tune."
'Tis the white stag, Fame, we're a-hunting, bid the world's hounds come to horn!
Wars are made to make debt.
We do NOT know the past in chronological sequence. It may be convenient to lay it out anesthetized on the table with dates pasted on here and there, but what we know we know by ripples and spirals eddying out from us and from our own time.
When two men in business always agree, one of them is unnecessary.
When you cannot make up your mind which of two evenly balanced courses of action you should take - choose the bolder.
A man who lives, not by what he loves but what he hates, is a sick man.
A real writer learns from earlier writers the way a boy learns from an apple orchard-by stealing what he has a taste for and can carry off.
America is promises to take! America is promises to us to take them.
Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, there is no reason either in football or in poetry why the two should not meet in a man's life if he has the weight and cares about the words.
Democracy is never a thing done. Democracy is always something that a nation must be doing. What is necessary now is one thing and one thing only that democracy become again democracy in action, not democracy accomplished and piled up in goods and gold.
Freedom is the right to one's dignity as a man.
I think you have to deal with the confused situation that we're faced with by seizing on the glimpses and particles of life, seizing on them and holding them and trying to make a pattern of them. In other words, trying to put a world back together again out of its fragmentary moments.
It is not in the world of ideas that life is lived. Life is lived for better or worse in life, and to a man in life, his life can be no more absurd than it can be the opposite of absurd, whatever that opposite may be.
Journalism is concerned with events, poetry with feelings. Journalism is concerned with the look of the world, poetry with the feel of the world.
Journalism wishes to tell what it is that has happened everywhere as though the same things had happened for every man. Poetry wishes to say what it is like for any man to be himself in the presence of a particular occurrence as though only he were alone there.
Spring has many American faces. There are cities where it will come and go in a day and counties where it hangs around and never quite gets there. Summer is drawn blinds in Louisiana, long winds in Wyoming, shade of elms and maples in New England.
The American mood, perhaps even the American character, has changed. There are few manifestations any longer of the old American self-assurance which so irritated Dickens. Instead, there is a sense of frustration so perceptible that even our politicians have attempted to exploit it.
The business of the law is to make sense of the confusion of what we call human life - to reduce it to order but at the same time to give it possibility, scope, even dignity.
The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.
There are those who will say that the liberation of humanity, the freedom of man and mind is nothing but a dream. They are right. It is the American Dream.
There are those, I know, who will reply that the liberation of humanity, the freedom of man and mind, is nothing but a dream. They are right. It is. It is the American Dream.
To separate journalism and poetry, therefore-history and poetry-to set them up at opposite ends of the world of discourse, is to separate seeing from the feel of seeing, emotion from the acting of emotion, knowledge from the realization of knowledge.
What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice.
What is more important in a library than anything else - than everything else - is the fact that it exists.
You burned the city of London in our houses and we felt the flames.
They, that unnamed "they," they've knocked me down but I got up. I always get up-and I swear when I went down quite often I took the fall; nothing moves a mountain but itself. They, I've long ago named them me.
I didn't want to be like Yeats; I wanted to be Yeats.
And the Blue Angels are coming back to scare the local population. I remember seeing old Vietnamese women ducking under the benches in Washington Square; they thought they were back in the war.
Anyone who saw Nagasaki would suddenly realize that they'd been kept in the dark by the United States government as to what atomic bombs can do.
Before I was at Nagasaki, I was a good American boy. I was an Eagle Scout; I was the commander of a sub-chaser in the Normandy Invasion.
Don't patronize the chain bookstores. Every time I see some author scheduled to read and sign his books at a chain bookstore, I feel like telling him he's stabbing the independent bookstores in the back.
Freedom of speech is always under attack by Fascist mentality, which exists in all parts of the world, unfortunately.
I had a show at George Krevsky Gallery this past spring. That show traveled to Woodstock, New York where it showed for six weeks.
I think if there's a great depression there might be some hope.
I'd ban all automobiles from the central part of the city. You see, the automobile was just a passing fad. It's got to go. It's got to go a long way from here.
I'm reading a book about Romaine Brooks, a wonderful painter from early in the last century.
I'm still working on it. Look what it did for Pisa!
It seemed the clamor was such that this book would not be allowed by proper society. After all, Howl was a vast castigation of American consumer society.
It seems to me it's changing for the worse. The spineless Democrats are taking dictation from George II who usurped the throne and is occupying the palace illegally.
It would have been nice had we provided a nice warm stable and we were feeding them regularly - the care and feeding of poets.
It's much easier to consume the visual image than to read something.
It's the story of an American who wants to become a dictator and goes to Europe with a sidekick to interview various Fascists to find out how the Nazis and Mussolini got into power.
Many of the poets in the high poetic positions have been singularly silent or, at best, come out with a low mumble.
No, I didn't become disenchanted. I just couldn't paint like them.
No, it's much worse. That was nothing back then. President Eisenhower's reign was very stultifying; there was lots of unspoken censorship.
"Skyscraper America" extends around the world with American corporate monoculture.
Some of our greatest painters and poets are not activists at all. Like the Japanese haiku masters, or various Polish poets or Chinese poets, or 12th century mystics like Rumi or Hafiz, the great Persian poets.
The famous non-objective artists, from the New York School, for instance - Kline, De Kooning, Motherwell - were Abstract Expressionists, but they were great draftsmen; they could draw extremely well before they started painting non-objective.
The future of publishing lies with the small and medium-sized presses, because the big publishers in New York are all part of huge conglomerates.
The paintings may communicate even better because people are lazy and they can look at a painting with less effort than they can read a poem.
The real literary editors have mostly been fired. Those that remain are all "bottom line" editors; everything depends on the money.
There are hardly any left in New York City. The San Francisco Bay Area is very fortunate to still have a lot of independent bookstores.
There are skyscrapers in Sumatra, in China, in Japan, in the Middle East, in mid-Europe, in all the countries that were once under dictatorships.
There won't be any changes until we have another depression like in the 1930s, which we have not approached yet in the present recession.
These are international criminals, and the spineless Democrats are doing nothing about it.
They were looking for a stable, but we didn't have one. In fact, we weren't very stable ourselves.
Under both Bush administrations, they've reappointed at least four felons who were convicted during the Watergate years and during Iran-Contra.
We didn't really have a stable. One at a time, poets would stagger in the door, drunk or sober, high or stoned.
We have to raise the consciousness; the only way poets can change the world is to raise the consciousness of the general populace.
We were just a one-room bookstore; we didn't have any money for lawyers.
Well, I didn't know how to draw very well back then, in the '40s and '50s.
A perfect example of the new republic's urge to drape itself with the togas of classical respectability.
I don't look on poetry as closed works. I feel they're going on all the time in my head and I occasionally snip off a length.
I don't want to read what is going to slide down easily; there has to be some crunch, a certain amount of resilience.
I like poems you can tack all over with a hammer and there are no hollow places.
I write with experiences in mind, but I don't write about them, I write out of them.
Inside my empty bottle I was constructing a lighthouse while all the others were making ships.
Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.
Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket.
He thinks that Schiller and St Paul were just two Partisan Review editors.
It is better to entertain an idea than to take it home to live with you for the rest of your life.
One of the most obvious facts about grown-ups, to a child, is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child.
The Southern past, the Southern present, the Southern future became one of red clay pine barrens, of chain-gang camps, of housewives dressed in flour sacks who stare all day dully down into dirty sinks.
A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.
Art is the objectification of feeling.
Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.
But it is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.
Death is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried; it is but the first salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote, the Wild, the Watery, the Unshored.
Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.
For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!
Give me a condor's quill! Give me Vesuvius crater for an inkstand!
He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it.
He pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me round the waist, and said that henceforth we were married... Thus, then, in our hearts' honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg - a cosy, loving pair.
He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great.
How wondrous familiar is a fool!
If some books are deemed most baneful and their sale forbid, how, then, with deadlier facts, not dreams of doting men? Those whom books will hurt will not be proof against events. Events, not books, should be forbid.
In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers.
Is there some principal of nature which states that we never know the quality of what we have until it is gone?
It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.
It is not down in any map; true places never are.
Let America first praise mediocrity even, in her children, before she praises... the best excellence in the children of any other land.
Let us speak, though we show all our faults and weaknesses, - for it is a sign of strength to be weak, to know it, and out with it - not in a set way and ostentatiously, though, but incidentally and without premeditation.
Miserable man! Oh! most contemptible and worthy of all scorn; with slouched hat and guilty eye, skulking from his God; prowling among the shipping like a vile burglar hastening to cross the seas.
Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.
So man's insanity is heaven's sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.
Some dying men are the most tyrannical; and certainly, since they will shortly trouble us so little for evermore, the poor fellows ought to be indulged.
The beauty myth moves for men as a mirage; its power lies in its ever-receding nature. When the gap is closed, the lover embraces only his own disillusion.
The consciousness of being deemed dead, is next to the presumable unpleasantness of being so in reality. One feels like his own ghost unlawfully tenanting a defunct carcass.
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.
There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.
There is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself.
There is something wrong about the man who wants help. There is somewhere a deep defect, a want, in brief, a need, a crying need, somewhere about that man.
Thrusted light is worse than presented pistols.
To know how to grow old is the master work of wisdom, and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living.
To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be that have tried it.
Toil is man's allotment; toil of brain, or toil of hands, or a grief that's more than either, the grief and sin of idleness.
We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men.
Whatever fortune brings, don't be afraid of doing things.
A child too, can never grasp the fact that the same mother who cooks so well, is so concerned about his cough, and helps so kindly with his homework, in some circumstance has no more feeling than a wall of his hidden inner world.
Contempt is the weapon of the weak and a defense against one's own despised and unwanted feelings.
Don't ever dare to take your college as a matter of course - because, like democracy and freedom, many people you'll never know have broken their hearts to get it for you.
Genuine forgiveness does not deny anger but faces it head-on.
If it's very painful for you to criticize your friends - you're safe in doing it. But if you take the slightest pleasure in it, that's the time to hold your tongue.
When a woman like that whom I've seen so much, All of a sudden drops out of touch; Is always busy and never can, Spare you a moment, it means a man.
America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.
Democracy! Bah! When I hear that word I reach for my feather Boa!
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.
It isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now.
My own experience is that a certain kind of genius among students is best brought out in bed.
Nobody saves America by sniffing cocaine, jiggling your knees blankly in the rain, when it snows in your nose you catch cold in your brain.
Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.
The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does.
If we could only fathom what a unique, once-in-a-lifetime experience life is, perhaps we would pay more attention to it.
I find myself awed by nature, every time, without fail. We are nature too, despite our wild antics of civilization and technology. For better or worse, it's impossible for us to separate ourselves from it.
You can only be in one place at any time. Choose where you want to be carefully.
You will be more useful to the world if, flaws and all, you carry on with your purpose in life. The alternative is cowering in a corner like a clod of dirt, lamenting your imperfections.
He played the King as though under momentary apprehension that someone else was about to play the ace.
Ideas came with explosive immediacy, like an instant birth. Human thought is like a monstrous pendulum; it keeps swinging from one extreme to the other.
A young man's ambition is to get along in the world and make a place for himself-half your life goes that way, till you're 45 or 50. Then, if you're lucky, you make terms with life, you get released.
For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.
How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.
I don't expect you'll hear me writing any poems to the greater glory of Ronald and Nancy Reagan.
I've been to a lot of places and done a lot of things, but writing was always first. It's a kind of pain I can't do without.
Most writers are trying to find what they think or feel... not simply working from the given, but toward the given, saying the unsayable and steadily asking, "What do I really feel about this?"
Storytelling and copulation are the two chief forms of amusement in the South. They're inexpensive and easy to procure.
The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see-it is, rather, a light by which we may see-and what we see is life.
The poet is in the end probably more afraid of the dogmatist who wants to extract the message from the poem and throw the poem away than he is of the sentimentalist who says, "Oh, just let me enjoy the poem."
The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.
What is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding? It is the deepest part of autobiography.
A human being: an ingenious assembly of portable plumbing.
A man who has never made a woman angry is a failure in life.
Act like you expect to get into the end zone.
Beauty is ever to the lonely mind a shadow fleeting; she is never plain. She is a visitor who leaves behind the gift of grief, the souvenir of pain.
Big shots are only little shots who keep shooting.
Cleanliness is indeed next to godliness.
Dancing is a wonderful training for girls, it's the first way you learn to guess what a man is going to do before he does it.
God made man merely to hear some praise of what he'd done on those Five Days.
Heavy hearts, like heavy clouds in the sky, are best relieved by the letting of a little water.
High heels were invented by a woman who had been kissed on the forehead.
Humor is perhaps a sense of intellectual perspective: an awareness that some things are really important, others not; and that the two kinds are most oddly jumbled in everyday affairs.
I had a million questions to ask God: but when I met Him, they all fled my mind; and it didn't seem to matter.
If we discovered that we only had five minutes left to say all that we wanted to say, every telephone booth would be occupied by people calling other people to stammer that they loved them.
In every man's heart there is a secret nerve that answers to the vibrations of beauty.
Let me look at the foulness and ugliness of my body. Let me see myself as an ulcerous sore running with every horrible and disgusting poison.
Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it.
Lots of times you have to pretend to join a parade in which you're not really interested in order to get where you're going.
My theology, briefly, is that the universe was dictated but not signed.
New York, the nation's thyroid gland.
No man is lonely eating spaghetti; it requires so much attention.
No man is lonely while eating spaghetti; it requires so much attention.
Only the sinner has the right to preach.
People like to imagine that because all our mechanical equipment moves so much faster, that we are thinking faster, too.
Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity.
The enemies of the future are always the very nicest people.
The misfortunes hardest to bear are these which never came.
There are three ingredients in the good life: learning, earning and yearning.
There is only one rule for being a good talker - learn to listen.
There is only one success - to be able to spend your life in your own way.
We've had bad luck with our kids - they've all grown up.
When you sell a man a book you don't sell him just 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue-you sell him a whole new life.
A baby is God's opinion that life should go on.
A book is never a masterpiece: it becomes one. Genius is the talent of a dead man.
A fellow, after speaking, took his seat as though he had had a good workout and felt easier.
A man may be born, but in order to be born he must first die, and in order to die he must first awake.
After the one-hour lecture came a two-hour free-for-all of speeches from the floor-anarchists, single taxers, radical socialists, Criers for cooperative stores, for war to be outlawed by international agreement.
All human actions are equivalent... and all are on principle doomed to failure.
Anger is the most impotent of passions. It effects nothing it goes about, and hurts the one who is possessed by it more than the one against whom it is directed.
Arithmetic is where the answer is right and everything is nice and you can look out of the window and see the blue sky - or the answer is wrong and you have to start over and try again and see how it comes out this time.
At Baylor University, on the flat lands of Texas, is the largest comprehensive collection of Browningiana in the world.
At football I had my try-outs and found that after being slammed to the ground a few times I had no interest in my studies.
Back of every mistaken venture and defeat is the laughter of wisdom, if you listen.
Basketball had a fascination for me, and during the four years I never thought of quitting the game.
Calling it off comes easy enough if you haven't told the girl you are smitten with her.
Dreamers most often got the loud horse laugh or the quiet merry titter.
During my four years at Lombard I never knew of a student getting drunk.
Enclosures are from my subterranean cavern of skulls, memoranda, miscellany, monkeybusiness.
Every blunder behind us is giving a cheer for us, and only for those who were willing to fail are the dangers and splendors of life.
Every couple that kept going steady over the four years I was at college were later reported as married.
Every other day I drove my two bay horses back and forth along Brooks Street for exercise.
Every Thanksgiving and Christmas sason for four years I dressed chickens and turkeys in the basement of Sam Swanson's meat market, five cents for getting the feathers off a chicken, ten cents for a turkey.
For years the Chicago redlight district was to go on as a known and recognized business operation.
From year to year the chapel exercises, a half-hour beginning at nine, never lost interest for me.
Here is the difference between Dante, Milton, and me. They wrote about hell and never saw the place. I wrote about Chicago after looking the town over for years and years.
Home... for pancakes, eggs, and coffee from the always-smiling and cheerful mother who could hardly believe that one of her boys was going to college.
I am an idealist. I believe in everything-I am only looking for proofs.
I am an idealist. I don't know where I'm going but I'm on my way.
I am Swedish. My father and mother came from Sweden. I wondered if German, Italian, Polish upperclassmen sometimes felt a call of blood like that.
I believe fireman are mostly quiet sleepers who don't talk, cry, or moan in their sleep.
I bought a second-hand Blickensderfer typewriter for $15. When you pecked one letter you brought down a cylinder covered with the whole alphabet.
I came to see how the common people close to the earth by their day-to-day usage of words make changes in their simplest speech.
I can remember only a few of the strange and curious words now dead but living and spoken by the English people a thousand years ago.
I couldn't see myself filling some definite niche in what is called a career. This was all misty.
I decided I would go to Chicago and try my luck as a writer after those eight months as a fireman.
I doubt if you can have a truly wild party without liquor.
I feel like I'm drowning. Every night, I'm carrying home loads of things to read but I'm too exhausted. I keep clipping things and Xeroxing them and planning to read them eventually, but I just end up throwing it all away and feeling guilty.
I fell in love, not deep, but I fell several times and then fell out.
I had a feeling the name Carl would mean one more Poor Swede Boy while the name Charles filled the mouth with fun and had 'em guessing.
I had a flashlight thrown on how language can change over centuries.
I had been keeping an off eye on the advertising field, thinking I might become an idea man and a copywriter.
I had taken a course in Ethics. I read a thick textbook, heard the class discussions and came out of it saying I hadn't learned a thing I didn't know before about morals and what is right or wrong in human conduct.
I have always been respectful, even reverential, in a room where you can look a human skeleton in the eye-sockets.
I have always felt that a woman has the right to treat the subject of her age with ambiguity until, perhaps, she passes into the realm of over ninety. Then it is better she be candid with herself and with the world.
I have become infected, now that I see how beautifully a book is coming out of all this.
I have in later years taken to Euclid, Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, in an elemental way.
I have kept for years certain handwrought rusty nails that I can't throw away because of the way they say, we are of the time when man had tools but not yet machines for shaping us.
I have often wondered what it is an old building can do to you when you happen to know a little about things that went on long ago in that building.
I knew I would read all kinds of books and try to get at what it is that makes good writers good. But I made no promises that I would write books a lot of people would like to read.
I learned you can't trust the judgment of good friends.
I lingered at roadsides and wrote poems-the poems not so good but I had the lingering and that was good.
I made notes with a lead pencil, wrote letters and college papers with a stub steel pen dipped into a bottle of Waterman ink.
I make it clear why I write as I do and why other poets write as they do. After hundreds of experiments I decided to go my own way in style and see what would happen.
I met and came to respect a Vineland lawyer who later became a judge. I met another lawyer, young, lusty, gabby, who said that every weekend in summer he took this woman and that to Atlantic City for fun and a few drinks.
I never made a mistake in grammar but one in my life and as soon as I done it I seen it.
I never saw a fireman drunk on duty.
I smoked endless pipes of Scraps, the crushed and cheap but pure tobacco leaves.
I stayed away from mathematics not so much because I knew it would be hard work as because of the amount of time I knew it would take, hours spent in a field where I was not a natural.
I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes, so live not in your yesterdays, no just for tomorrow, but in the here and now. Keep moving and forget the post mortems; and remember, no one can get the jump on the future.
I took to wearing a black tie known as the Ascot, with long drooping ends. I had seen pictures of painters, sculptors, poets, wearing this style of tie.
I was a call man for the fire department. My job most often was to connect with a hydrant and with a wrench turn on the water.
I was entering the lecture field myself in a beginning way. I had put out a circular with a dignified picture and testimonials that I was worth hearing.
I was measured, pounded, squeezed, stethoscoped, given the works, and pronounced physically fit to be an officer of the United States Army.
I won't take my religion from any man who never works except with his mouth.
I wrote poems in my corner of the Brooks Street station. I sent them to two editors who rejected them right off. I read those letters of rejection years later and I agreed with those editors.
I wrote some editorials that I then considered instructive, solemn, and portentous, later seeing them as somewhat wishy-washy.
I'm an idealist. I don't know where I'm going, but I'm on my way.
I'm either going to be a writer or a bum.
I've written some poetry I don't understand myself.
If America forgets where she came from, if the people lose sight of what brought them along, if she listens to the deniers and mockers, then will begin the rot and dissolution.
If anthropology is the science dealing with man as an animal, at those meetings you could hear man as the animal who can spill and spout language.
In order to live, you have to eat, and having eaten, your sex drive sends you into begetting children, reproducing yourself.
In the crying-out-loud of that year, my two slight books made the same commotion as a child's whisper in a Kansas cyclone.
In these times you have to be an optimist to open your eyes when you awake in the morning.
In zero weather I wore a turtleneck sweater, coat, and overcoat and read and wrote lighted by a lamp.
Let the gentle bush dig its root deep and spread upward to split the boulder.
Lombard was strictly a small college, averaging 150 to 170 students.
More than one day I read a newspaper from page one on through to the back page, every story. I liked especially the murders, the robberies, the divorces, the political squabbles.
My black-bordered editorial on the death of President McKinley had a few good sentences but was stilted and perfunctory.
My main lecture was titled, The American Vagabond, which I thought sounded more attractive than just plain, Walt Whitman.
My room for books and study or for sitting and thinking about nothing in particular to see what would happen was at the end of a hall.
Nearly all the best things that came to me in life have been unexpected, unplanned by me.
Nothing happens unless first we dream.
Often I look back and see that I had been many kinds of a fool-and that I had been happy in being this or that kind of fool.
One of the greatest necessities in America is to discover creative solitude.
Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes.
Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.
Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.
Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment.
Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.
Professor Kimble could tell of women who served 50 men in a day and night and sent their earnings to children who didn't know where the money came from.
Rouged was known as a fallen woman to the ministers, as a streetwalker to the police, as a chippy to the men on the hunt.
Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work.
Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come.
The basement had windows lighting the Old Man's workshop and plenty of room for the potatoes and cabbages we raised.
The best part of my lecture was not reciting what I had written but the well-memorized lines Whitman wrote.
The girl rated as decent kept away from the powder and rouge. In public a girl's ankle and sometimes calf could be seen only when she was in a gym or swim suit.
The greatest cunning is to have none at all.
The manager of a small vaudeville theater said he would give me a tryout. I went on a second night. I stayed shy of show business. I was fuzzy-minded about it.
The Old Man was thinking of the profit that did come to him from selling the house and lot, but he couldn't have worked the way he did unless he truly enjoyed work for the sake of work itself.
The scholars and poets of an earlier time can be read only with a dictionary to help.
The sea speaks a language polite people never repeat. It is a colossal scavenger slang and has no respect.
The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring.
The United States census for 1860 counted more than 600,000 Universalists in the country.
The United States was at peace with the world. The country felt good about it. Little wars sprang up here and there in Europe, Asia, Africa, but it was none of our business.
There are 10 men in me and I do not know or understand one of them.
There have been as many varieties of socialists as there are wild birds that fly in the woods and sometimes go up and on through the clouds.
There was always the consolation that if I didn't like what I wrote I could throw it away or burn it.
Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you.
To be a good loser is to learn how to win.
Valor is a gift. Those having it never know for sure whether they have it till the test comes. And those having it in one test never know for sure if they will have it when the next test comes.
We don't have to think up a title till we get the doggone book written.
We had one Japanese student, a theolog, learning how to go back to Tokyo or Hiroshima and preach to the Nipponese that God loves everybody.
We had two grand antique professors who had been teaching at Lombard since before I was born.
We read Robert Browning's poetry. Here we needed no guidance from the professor: the poems themselves were enough.
We were very near to being Middle Class though the Old Man was still a blacksmith's helper.
When I was writing pretty poor poetry, this girl with midnight black hair told me to go on.
When no college events or odd jobs were doing, I worked Saturdays, Sundays, and evenings from about 6:30 to 10 o'clock.
Where was I going? I puzzled and wondered about it til I actually enjoyed the puzzlement and wondering.
You could mail a copy of Incidentals in an ordinary letter envelope, it was that small a book.
You remember some bedrooms you have slept in. There are bedrooms you like to remember and others you would like to forget.
I'm never going to be famous. I don't do anything, not one single thing. I used to bite my nails, but I don't even do that any more.
I don't care what is written about me so long as it isn't true.
Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.
You can't teach an old dogma new tricks.
Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.
Four be the things I'd have been better without:
Love, curiosity, freckles and doubt.
A girl's best friend is her mutter.
I require only three things of a man. He must be handsome, ruthless and stupid.
Take care of luxuries and the necessities will take care of themselves.
Salary is no object; I want only enough to keep body and soul apart.
Money cannot buy health, but I'd settle for a diamond-studded wheelchair.
The two most beautiful words in the English language are 'cheque enclosed.'
If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.
The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.
The best way to keep children home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant -- and let the air out of the tires.
Now, look, baby, 'Union' is spelled with 5 letters. It is not a four-letter word.
It serves me right for keeping all my eggs in one bastard.
All I need is room enough to lay a hat and a few friends.
Heterosexuality is not normal, it's just common.
Scratch a lover, and find a foe.
Men don't like nobility in woman. Not any men. I suppose it is because the men like to have the copyrights on nobility -- if there is going to be anything like that in a relationship.
That woman speaks eighteen languages, and can't say No in any of them.
People are more fun than anybody.
I like to have a martini,
Two at the very most.
After three I'm under the table,
after four I'm under my host.
I'd rather have a bottle in front of me, than a frontal lobotomy.
You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think.
Ducking for apples -- change one letter and it's the story of my life.
The Monte Carlo casino refused to admit me until I was properly dressed so I went and found my stockings, and then came back and lost my shirt.
Brevity is the soul of lingerie.
This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.
She runs the gamut of emotions from A to B.
The only ism Hollywood believes in is plagiarism.
If all the young ladies who attended the Yale prom were laid end to end, no one would be the least surprised.
As only New Yorkers know, if you can get through the twilight, you'll live through the night.
Misfortune, and recited misfortune especially, may be prolonged to that point where it ceases to excite pity and arouses only irritation.
Summer makes me drowsy.
Autumn makes me sing.
Winter's pretty lousy,
But I hate Spring.
Although I know it's unfair I reveal myself one mask at a time.
I think because my parents died in their early 50s, mid 50s, I always thought I would die young. And that's been both a useful thing and I suspect something that's haunted me a little bit.
I think most of our lives are made up of both things visible and things interior, with a large chunk of them being interior.
The reaction has been overwhelming, and I'm just getting used to it. I think I actually, though, could get used to it for a long time.
A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard). It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.
A New York divorce is in itself a diploma of virtue.
After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.
Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.
Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?
Habit is necessary; it is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive.
How much longer are we going to think it necessary to be ''American'' before (or in contradistinction to) being cultivated, being enlightened, being humane, and having the same intellectual discipline as other civilized countries?
I have never known a novel that was good enough to be good in spite of its being adapted to the author's political views.
I wonder, among all the tangles of this mortal coil, which one contains tighter knots to undo, and consequently suggests more tugging, and pain, and diversified elements of misery, than the marriage tie.
If we'd stop trying to be happy we could have a pretty good time.
In spite of illness, in spite even of the archenemy sorrow, one can remain alive log past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways.
Life is always a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope.
Life is the only real counselor; wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue.
Mrs. Ballinger is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet it alone.
Old age, calm, expanded, broad with the haughty breadth of the universe, old age flowing free with the delicious near-by freedom of death.
The only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of it.
There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.
True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision.
When people ask for time, it's always for time to say no. Yes has one more letter in it, but it doesn't take half as long to say.
Someone approaches to say his life is ruined and to fall down at your feet and pound his head upon the sidewalk.
A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace with his pants down. If it is a good book nothing can hurt him. If it is a bad book nothing can help him.
Beauty is whatever gives joy.
Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies. Nobody that matters, that is.
God, I can push the grass apart and lay my finger on Thy heart.
I am glad that I paid so little attention to good advice; had I abided by it I might have been saved from some of my most valuable mistakes.
I know I am but summer to your heart, and not the full four seasons of the year.
If I love you Wednesday, What is that to you? I do not love you Thursday - so much is true.
It's not true that life is one damn thing after another; it's one damn thing over and over.
My candle burns at both ends; it will not last the night; but ah, my foes, and oh, my friends - it gives a lovely light!
Not truth, but faith, it is that keeps the world alive.
Parrots, tortoises and redwoods live a longer life than men do; Men a longer life than dogs do; Dogs a longer life than love does.
Please give me some good advice in your next letter. I promise not to follow it.
Set the foot down with distrust on the crust of the world - it is thin.
Tea was such a comfort.
The longest absence is less perilous to love than the terrible trials of incessant proximity.
The soul can split the sky in two and let the face of God shine through.
We are all ruled in what we do by impulses; and these impulses are so organized that our actions in general serve for our self preservation and that of the race.
What the customer demands is last year's model, cheaper. To find out what the customer needs you have to understand what the customer is doing as well as he understands it. Then you build what he needs and you educate him to the fact that he needs it.
Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell.
He was almost there, when... Smash! Crash! Bash! He slid down and mashed into engine hash the little engine that almost could.
I know a way to stay friends forever, There's really nothing to it, I tell you what to do, And you do it.
I will not play tug o' war. I'd rather play hug o' war. Where everyone hugs instead of tugs, Where everyone giggles and rolls on the rug, Where everyone kisses, and everyone grins, and everyone cuddles, and everyone wins.
Poetry is what the heart says when the mouth can’t speak
A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.
Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.
As a life's work, I would remember everything - everything, against loss. I would go through life like a plankton net.
As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.
Eskimo: "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?" Priest: "No, not if you did not know." Eskimo: "Then why did you tell me?"
Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
It could be that our faithlessness is a cowering cowardice born of our very smallness, a massive failure of imagination... If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed.
Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you.
The mind itself is an art object. It is a Mondrian canvas onto whose homemade grids it fits its own preselected products. Our knowledge is contextual and only contextual. Ordering and invention coincide: we call their collaboration knowledge.
The surest sign of age is loneliness.
There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.
You can't test courage cautiously.
God owns heaven but He craves the earth.
In a dream you are never eighty.
It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was.
Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.
Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance.
The joy that isn't shared dies young.
The sea is mother-death and she is a mighty female, the one who wins, the one who sucks us all up.
How dare anyone, parent, schoolteacher, or merely literary critic, tell me not to act colored.
Is there something we have forgotten? Some precious thing we have lost, wandering in strange lands?
Let us keep the dance of rain our fathers kept and tread our dreams beneath the jungle sky.
Yet would we die as some have done, beating a way for the rising sun.
Art, it seems to me, should simplify finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole - so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader's consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.
Give the people a new word and they think they have a new fact.
I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.
I shall not die of a cold. I shall die of having lived.
Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.
No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person.
Only solitary men know the full joys of frienship. Others have their family; but to a solitary and an exile, his friends are everything.
Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.
Sometimes a neighbor whom we have disliked a lifetime for his arrogance and conceit lets fall a single commonplace remark that shows us another side, another man, really; a man uncertain, and puzzled, and in the dark like ourselves.
That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.
The condition every art requires is, not so much freedom from restriction, as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter.
The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.
The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one's own.
The irregular and intimate quality of things made entirely by the human hand.
The miracles of the church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.
The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.
The sun was like a great visiting presence that stimulated and took its due from all animal energy. When it flung wide its cloak and stepped down over the edge of the fields at evening, it left behind it a spent and exhausted world.
There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.
There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.
To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.
What was any art but a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself - life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.
When kindness has left people, even for a few moments, we become afraid of them as if their reason had left them. When it has left a place where we have always found it, it is like shipwreck; we drop from security into something malevolent and bottomless.
Where there is great love there are always miracles.
Where there is great love, there are always wishes.
Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen.
And I hear from the outgoing ship in the bay The song of the sailors in glee: So I think of the luminous footprints that bore The comfort o'er dark Galilee, And wait for the signal to go to the shore, To the ship that is waiting for me.
Man has the possibility of existence after death. But possibility is one thing and the realization of the possibility is quite a different thing.
Never a lip is curved with pain that can't be kissed into smiles again.
Never a tear bedims the eye that time and patience will not dry.
The only sure thing about luck is that it will change.
We begin to die as soon as we are born, and the end is linked to the beginning.
People wish to be poets more than they wish to write poetry, and that's a mistake. One should wish to celebrate more than one wishes to be celebrated.
At one point I took on a new job, and I just didn't have time to do anything but work.
Because a poem is not written while running or while answering the phone. It's written in whatever minutes one has. Sometimes you have half an hour.
Every poet I know - although there may be some I don't know who lead very different lives, who maybe live in the country and don't teach - tends to be just like the rest of us: just really busy, really overcommitted.
Everyone is so different. I sometimes wish I wrote in a different way. You know, that feeling of: So-and-so writes slowly, if only I wrote slowly.
I didn't have time to sit down and look at the work of a year and choose what to type.
I think that my work is easy to understand because I am not a thinker, I am not a... How can I put it? I write the way I perceive, I guess.
I think that there are fiction writers for whom that works well. I could never do it. I feel as if, by the time I see that it's a poem, it's almost written in my head somewhere.
I think this is true for all artists. My senses are very important to me.
I was very afraid that I wouldn't be able to do this job well. And the time never came back.
I wish I wrote more about the world at more distance from myself.
I'm not sure that the benefit - as a writer and as a citizen - that I would get from reading at least the front page of the Times every day or every other day would outweigh the depression.
I'm probably so out of it at my age that I don't know what people think.
If I wrote in a sonnet form, I would be distorting. Or if I had some great new idea for line breaks and I used it in a poem, but it's really not right for that poem, but I wanted it, that would be distorting.
It might be a bad thing, not to know what's going on in the world. I can't say I really approve of it.
Many poets write books. They'll tell you: Well, I've got my next book, but there are two poems I need to write, one about x, one about y. This is a wonder to me.
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.
My poems - I don't even like the sound of that, in a way. Not that anyone else wrote them. But we know that only people who are really close to us care about our personal experience.
So I did quit coffee and I did quit smoking. But I haven't managed that with drinking!
The amount of horror one used to hear about in one village could be quite extreme. But one might not have heard about all the other villages' horrors at the same time.
The decision for me was whether to have "The Father" be a book that told a story - from the point of view of this speaker, the daughter - without, as in the earlier books, then having a section on something else and a section on something else.
The fact that there was a lot of anger and sorrow and a sense of connection to destructive feelings in "The Father" doesn't bother me.
The older I get, the more I feel almost beautiful.
The teaching is very rewarding, and very time-consuming, and very exhausting. But it's wonderful. The community here at NYU is very precious to me.
Their spirits and their visions are embodied in their craft. And so is mine. It's not Jane Saw Puff. But the clarity of Jane Saw Puff is precious to me.
There are some fine books and essays about that. Lewis Hyde has written about alcoholism and poets and the role that society gives its writers - encouraging them to die.
This creature of the poem may assemble itself into a being with its own centrifugal force.
To me, the mind seems to be spread out in the whole body - the senses are part of the brain. I guess they're not where the thinking is done.
We're all taking on too much, we're all asking too much of ourselves. We're all wishing we could do more, and therefore just doing more.
Well, "The Wellspring" was written from 1983 to 1986. And it had a section in the beginning that was poems that began from others' experience.
Well, one thing I'm really interested in, when I'm writing, is being accurate.
When I quit all these things and said I didn't have any time, I meant I didn't have any time.
Who wants to put together something that will bear some relationship to the vision or memory or experience or story or idea or dream or whatever.
You listen to them and you're hearing a world-view, a body-view, you're hearing a spirit of a person, and mind, and heart, and soul.
A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.
Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.
All the great things have been denied and we live in an intricacy of new and local mythologies, political, economic, poetic, which are asserted with an ever-enlarging incoherence.
Civilization must be destroyed. The hairy saints of the North have earned this crumb by their complaints.
Democritus plucked his eye out because he could not look at a woman without thinking of her as a woman. If he had read a few of our novels, he would have torn himself to pieces.
Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
If some really acute observer made as much of egotism as Freud has made of sex, people would forget a good deal about sex and find the explanation for everything in egotism.
Intolerance respecting other people's religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people's art.
It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom.
Money is a kind of poetry.
Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.
Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.
One cannot spend one's time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be.
Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.
Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!
Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates. It is of the nature of that in which it is found, whether the poem, the manner of a god, the bearing of a man. It is not a dress.
The genuine artist is never "true to life." He sees what is real, but not as we are normally aware of it. We do not go storming through life like actors in a play. Art is never real life.
The imagination is man's power over nature.
The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself.
Thought is an infection. In the case of certain thoughts, it becomes an epidemic.
To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind.
Union of the weakest develops strength not wisdom. Can all men, together, avenge one of the leaves that have fallen in autumn? But the wise man avenges by building his city in snow.
What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one's meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality.
A single conversation across the table with a wise man is better than ten years mere study of books.
A thought often makes us hotter than a fire.
A torn jacket is soon mended; but hard words bruise the heart of a child.
Ah, how good it feels! The hand of an old friend.
Ah, how skillful grows the hand that obeyeth love's command! It is the heart and not the brain that to the highest doth attain, and he who followeth love's behest far excelleth all the rest.
Ah! what would the world be to us If the children were no more? We should dread the desert behind us Worse than the dark before.
All things come round to him who will but wait.
All things must change to something new, to something strange.
Ambition is so powerful a passion in the human breast, that however high we reach we are never satisfied.
And yet not turn your back upon the world.
Build today, then strong and sure, With a firm and ample base; And ascending and secure. Shall tomorrow find its place.
Critics are sentinels in the grand army of letters, stationed at the corners of newspapers and reviews, to challenge every new author.
Doubtless criticism was originally benignant, pointing out the beauties of a work rather that its defects. The passions of men have made it malignant, as a bad heart of Procreates turned the bed, the symbol of repose, into an instrument of torture.
Each morning sees some task begun, each evening sees it close; Something attempted, something done, has earned a night's repose.
Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad.
Evil is only good perverted.
Fame comes only when deserved, and then is as inevitable as destiny, for it is destiny.
For age is opportunity no less Than youth itself, though in another dress, And as the evening twilight fades away The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.
For his heart was in his work, and the heart giveth grace unto every art.
Give what you have to somebody, it may be better than you think.
He that respects himself is safe from others. He wears a coat of mail that none can pierce.
Heights by great men reached and kept were not obtained by sudden flight but, while their companions slept, they were toiling upward in the night.
However things may seem, no evil thing is success and no good thing is failure.
I feel a kind of reverence for the first books of young authors. There is so much aspiration in them, so much audacious hope and trembling fear, so much of the heart's history, that all errors and shortcomings are for a while lost sight of in the amiable self assertion of youth.
I have an affection for a great city. I feel safe in the neighborhood of man, and enjoy the sweet security of the streets.
I stay a little longer, as one stays, to cover up the embers that still burn.
If we could read the secret history of our enemies we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.
If you only knock long enough and loud enough at the gate, you are sure to wake up somebody.
If you would hit the mark, you must aim a little above it.
In this world a man must either be anvil or hammer.
Intelligence and courtesy not always are combined; Often in a wooden house a golden room we find.
Into each life some rain must fall.
It is difficult to know at what moment love begins; it is less difficult to know that it has begun.
It is foolish to pretend that one is fully recovered from a disappointed passion. Such wounds always leave a scar.
It takes less time to do a thing right, than it does to explain why you did it wrong.
Joy, temperance, and repose, slam the door on the doctor's nose.
Know how sublime a thing is to suffer and be strong.
Life is real! Life is earnest! And the grave is not its goal; dust thou art, to dust returnest, was not spoken of the soul.
Like a French poem is life; being only perfect in structure when with the masculine rhymes mingled the feminine are.
Lives of great men all remind us, we can make our lives sublime, and, departing, leave behind us, footprints on the sands of time.
Look not mournfully into the past, it comes not back again. Wisely improve the present, it is thine. Go forth to meet the shadowy future without fear and with a manly heart.
Love gives itself; it is not bought.
Love keeps the cold out better than a cloak.
Man is always more than he can know of himself; consequently, his accomplishments, time and again, will come as a surprise to him.
Method is more important than strength, when you wish to control your enemies. By dropping golden beads near a snake, a crow once managed To have a passer-by kill the snake for the beads.
Morality without religion is only a kind of dead reckoning - an endeavor to find our place on a cloudy sea by measuring the distance we have run, but without any observation of the heavenly bodies.
Most people would succeed in small things if they were not troubled with great ambitions.
Not in the clamor of the crowded street, not in the shouts and plaudits of the throng, but in ourselves, are triumph and defeat.
Not in the shouts and plaudits of the throng, but in ourselves, are triumph and defeat.
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
Only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.
People demand freedom only when they have no power.
Perseverance is a great element of success. If you only knock long enough and loud enough at the gate, you are sure to wake up somebody.
Resolve and thou art free.
Sail on ship of state, sail on, I union, strong and great! Humanity with all its fears, with all its hopes of future years, is hanging on thy fate!
Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing, only a signal shown, and a distant voice in the darkness; So on the ocean of life, we pass and speak one another, only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.
Silently one by one, in the infinite meadows of heaven, Blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels.
Simplicity in character, in manners, in style; in all things the supreme excellence is simplicity.
Sit in reverie and watch the changing color of the waves that break upon the idle seashore of the mind.
Sleep... Oh! how I loathe those little slices of death.
Something attempted, something done, Has earned a nights repose.
Sometimes we may learn more from a man's errors, than from his virtues.
Talk not of wasted affection - affection never was wasted.
That which the fountain sends forth returns again to the fountain.
The best thing one can do when it's raining is to let it rain.
The counterfeit and counterpart of Nature is reproduced in art.
The grave is but a covered bridge Leading from light to light, through a brief darkness!
The greatest firmness is the greatest mercy.
The heights by great men reached and keptWere not obtained by sudden flight,But they, while their companions sleptWere toiling upward in the night.
The love of learning, the sequestered nooks, And all the sweet serenity of books.
The mind of the scholar, if he would leave it large and liberal, should come in contact with other minds.
The morning pouring everywhere, its golden glory on the air.
The nearer the dawn the darker the night.
The rapture of pursuing is the prize the vanquished gain.
The secret anniversaries of the heart.
The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.
The strength of criticism lies in the weakness of the thing criticized.
The talent of success is nothing more than doing what you can do well, and doing well whatever you do without thought of fame. If it comes at all it will come because it is deserved, not because it is sought after.
There is nothing holier, in this life of ours, than the first consciousness of love - the first fluttering of its siken wings.
Thought takes man out of servitude, into freedom.
To be left alone, and face to face with my own crime, had been just retribution.
Trust no future, however pleasant! Let the dead past bury its dead! Act - act in the living Present! Heart within and God overhead.
We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.
When she had passed, it seemed like the ceasing of exquisite music.
Whenever nature leaves a hole in a person's mind, she generally plasters it over with a thick coat of self-conceit.
Whoever benefits his enemy with straightforward intention that man's enemies will soon fold their hands in devotion.
Would you learn the secret of the sea? Only those who brave its dangers, comprehend its mystery!
Write on your doors the saying wise and old. "Be bold!" and everywhere - "Be bold; Be not too bold!" Yet better the excess Than the defect; better the more than less sustaineth him and the steadiness of his mind beareth him out.
Yes, we must ever be friends; and of all who offer you friendship let me be ever the first, the truest, the nearest and dearest!
You know I say just what I think, and nothing more and less. I cannot say one thing and mean another.
Youth comes but once in a lifetime.
Art hurts. Art urges voyages - and it is easier to stay at home.
Be careful what you swallow. Chew!
I don't want to say that these poems have to be simple, but I want to clarify my language. I want these poems to be free. I want them to be direct without sacrificing the kinds of music, the picturemaking I've always been interested in.
I felt that I had to write. Even if I had never been published, I knew that I would go on writing, enjoying it and experiencing the challenge.
I think there are things for all of us to do as long as we're here and we're healthy.
I who have gone the gamut from an almost angry rejection of my dark skin by some of my brainwashed brothers and sisters to a surprised queenhood in the new Black sunam qualified to enter at least the kindergarten of new consciousness now... I have hopes for myself.
I've always thought of myself as a reporter.
It helped me to have somebody tell me what he thought was wrong with my work, and then bounce the analysis back and forth.
Look at what's happening in this world. Every day there's something exciting or disturbing to write about. With all that's going on, how could I stop?
The '40s and '50s were years of high poetincense; the language-flowers were thickly sweet. Those flowers whined and begged white folks to pick them, to find them lovable. Then the '60s: Independent fire!
Very early in life I became fascinated with the wonders language can achieve. And I began playing with words.
We are each other's magnitude and bond.
What I'm fighting for now in my work... for an expression relevant to all manner of blacks, poems I could take into a tavern, into the street, into the halls of a housing project.
When you love a man, he becomes more than a body. His physical limbs expand, and his outline recedes, vanishes. He is rich and sweet and right. He is part of the world, the atmosphere, the blue sky and the blue water.
A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us.
A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.
A good indignation brings out all one's powers.
A great man is always willing to be little.
A great part of courage is the courage of having done the thing before.
A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer.
A man in debt is so far a slave.
A man is usually more careful of his money than he is of his principles.
A man is what he thinks about all day long.
A man's growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends.
Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.
All diseases run into one, old age.
All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen.
All life is an experiment.
All mankind love a lover.
All sensible people are selfish, and nature is tugging at every contract to make the terms of it fair.
Always do what you are afraid to do.
America is another name for opportunity.
An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.
As a cure for worrying, work is better than whiskey.
As soon as there is life there is danger.
As we grow old, the beauty steals inward.
Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.
Be an opener of doors.
Beauty is an outward gift, which is seldom despised, except by those to whom it has been refused.
Beauty without expression is boring.
Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.
Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.
By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.
Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants, and to serve them one's self?
Cards were at first for benefits designed, sent to amuse, not to enslave the mind.
Character is higher than intellect. A great soul will be strong to live as well as think.
Children are all foreigners.
Commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred.
Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass.
Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.
Culture is one thing and varnish is another.
Curiosity is lying in wait for every secret.
Death comes to all, but great achievements build a monument which shall endure until the sun grows cold.
Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
Do the thing we fear, and death of fear is certain.
Doing well is the result of doing good. That's what capitalism is all about.
Don't be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment.
Earth laughs in flowers.
Enthusiasm is the mother of effort, and without it nothing great was ever achieved.
Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey laws too well.
Every artist was first an amateur.
Every burned book enlightens the world.
Every hero becomes a bore at last.
Every man has his own courage, and is betrayed because he seeks in himself the courage of other persons.
Every man has his own vocation, talent is the call.
Every man I meet is in some way my superior.
Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.
Every man supposes himself not to be fully understood or appreciated.
Every mind must make its choice between truth and repose. It cannot have both.
Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.
Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff.
Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence.
Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.
Fear is an instructor of great sagacity, and the herald of all revolutions.
Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.
Fine manners need the support of fine manners in others.
Flowers... are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world.
Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.
For every benefit you receive a tax is levied.
For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind.
Genius always finds itself a century too early.
Getting old is a fascination thing. The older you get, the older you want to get.
God enters by a private door into every individual.
God screens us evermore from premature ideas.
Good men must not obey the laws too well.
Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.
Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.
He builded better than he knew; the conscious stone to beauty grew.
He who is not everyday conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life.
Hitch your wagon to a star.
I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.
I hate the giving of the hand unless the whole man accompanies it.
I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.
If a man can... make a better mousetrap, the world will make a beaten path to his door.
If you would lift me up you must be on higher ground.
In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.
In skating over thin ice our safety is in our speed.
In the morning a man walks with his whole body; in the evening, only with his legs.
Intellect annuls Fate. So far as a man thinks, he is free.
It is not length of life, but depth of life.
It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.
It was high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, 'always do what you are afraid to do.'
Judge of your natural character by what you do in your dreams.
Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know.
Let every man shovel out his own snow and the whole city will be passable.
Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.
Let us be silent, that we may hear the whispers of the gods.
Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.
Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art.
Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you.
Make yourself necessary to somebody.
Manners require time, and nothing is more vulgar than haste.
Men achieve a certain greatness unawares, when working to another aim.
Men are what their mothers made them.
Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science.
Money often costs too much.
Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.
Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.
Nature hates calculators.
Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.
New York is a sucked orange.
Night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir tree.
No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character.
No great man ever complains of want of opportunity.
No man ever prayed heartily without learning something.
Nobody can bring you peace but yourself.
Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.
Our best thoughts come from others.
Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be.
Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail.
Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding.
People only see what they are prepared to see.
People that seem so glorious are all show; underneath they are like everyone else.
People with great gifts are easy to find, but symmetrical and balanced ones never.
Perpetual modernness is the measure of merit in every work of art.
Pictures must not be too picturesque.
Reality is a sliding door.
Revolutions go not backward.
Science does not know its debt to imagination.
Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.
Society is always taken by surprise at any new example of common sense.
Some books leave us free and some books make us free.
Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.
The ancestor of every action is a thought.
The believing we do something when we do nothing is the first illusion of tobacco.
The best effort of a fine person is felt after we have left their presence.
The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet.
The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.
The desire of gold is not for gold. It is for the means of freedom and benefit.
The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.
The first wealth is health.
The fox has many tricks. The hedgehog has but one. But that is the best of all.
The greatest gift is a portion of thyself.
The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.
The louder he talked of his honor the faster we counted our spoons.
The man of genius inspires us with a boundless confidence in our own powers.
The method of nature: who could ever analyze it?
The miracles of genius always rest on profound convictions which refuse to be analyzed.
The only way to have a friend is to be one.
The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war.
The revelation of thought takes men out of servitude into freedom.
The reward of a thing well done is having done it.
The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.
The sum of wisdom is that time is never lost that is devoted to work.
The value of a dollar is social, as it is created by society.
The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain.
The whole secret of the teacher's force lies in the conviction that man are convertible.
The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck.
The years teach much which the days never knew.
Then beauty is its own excuse for being.
There are no days in life so memorable as those which vibrated to some stroke of the imagination.
There is a tendency for things to right themselves.
There is creative reading as well as creative writing.
There was never a child so lovely but his mother was glad to get him to sleep.
This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.
Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.
To be great is to be misunderstood.
To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.
Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly and they will show themselves great.
Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.
Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.
Trust your instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.
Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.
Truth is the property of no individual but is the treasure of all men.
Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow.
Use what language you will, you can never say anything but what you are.
Washington, where an insignificant individual may trespass on a nation's time.
We acquire the strength we have overcome.
We aim above the mark to hit the mark.
We are always getting ready to live but never living.
We are rich only through what we give, and poor only through what we refuse.
We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.
We are wiser than we know.
We do what we must, and call it by the best names.
We find delight in the beauty and happiness of children that makes the heart too big for the body.
We gain the strength of the temptation we resist.
We must be our own before we can be another's.
What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have never been discovered.
What would be the use of immortality to a person who cannot use well a half an hour.
What you do speak so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.
When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.
When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.
When we quarrel, how we wish we had been blameless.
Who you are speaks so loudly I can't hear what you're saying.
Win as if you were used to it, lose as if you enjoyed it for a change.
Wisdom has its root in goodness, not goodness its root in wisdom.
With the past, I have nothing to do; nor with the future. I live now.
Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.
You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.
Genius might be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way.
I would be married, but I'd have no wife, I would be married to a single life.
It's possible to love a human being if you don't know them too well.
Joan of Arc had style. Jesus had style.
Sex is interesting, but it's not totally important. I mean it's not even as important (physically) as excretion. A man can go seventy years without a piece of ass, but he can die in a week without a bowel movement.
Show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually clean kitchen, and 8 times out of 9 I'll show you a man with detestable spiritual qualities.
When you write there is the sound that each word makes as it falls against another word, and there is also the sound of silence in between the words.
A word is dead when it is said, some say. I say it just begins to live that day.
A wounded deer leaps the highest.
After great pain, a formal feeling comes. The Nerves sit ceremonious, like tombs.
Anger as soon as fed is dead - 'Tis starving makes it fat.
Beauty is not caused. It is.
Behavior is what a man does, not what he thinks, feels, or believes.
Celebrity is the chastisement of merit and the punishment of talent.
Drab Habitation of Whom? Tabernacle or Tomb - or Dome of Worm - or Porch of Gnome - or some Elf's Catacomb?
Fame is a fickle food upon a shifting plate.
Find ecstasy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough.
Finite to fail, but infinite to venture.
For Love is Immortality.
Forever is composed of nows.
Fortune befriends the bold.
He ate and drank the precious Words, his Spirit grew robust; He knew no more that he was poor, nor that his frame was Dust.
His Labor is a Chant - his Idleness - a Tune - oh, for a Bee's experience of Clovers, and of Noon!
Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul - and sings the tunes without the words - and never stops at all.
How dreary - to be - somebody! How public - like a frog - to tell your name - the livelong June - to an admiring bog!
How strange that nature does not knock, and yet does not intrude!
I argue thee that love is life. And life hath immortality.
I do not like the man who squanders life for fame; give me the man who living makes a name.
I hope you love birds too. It is economical. It saves going to heaven.
If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain.
If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.
If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.
Is wholesome even for the King.
It is better to be the hammer than the anvil.
Luck is not chance, it is toil. Fortune is expensive smile is earned.
Luck is not chance, it's toil; fortune's expensive smile is earned.
Not knowing when the dawn will come I open every door.
Old age comes on suddenly, and not gradually as is thought.
People need hard times and oppression to develop psychic muscles.
Remember if you marry for beauty, thou bindest thyself all thy life for that which perchance, will neither last nor please thee one year: and when thou hast it, it will be to thee of no price at all.
Some keep the Sabbath going to Church I keep it staying at Home With a Bobolink for a Chorister And an Orchard for a Dome.
Success is counted sweetest by those who never succeed.
Surgeons must be very careful. When they take the knife!, underneath their fine incisions, stirs the Culprit - Life!
Tell the truth, but tell it slant.
The possible's slow fuse is lit, by the Imagination.
The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.
There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry.
They might not need me; but they might. I'll let my head be just in sight; a smile as small as mine might be precisely their necessity.
They say that God is everywhere, and yet we always think of Him as somewhat of a recluse.
'Tis so much joy! 'Tis so much joy! If I should fail, what poverty! And yet, as poor as I Have ventured all upon a throw; Have gained! Yes! Hesitated so this side the victory!
To fight aloud is very brave, but gallanter, I know, who charge within the bosom, the Cavalry of Woe.
To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.
To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, One clover, and a bee, And revery. The revery alone will do, If bees are few.
To whom the mornings are like nights, What must the midnights be!
Truth is so rare that it is delightful to tell it.
Whenever a thing is done for the first time, it releases a little demon.
Where thou art, that is home.
Without suspecting our abode until we drive away.
As long as habit and routine dictate the pattern of living, new dimensions of the soul will not emerge.
Be glad of life because it gives you the chance to love and to work and to play and to look up at the stars.
Be glad of life because it gives you the chance to love, to work, to play, and to look up at the stars.
Half of the secular unrest and dismal, profane sadness of modern society comes from the vain ideas that every man is bound to be a critic for life.
He that planteth a tree is a servant of God, he provideth a kindness for many generations, and faces that he haith not seen shall bless him.
I thank God for the honesty and virility of Jesus religion which makes us face the facts and calls us to take a man's part in the real battle of life.
In the progress of personality, first comes a declaration of independence, then a recognition of interdependence.
Look around for a place to sow a few seeds.
Some people are so afraid do die that they never begin to live.
The first day of spring is one thing, and the first spring day is another. The difference between them is sometimes as great as a month.
There is a loftier ambition than merely to stand high in the world. It is to stoop down and lift mankind a little higher.
There is no personal charm so great as the charm of a cheerful temperament.
There is only one way to get ready for immortality, and that is to love this life and live it as bravely and faithfully and cheerfully as we can.
Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is eternity.
To desire and strive to be of some service to the world, to aim at doing something which shall really increase the happiness and welfare and virtue of mankind - this is a choice which is possible for all of us; and surely it is a good haven to sail for.
Use what talent you possess - the woods would be very silent if no birds sang except those that sang best.
When once you have tasted flight you will always walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward: for there you have been and there you will always be.
I remember how being young and black and gay and lonely felt. A lot of it was fine, feeling I had the truth and the light and the key, but a lot of it was purely hell.
If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.
There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.
Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
I am never going to write for the sake of writing.
I am perfectly conscious that this contempt and hatred underlies the general tone of the community towards us, and yet when I even remotely hint at the fact that we are not a favorite people I am accused of stirring up strife and setting barriers between the two sects.
In Heine the Jew there is a depth of human sympathy, a mystic warmth and glow of imagination... an indomitable resistance to every species of bondage.
Jews are the intensive form of any nationality whose language and customs they adopt.
Life's sharpest rapture is surcease of pain.
My own curiosity and interest are insatiable.
The particular article ought in my opinion to be treated with absolute contempt. It is too vile to touch.
To refer to the Sun article. It seems to me so coarse and vulgar that it deserves no reply from any self-respecting Jew.
Until we are all free, we are none of us free.
We who are prosperous and independent have not sufficient homogeneity to champion on the ground of a common creed, common stock, a common history, a common heritage of misfortune, the rights of the lowest and poorest Jew-peddler who flees, for life and liberty of thought, from Slavonic mobs.
Nothing in man is more serious than his sense of humor; it is the sign that he wants all the truth.
The art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery.
The job of the poet is to render the world - to see it and report it without loss, without perversion. No poet ever talks about feelings. Only sentimental people do.
When it aims to express a love of the world it refuses to conceal the many reasons why the world is hard to love, though we must love it because we have no other, and to fail to love it is not to exist at all.
Beneath all differences of doctrine or discipline there exists a fundamental agreement as to the simple, absolute essentials in religion.
Boston is an oasis in the desert, a place where the larger proportion of people are loving, rational and happy.
Chev receives a great deal of attention... I do not like that the pretty women should pay him so many compliments... it will turn his little head!
Every wave as it dashed upon the shore seemed to tell a tale of days that will return no more.
For the first time I saw a true picture of the neglected children of the poor-pale and wan, and I saw that among the wretched even childhood is shorn of its beauty.
From you dear husband, I would have no secrets. You have made me feel that you could not take much interest in my spiritual experience.
God forgive me if I do wrong in following with ardor the strongest instincts of my nature.
God will help me! I am so tired!
Good ladies make good stewardesses.
Had I wanted to see something of society, it seemed hardly fair that I should never give myself an opportunity of judging and being judged by it.
He has been in a very dangerous state, very near insanity, and if I have done my best for him and my children for staying here, you will neither regret nor complain of it.
Heaven knows what I have not been through with, since I saw you-dust, dirt, dyspepsia, hotels, railroads, prairies, tobacco juice.
His true devotion has won me from the world and from myself. I am the captive of his bow and spear.
Hope died as I was led unto my marriage bed.
How utterly are one's best thoughts invaded by this going out in society.
I am able to think, to study and to pray, things which I cannot accomplish when my brain is oppressed.
I am confirmed in my division of human energies. Ambitious people climb, but faithful people build.
I am forced to make myself an imaginary public, and to tell it the secrets of my poor little ridiculous brain.
I am intent mainly upon holding on to the ropes, and upon getting through the present without too much consciousness of it.
I am sad and spleeny, and begin to have fears that I may not be after all the greatest woman alive.
I am too lonely, too helpless, too orphaned to be deserted by you, my brother.
I am trying to translate The Cat and the Fiddle into Greek!
I arrived at Green Peace. Two children whom I should not have recognized as mine ran out to meet me.
I believe I shall live to see women in New York and some of the other states enfranchised, but not in Massachusetts.
I do not think that I shall ever consider music as a serious occupation instead of a recreation.
I esteem this century, now at its close, to have deserved a record among those which have been great landmarks in human history.
I feel much excited, quite unsettled, sometimes a little frantic.
I find society most uninteresting after that of Rome-my books are now the only things for me.
I firmly resolved when I married you, to admit no thought, to cultivate no taste, in which you could not sympathize. You must know that my heart has been very loyal.
I had formerly seen Boston as a petted visitor from another city would be apt to see it. I was now to make acquaintance with the Boston of the teachers, of the reformers, of the cranks, and also-of the apostles.
I had rather go to a party than stay at home.
I had rather go to a theater than a party.
I had rather hear Theodore Parker than go to the theater.
I have been leading a very lonely and unsympathetic life ever since I came from Newport.
I have been singing and writing poetry, so you may know that I have been happy, alas, am I not a selfish creature to prize these enjoyments as I do.
I have just heard the greatest thing I shall ever hear!
I hope to get through the winter without any more serious evil than the loss of time, and the ruin of ball dresses.
I know not why there is such a melancholy feeling attached to the remembrance of past happiness, except that we fear that the future can have nothing so bright as the past.
I live in a place in which I have few social relations, and all too recent to be intimate.
I need to be practically reminded that Love is the Religion of Life.
I never could be good when I was not happy.
I remember one dinner for which I had relied upon a form of ice as the principal feature of the dessert.
I rush into your presence with all the madness of a disordered mind-it is your fault, yours.
I shall stick to my resolution of writing always what I think no matter whom it offends.
I should like to find out how Joshua contrived to make the sun stand still.
I sometimes suspect him of having relations with another woman, and regret more bitterly the sacrifice which entailed upon me these months of fatigue and suffering.
I sometimes think God allows Great Britain to be unprincipled for the good of mankind.
I take refuge in my books.
I threw away, once and forever, the thought of the terrible hell which till then had always formed a part of my belief.
I turned against my New Testament and said, I know you all by heart!
I walked on the beach yesterday at sunset. It was beautiful and awakened many pleasing associations of former days.
I was born 'neath a clouded star.
I was the first bridesmaid! Pearls, diamonds, silks, satins and laces!
It has been strange to me to return to life and to feel that I have any sympathy with human beings, after the long interval of quiet and indifference which succeeded my marriage.
It is better not to entertain at all, than to entertain badly.
It was a splendid tribute.
Life is so short, and friendship so precious!
Marriage, like death, is a debt we owe to nature.
Massachusetts women as a rule adhere too strongly to old-time conventions.
My book came out on Friday last. The title simply, Passion Flowers, was approved by Longfellow.
My children are babies and my husband has scarcely half an hour in 24 to give me.
My husband was himself averse to public appearances.
My little corner is so green and pretty, so quiet and hidden from all.
New England spunk seems to be pretty well up.
One might think that the genius of this age must have uttered a like injunction.
Seating myself at the piano, I made it ring out the Marseillaise with a will.
That which I have seen in Rome and even in England leads me to believe that men have strangely mistaken the spirit in their zeal for the letter of Christianity.
The beaux are all gone, so that we are quite deserted.
The blind must not only be fed and housed and cared for; they must learn to make thir lives useful to the community.
The city seems to contain scarce anything but artists, priests and beggars. I have seen the Pope three times, he looked like an old woman dressed up very finely.
The desolate hush which fell upon our house... silent and cold, in the midst of weeping friends and children.
The doctor dismounted, and presently came to make our acquaintance. Dr. Howe made upon us an impression of unusual force and reserve.
The false romance of the time made a tyrant to a childish imagination of the best and kindest of parents.
The frozen ocean... of Boston life.
The longer I live, the more do I feel my childlike helplessness about all practical affairs.
The planed floor was smooth as glass-the music heavenly-the supper superb-we danced till two.
The Society of Good People is always Good Society.
The widowed daughter of our host lost heavily by the failure of certain American securities. The tea to which we had been bidden was simply a cup of tea, served without a table.
Theology in general seems to me a substitution of human ingenuity for divine wisdom.
These three years of married life have wiped out, as with a sponge, all living memory of the past-I have gone with you to a new world. I will not expect too much from you.
Uncle John was right about me, when he said I ought not to marry.
We are fulfilling the destiny of women, we are learning to live for others more than for ourselves.
We are getting up the Crochet Party, which is to meet once a fortnight for crochet and fun.
We bore the harassing conversation as long as we could.
We have acted more wisely than we would have done in marking out any eccentric course of our own and adhering to it.
We must help our fellow man against the most cruel beast of all, the human tiger.
When the ship rolled and I felt myself going, I generally made for the stoutest man in sight and pitched into him... little of the old mischief left, you see.
When the unwelcome little unborn shall have seen the light my brain will be lightened, and I shall have a clearer mind. Thank God that even this weary nine months shall come to an end and leave me in possession of my own body and my own soul.
While I am employed with frictions my husband is dealing with facts, but as we both seek truth which lies beyond either, we do not get so very far apart as you would think.
While your life is the true expression of your faith, whom can you fear?
Women speakers were few in those days, and were frowned upon by general society.
It's the light of the oncoming train.
The light at the end of the tunnel is just the light of an oncoming train.
Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't.
Ambivalence is a wonderful tune to dance to. It has a rhythm all its own.
And the trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more.
Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it's cracked up to be. That's why people are so cynical about it. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don't risk everything, you risk even more.
Every country gets the circus it deserves. Spain gets bullfights. Italy gets the Catholic Church. America gets Hollywood.
Everyone has a talent, what is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads.
Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow that talent to the dark place where it leads.
Fame means millions of people have the wrong idea of who you are.
Gossip is the opiate of the oppressed.
Growing up female in America. What a liability! You grew up with your ears full of cosmetic ads, love songs, advice columns, whoreoscopes, Hollywood gossip, and moral dilemmas on the level of TV soap operas. What litanies the advertisers of the good life chanted at you! What curious catechisms!
He who can take advice is sometimes superior to him who can give it.
I have accepted fear as a part of life - specifically the fear of change... I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says: turn back.
I have not ceased being fearful, but I have ceased to let fear control me. I have accepted fear as part of life specifically fear of change and fear of the unknown;and I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says, turn back, turn back,you'll die if you venture too far.
I write lustily and humorously. It isn't calculated; it's the way I think. I've invented a writing style that expresses who I am.
If sex and creativity are often seen by dictators as subversive activities, it's because they lead to the knowledge that you own your own body (and with it your own voice), and that's the most revolutionary insight of all.
If you don't risk anything, you risk even more.
In a bad marriage, friends are the invisible glue. If we have enough friends, we may go on for years, intending to leave, talking about leaving - instead of actually getting up and leaving.
It is the city of mirrors, the city of mirages, at once solid and liquid, at once air and stone.
Jealousy is all the fun you think they had.
Men and women, women and men. It will never work.
Men have always detested women's gossip because they suspect the truth: their measurements are being taken and compared.
Show me a woman who doesn't feel guilty and I'll show you a man.
Singularity shows something wrong in the mind.
Solitude is un-American.
Take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame.
The stones themselves are thick with history, and those cats that dash through the alleyways must surely be the ghosts of the famous dead in feline disguise.
The trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more.
Women are the only exploited group in history to have been idealized into powerlessness.
You see a lot of smart guys with dumb women, but you hardly ever see a smart woman with a dumb guy.
You take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame.
Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.
I am not bound for any public place, but for ground of my own where I have planted vines and orchard trees, and in the heat of the day climbed up into the healing shadow of the woods.
I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief... For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.
The past is our definition. We may strive, with good reason, to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it, but we will escape it only by adding something better to it.
To cherish what remains of the Earth and to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope of survival.
We learn from our gardens to deal with the most urgent question of the time: How much is enough?
A man must be sacrificed now and again to provide for the next generation of men.
All books are either dreams or swords, you can cut, or you can drug, with words.
Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.
Even Pain pricks to livelier living.
For books are more than books, they are the life, the very heart and core of ages past, the reason why men worked and died, the essence and quintessence of their lives.
Happiness, to some, elation; Is, to others, mere stagnation.
Happiness: We rarely feel it. I would buy it, beg it, steal it, Pay in coins of dripping blood For this one transcendent good.
Hate is ravening vulture beaks descending on a place of skulls.
I am tired, beloved, of chafing my heart against the want of you; of squeezing it into little ink drops, and posting it. And I scald alone, here, under the fire of the great moon.
In science, read by preference the newest works. In literature, read the oldest. The classics are always modern.
Let the key guns be mounted, make a brave show of waging war, and pry off the lid of Pandora's Box once more.
Let us be of cheer, remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never come.
Moon! Moon! I am prone before you. Pity me,and drench me in loneliness.
Sexual love is the most stupendous fact of the universe, and the most magical mystery our poor blind senses know.
Take everything easy and quit dreaming and brooding and you will be well guarded from a thousand evils.
There are few things so futile, and few so amusing, As a peaceful and purposeless sort of perusing of old random jottings set down in a blank book you've unearthed from a drawer as you looked for your bank book.
Time! Joyless emblem of the greed of millions, robber of the best which earth can give.
You are ice and fire the touch of you burns my hands like snow.
Youth condemns; maturity condones.
And, as I have said, it's made me think twice about the imagination. If the spirits aren't external, how astonishing the mediums become! Victor Hugo said of his voices that they were like his own mental powers multiplied by five.
Arthur Young's Reflexive Universe - fascinating but too schematic to fit into my scheme. The most I could hope for was a sense of the vocabulary and some possible images.
At college I'd seen my dead frog's limbs twitch under some applied stimulus or other - seen, but hadn't believed. Didn't dream of thinking beyond or around what I saw.
Because of its length and looniness I'd taken to calling it the Divine Comedy - not of course a usable title, until David Jackson thought of making it plural. Dante, subtler as always, let posterity affix the adjective.
Before trying a novel I wrote a couple of plays.
But those two plays left me on fresh terms with language. I didn't always have to speak in my own voice.
Chiefly, I think, the - to me - unprecedented way in which the material came. Not through flashes of insight, wordplay, trains of thought. More like what a friend, or stranger, might say over a telephone.
Don't ask me to paraphrase his thesis - but, reading Jaynes as I was finishing Mirabell, I rather goggled. Because the poem is set by and large in two adjacent rooms: a domed red one where we took down the messages, and a blue one, dominated by an outsize mirror, where we reflected upon them.
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.
I'd like to think the scientists need us - but do they? Did Newton need Blake?
In life, there are no perfect affections.
Knowing some Greek helped defuse forbidding words - not that I counted much on using them. You'll find only trace elements of this language in the poem.
Oh, I picked up a two-volume Guide to Science by Asimov - very useful, still, each time I forget how the carbon atom is put together, or need to shake my head over elemental tables.
Strange about parents. We have such easy access to them and such daunting problems of communication.
The simplest science book is over my head.
Ain't they got no shame.
Everything will change. The only question is growing up or decaying.
I really don't think life is about the I-could-have-beens. Life is only about the I-tried-to-do. I don't mind the failure but I can't imagine that I'd forgive myself if I didn't try.
If you don't understand yourself you don't understand anybody else.
Mistakes are a fact of life. It is the response to the error that counts.
Some say we are responsible for those we love. Others know we are responsible for those who love us.
There're two people in the world that are not likeable: a master and a slave.
We eat up artists like there's going to be a famine at the end.
We love because it's the only true adventure.
We write because we believe the human spirit cannot be tamed and should not be trained.
You must invent your own games and teach us old ones how to play.
A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back when it begins to rain.
A civilized society is one which tolerates eccentricity to the point of doubtful sanity.
A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman's birthday but never remembers her age.
A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.
A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.
A mother takes twenty years to make a man of her boy, and another woman makes a fool of him in twenty minutes.
A person will sometimes devote all his life to the development of one part of his body - the wishbone.
A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.
A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.
A poet never takes notes. You never take notes in a love affair.
A successful lawsuit is the one worn by a policeman.
Always fall in with what you're asked to accept. Take what is given, and make it over your way. My aim in life has always been to hold my own with whatever's going. Not against: with.
And nothing to look backward to with pride, and nothing to look forward to with hope.
And were an epitaph to be my story I'd have a short one ready for my own. I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover's quarrel with the world.
Being the boss anywhere is lonely. Being a female boss in a world of mostly men is especially so.
But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep.
By working faithfully eight hours a day you may eventually get to be boss and work twelve hours a day.
College is a refuge from hasty judgment.
Don't ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.
Education doesn't change life much. It just lifts trouble to a higher plane of regard.
Education is hanging around until you've caught on.
Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.
For fear it would make me conservative when old.
Forgive me my nonsense, as I also forgive the nonsense of those that think they talk sense.
Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee, and I'll forgive Thy great big joke on me.
Freedom lies in being bold.
Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can't, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.
Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length.
Hell is a half-filled auditorium.
Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in.
Humor is the most engaging cowardice.
I alone of English writers have consciously set myself to make music out of what I may call the sound of sense.
I always entertain great hopes.
I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand; I teach in order to learn.
I am glad the invitation pleases your family. It will please my family to the fourth generation and my family of friends and, were they living, it would have pleased inordinately the kind of Grover Cleveland Democrats I had for parents.
I had a lovers quarrel with the world.
I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.
I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way.
I never dared to be radical when young for fear it would make me conservative when old.
I often say of George Washington that he was one of the few in the whole history of the world who was not carried away by power.
I'd just as soon play tennis with the net down.
I'm not confused. I'm just well mixed.
If one by one we counted people out For the least sin, it wouldn't take us long To get so we had no one left to live with. For to be social is to be forgiving.
If society fits you comfortably enough, you call it freedom.
If you don't know how great this country is, I know someone who does; Russia.
In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.
Is due to truths being in and out of favor.
It's a funny thing that when a man hasn't anything on earth to worry about, he goes off and gets married.
Let him that is without stone among you cast the first thing he can lay his hands on.
Life is tons of discipline. Your first discipline is your vocabulary; then your grammar and your punctuation Then, in your exuberance and bounding energy you say you're going to add to that. Then you add rhyme and meter. And your delight is in that power.
Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.
Modern poets talk against business, poor things, but all of us write for money. Beginners are subjected to trial by market.
Most of the change we think we see in life is due to truths being in and out of favor.
My sorrow, when she's here with me, thinks these dark days of autumn rain are beautiful as days can be; she loves the bare, the withered tree; she walks the sodden pasture lane.
No memory of having starred atones for later disregard, or keeps the end from being hard.
No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.
Nobody was ever meant, To remember or invent, What he did with every cent.
One aged man - one man - can't fill a house.
Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.
Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance.
Poetry is what gets lost in translation.
Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.
Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things.
"Skepticism," is that anything more than we used to mean when we said, "Well, what have we here?"
Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice.
Style is that which indicates how the writer takes himself and what he is saying. It is the mind skating circles around itself as it moves forward.
Take care to sell your horse before he dies. The art of life is passing losses on.
Talking is a hydrant in the yard and writing is a faucet upstairs in the house. Opening the first takes the pressure off the second.
The best things and best people rise out of their separateness; I'm against a homogenized society because I want the cream to rise.
The best way out is always through.
The brain is a wonderful organ; it starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office.
The chief reason for going to school is to get the impression fixed for life that there is a book side for everything.
The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.
The father is always a Republican toward his son, and his mother's always a Democrat.
The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom... in a clarification of life - not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.
The greatest thing in family life is to take a hint when a hint is intended-and not to take a hint when a hint isn't intended.
The jury consist of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.
The middle of the road is where the white line is - and that's the worst place to drive.
The only way round is through.
The reason why worry kills more people than work is that more people worry than work.
The snake stood up for evil in the Garden.
The strongest and most effective force in guaranteeing the long-term maintenance of power is not violence in all the forms deployed by the dominant to control the dominated, but consent in all the forms in which the dominated acquiesce in their own domination.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.
The world is full of willing people; some willing to work, the rest willing to let them.
The worst disease which can afflict executives in their work is not, as popularly supposed, alcoholism; it's egotism.
There is no arguing with him, for if his pistol misses fire, he knocks you down with the butt end of it.
There is the fear that we shan't prove worthy in the eyes of someone who knows us at least as well as we know ourselves. That is the fear of God. And there is the fear of Man-fear that men won't understand us and we shall be cut off from them.
They would not find me changed from him they knew - only more sure of all I thought was true.
Thinking isn't agreeing or disagreeing. That's voting.
To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.
To be social is to be forgiving.
Two roads diverged in a wood and I - I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.
Two such as you with such a master speed, cannot be parted nor be swept away, from one another once you are agreed, that life is only life forevermore, together wing to wing and oar to oar.
We dance round in a ring and suppose, but the secret sits in the middle and knows.
What is this talked-of mystery of birth. But being mounted bareback on the earth?
Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.
You can be a little ungrammatical if you come from the right part of the country.
You can be a rank insider as well as a rank outsider.
You don't have to deserve your mother's love. You have to deserve your father's.
You have freedom when you're easy in your harness.
Fools-to-free-the-world, they go, Primeval hearts from Buffalo. Red cataracts of France to-day Awake, three thousand miles away, An echo of Niagara The cataract of Niagara.
I am unjust, but I can strive for justice. My life's unkind, but I can vote for kindness. I, the unloving, say life should be lovely. I, that am blind, cry out against my blindness.
To live in mankind is far more than to live in a name.
You can't crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them.
Again like Williams, with the emphasis now regrettable, when a man makes a poem, makes it mind you, he takes the words as he finds them lying interrelated about him.
All of which was OK, as that proved then, I certainly wouldn't contradict it as a necessary sense of things.
And what's fascinating in The Ten Thousand Things is that although there's time, an inexorable time of the three generations of lives, actively present, but place is the time, time doesn't really have to do with simply the human experience of it.
At least I felt a responsibility for everything that was started. It must have been that New England sense that you've got to finish what you start.
Don't name it, as they say, because instantly you offer it to this peculiar authority.
Everything is so contiguous and contingent that reality doesn't inhere in one focus.
First you wonder if they're separate stories, but no, they're not, they're contingent stories and they form a pattern. And you begin with some of the island as the place to which the heroine of the book returns.
He had, almost, tactics. He was somewhere; he had to figure his next move, always.
He lives out in Orchard Park. I mean, to be able to sit on the bench so patiently, for whatever part, and to be able to get up and do something, with such heroic competencies would be great.
He means the door I presume, the door you open and close as you choose or can. But again, what's so moving in Dermout's writing is the complex, echoing, confident, permeating, social experience, far more than her premises.
He's dead, yeah. I was thinking of Jim Kelly now, the great Buffalo Bills quarterback, with his, not displacement, but his having been happily, successfully replaced by Frank Lloyd Reich.
I don't know, I love the goofs in prose, I think they're beautiful. It's a newer form than poetry, it's much more opaque.
I remember once being told by an outstanding landscape architect, Dan Kiley, how he'd met his wife. He'd found himself at the edge of Lake Champlain, in the middle of the winter-very cold and desolate place-he just was absolutely captivated by this lake.
I thought when younger that the burden of the song or the poem was the emotional condition that it made articulate or the feelings it thus gave voice to, or the this or that, whatever is-and I think all of that is part of its real fact, but paradoxically, I don't think that's what defines it.
I've been reading a terrific writer, just not read enough, a poet, David Rattray. He's got a terrific collection of essays, classic essays of preoccupations and musing and information and experience, called How I Became One of the Invisible.
It's as though all the terms of a family were present at one time rather than his dad and his mum. Not just a present authority, but the resident memory of what qualifies what else is the case.
It's the classic story form. All staying equal, or proving equal, or being equal, this will all continue, and the next time around, we'll move on to see what happened to Harry after he dove in the river, or who his friend John really was, and so on.
No matter how wild reality was obviously often being, it was an absolutely secure place, as a tone and intelligence, and a thing happening.
Suddenly the whole imagination of writing and editorial and newspaper and all these presumptions about who am I reading this, and who else other people may be, and all that, it's so grimly brutal!
That poetry survived in its formal agencies finally, and that prose survived to get something said.
The awful thing, as a kid reading, was that you came to the end of the story, and that was it. I mean, it would be heartbreaking that there was no more of it.
The irony of our social group is that so often everyone feels this, but there's no company whatsoever in that feeling. Think of Pound's great emphasis, the way out is via the door.
The pattern of the narrative never of necessity wants to end, it never has to.
The prosaic matter, to communicate in that particular sense something in mind, something of value, or something recognizable.
There are a lot of editorials that have nothing to do with anything like that. But I was just thinking of that sense of prose as being very responsible and perceptive, thoughtful, intimate, and contriving a quote statement.
There was a great moment a couple of years ago when Jim Kelly had hurt his elbow and Frank Reich came in and won the game against Miami the next week. He was asked afterwards immediately by the press, what'd you do?
There's a wild billboard down the street, I'd almost be grateful if you'd get a picture of it, it says, "If God wrote an editorial in the newspaper, wouldn't you read it?"
This novel is not that way; this narrative is of a culture which is endlessly permeated, not permissive, but endlessly permeated by its own physical reality. And it has no time that's ambitious.
What's curious, you get the tone that makes you recognize that Michael Ondaatje is part of a culture, not simply a singular writer; he's part of a whole way of seeing reality.
When he's bored and he has simply an idea to carry it's awful, it's mawkish and sluggish-he's drunk, you know, you can tell.
Where the habit of something-what Granddad's favorite chair is-is the chair it literally is, but it's endlessly permeated, vibrating in that other, so that a place has all the echoes of what its use has been.
You set up a time track, but you can equally leave it. In fact, it is left endlessly when a book has become, like The Wizard of Oz for example, the exfoliating conditions and adventures.
You were saying that once when visiting Yale, you were struck that unlike Pound, Williams's thinking was volatile, I mean, did not stay locked into a pattern of concepts that then defined his subsequent necessary behavior, whereas Pound did.
Now all my teachers are dead except silence.
We are asleep with compasses in our hands.
All lovely things will have an ending, All lovely things will fade and die; And youth, that's now so bravely spending, Will beg a penny by and by.
I love you, what star do you live on?
Music I heard with you was more than music, and bread I broke with you was more than bread. Now that I am without you, all is desolate; all that was once so beautiful is dead.
Separate we come, and separate we go, And this be it known, is all that we know.
The action is best that secures the greatest happiness for the greatest number.
The secret of the man who is universally interesting is that he is universally interested.
There will presently be no room in the world for things; it will be filled up with the advertisements of things.
I am better able to imagine hell than heaven; it is my inheritance, I suppose.
If any have a stone to throw It is not I, ever or now.
In masks outrageous and austere, The years go by in single file; But none has merited my fear, And none has quite escaped my smile.
A writer is unfair to himself when he is unable to be hard on himself.
Any writer overwhelmingly honest about pleasing himself is almost sure to please others.
As contagion of sickness makes sickness, contagion of trust can make trust.
Egotism is usually subversive of sagacity.
If technique is of no interest to a writer, I doubt that the writer is an artist.
In a poem the excitement has to maintain itself. I am governed by the pull of the sentence as the pull of a fabric is governed by gravity.
It is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing.
My father used to say superior people never make long visits.
Poetry is all nouns and verbs.
Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.
Superior people never make long visits.
The passion for setting people right is in itself an afflictive disease.
There never was a war that was not inward; I must fight till I have conquered in myself what causes war.
War is pillage versus resistance and if illusions of magnitude could be transmuted into ideals of magnanimity, peace might be realized.
We are suffering from too much sarcasm.
When one cannot appraise out of one's own experience, the temptation to blunder is minimized, but even when one can, appraisal seems chiefly useful as appraisal of the appraiser.
And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.
Apparently, the most difficult feat for a Cambridge male is to accept a woman not merely as feeling, not merely as thinking, but as managing a complex, vital interweaving of both.
Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I've a call.
How frail the human heart must be - a mirrored pool of thought.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my eyes and all is born again.
I talk to God but the sky is empty.
I took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart. I am. I am. I am.
If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.
Is there no way out of the mind?
The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it.
There must be quite a few things that a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them.
Widow. The word consumes itself.
A gentleman with a pug nose is a contradiction in terms.
A strong argument for the religion of Christ is this - that offences against Charity are about the only ones which men on their death-beds can be made - not to understand - but to feel - as crime.
All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.
I have great faith in fools; self-confidence my friends call it.
I have no faith in human perfectability. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active - not more happy - nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago.
I never can hear a crowd of people singing and gesticulating, all together, at an Italian opera, without fancying myself at Athens, listening to that particular tragedy, by Sophocles, in which he introduces a full chorus of turkeys, who set about bewailing the death of Meleager.
I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat.
In criticism I will be bold, and as sternly, absolutely just with friend and foe. From this purpose nothing shall turn me.
In one case out of a hundred a point is excessively discussed because it is obscure; in the ninety-nine remaining it is obscure because it is excessively discussed.
It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in a future existence, we shall look upon what we think our present existence, as a dream.
Man's real life is happy, chiefly because he is ever expecting that it soon will be so.
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary.
Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.
That man is not truly brave who is afraid either to seem or to be, when it suits him, a coward.
That pleasure which is at once the most pure, the most elevating and the most intense, is derived, I maintain, from the contemplation of the beautiful.
The best chess-player in Christendom may be little more than the best player of chess; but proficiency in whist implies capacity for success in all these more important undertakings where mind struggles with mind.
The nose of a mob is its imagination. By this, at any time, it can be quietly led.
The true genius shudders at incompleteness - and usually prefers silence to saying something which is not everything it should be.
There are few cases in which mere popularity should be considered a proper test of merit; but the case of song-writing is, I think, one of the few.
There is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute, which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man.
Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.
To be thoroughly conversant with a man's heart, is to take our final lesson in the iron-clasped volume of despair.
To vilify a great man is the readiest way in which a little man can himself attain greatness.
We loved with a love that was more than love.
Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it 'the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul.' The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of 'Artist.'
With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.
A person who doubts himself is like a man who would enlist in the ranks of his enemies and bear arms agains himself. He makes his failure certain by himself being the first person to be convinced of it.
A total abstainer is one who abstains from everything but abstention, and especially from inactivity in the affairs of others.
Ability is commonly found to consist mainly in a high degree of solemnity.
Aborigines, n.: Persons of little worth found cumbering the soil of a newly discovered country. They soon cease to cumber; they fertilize.
Absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends.
Abstainer: a weak person who yields to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure.
Absurdity, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
Academe, n.: An ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught. Academy, n.: A modern school where football is taught.
Acquaintance. A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to.
Admiration, n. Our polite recognition of another's resemblance to ourselves.
All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusions is called a philosopher.
Ambidextrous, adj.: Able to pick with equal skill a right-hand pocket or a left.
An egotist is a person of low taste-more interested in himself than in me.
Anoint, v.: To grease a king or other great functionary already sufficiently slippery.
Ardor, n. The quality that distinguishes love without knowledge.
Bacchus, n.: A convenient deity invented by the ancients as an excuse for getting drunk.
Barometer, n.: An ingenious instrument which indicates what kind of weather we are having.
Battle, n., A method of untying with the teeth a political knot that would not yield to the tongue.
Beauty, n: the power by which a woman charms a lover and terrifies a husband.
Belladonna, n.: In Italian a beautiful lady; in English a deadly poison. A striking example of the essential identity of the two tongues.
Bigot: One who is obstinately and zealously attached to an opinion that you do not entertain.
Bore, n. A person who talks when you wish him to listen.
Brain: an apparatus with which we think we think.
Bride: A woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her.
Cabbage: a familiar kitchen-garden vegetable about as large and wise as a man's head.
Calamities are of two kinds: misfortunes to ourselves, and good fortune to others.
Childhood: the period of human life intermediate between the idiocy of infancy and the folly of youth - two removes from the sin of manhood and three from the remorse of age.
Clairvoyant, n.: A person, commonly a woman, who has the power of seeing that which is invisible to her patron - namely, that he is a blockhead.
Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum - I think that I think, therefore I think that I am.
Confidante. One entrusted by A with the secrets of B confided to herself by C.
Conservative, n: A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal who wishes to replace them with others.
Consult: To seek approval for a course of action already decided upon.
Corporation: An ingenious device for obtaining profit without individual responsibility.
Coward: One who, in a perilous emergency, thinks with his legs.
Cynic, n: a blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.
Dawn: When men of reason go to bed.
Day, n. A period of twenty-four hours, mostly misspent.
Death is not the end. There remains the litigation over the estate.
Debt, n. An ingenious substitute for the chain and whip of the slavedriver.
Deliberation, n.: The act of examining one's bread to determine which side it is buttered on.
Destiny: A tyrant's authority for crime and a fool's excuse for failure.
Doubt begins only at the last frontiers of what is possible.
Doubt is the father of invention.
Doubt, indulged and cherished, is in danger of becoming denial; but if honest, and bent on thorough investigation, it may soon lead to full establishment of the truth.
Edible, adj.: Good to eat, and wholesome to digest, as a worm to a toad, a toad to a snake, a snake to a pig, a pig to a man, and a man to a worm.
Education, n.: That which discloses the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.
Egotism, n: Doing the New York Times crossword puzzle with a pen.
Egotist: a person more interested in himself than in me.
Egotist: A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.
Experience is a revelation in the light of which we renounce our errors of youth for those of age.
Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.
Famous, adj.: Conspicuously miserable.
Fork: An instrument used chiefly for the purpose of putting dead animals into the mouth.
Future. That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true and our happinesss is assured.
Genealogy, n. An account of one's descent from a man who did not particularly care to trace his own.
Happiness: an agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another.
History is an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.
Honorable, adj.: Afflicted with an impediment in one's reach. In legislative bodies, it is customary to mention all members as honorable; as, "the honorable gentleman is a scurvy cur."
I believe we shall come to care about people less and less. The more people one knows the easier it becomes to replace them. It's one of the curses of London.
I never said all Democrats were saloonkeepers. What I said was that all saloonkeepers are Democrats.
Immortality: A toy which people cry for, And on their knees apply for, Dispute, contend and lie for, And if allowed Would be right proud Eternally to die for.
In our civilization, and under our republican form of government, intelligence is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption from the cares of office.
Inventor: A person who makes an ingenious arrangement of wheels, levers and springs, and believes it civilization.
It is evident that skepticism, while it makes no actual change in man, always makes him feel better.
Land: A part of the earth's surface, considered as property. The theory that land is property subject to private ownership and control is the foundation of modern society, and is eminently worthy of the superstructure.
Lawsuit: A machine which you go into as a pig and come out of as a sausage.
Learning, n. The kind of ignorance distinguishing the studious.
Liberty: One of Imagination's most precious possessions.
Litigation: A machine which you go into as a pig and come out of as a sausage.
Logic: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.
Love: A temporary insanity curable by marriage.
Mad, adj. Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence.
Mammon, n.: The god of the world's leading religion.
Marriage, n: the state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making in all, two.
Mayonnaise: One of the sauces which serve the French in place of a state religion.
Meekness: Uncommon patience in planning a revenge that is worth while.
Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt.
Ocean: A body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for man - who has no gills.
Optimism: The doctrine that everything is beautiful, including what is ugly, everything good, especially the bad, and everything right that is wrong... It is hereditary, but fortunately not contagious.
Painting, n.: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather, and exposing them to the critic.
Patience, n. A minor form of dispair, disguised as a virtue.
Perseverance - a lowly virtue whereby mediocrity achieves an inglorious success.
Philosophy: A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.
Photograph: a picture painted by the sun without instruction in art.
Politeness, n: The most acceptable hypocrisy.
Politics: A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.
Positive, adj.: Mistaken at the top of one's voice.
Pray, v.: To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.
Pray: To ask the laws of the universe to be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.
Prescription: A physician's guess at what will best prolong the situation with least harm to the patient.
Quotation, n: The act of repeating erroneously the words of another.
Religion. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.
Revolution, n. In politics, an abrupt change in the form of misgovernment.
Saint: A dead sinner revised and edited.
Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.
Spring beckons! All things to the call respond; the trees are leaving and cashiers abscond.
Success is the one unpardonable sin against our fellows.
Suffrage, noun. Expression of opinion by means of a ballot. The right of suffrage (which is held to be both a privilege and a duty) means, as commonly interpreted, the right to vote for the man of another man's choice, and is highly prized.
Sweater, n.: garment worn by child when its mother is feeling chilly.
Telephone, n. An invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance.
The best thing to do with the best things in life is to give them up.
The covers of this book are too far apart.
The gambling known as business looks with austere disfavor upon the business known as gambling.
The hardest tumble a man can make is to fall over his own bluff.
The slightest acquaintance with history shows that powerful republics are the most warlike and unscrupulous of nations.
The small part of ignorance that we arrange and classify we give the name of knowledge.
There are four kinds of Homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy.
To be positive is to be mistaken at the top of one's voice.
Vote: the instrument and symbol of a freeman's power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.
War is God's way of teaching Americans geography.
We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over.
We submit to the majority because we have to. But we are not compelled to call our attitude of subjection a posture of respect.
What this country needs what every country needs occasionally is a good hard bloody war to revive the vice of patriotism on which its existence as a nation depends.
When you doubt, abstain.
Who never doubted, never half believed. Where doubt is, there truth is - it is her shadow.
But only God can make a tree.
I think that I shall never see a poem lovely as a tree.
All honor to him who shall win the prize,'The world has cried for a thousand years;But to him who tries and fails and dies,I give great honor and glory and tears.
I got so I simply gagged everytime I sat before my desk to write an ad.
It has taken a great deal of energy, which has not been so difficult to summon as the necessary patience to wait, simply wait much of the time - until my instincts assured me that I had assembled my materials in proper order for a final welding into their natural form.
All our best men are laughed at in this nightmare land.
Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.
If moderation is a fault, then indifference is a crime.
It is not my fault that certain so-called bohemian elements have found in my writings something to hang their peculiar beatnik theories on.
Now you understand the Oriental passion for tea," said Japhy. "Remember that book I told you about the first sip is joy, the second is gladness, the third is serenity, the fourth is madness, the fifth is ecstasy.
Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?
All of us have a place in history. Mine is clouds.
I didn't know the full dimensions of forever, but I knew it was longer than waiting for Christmas to come.
I don't want my daughter to be educated. I think women should just be decorative.
I'll think about things for thirty or forty years before I'll write it.
I'm in a constant process of thinking about things.
It's strange how the simple things in life go on while we become more difficult.
Probably the closest things to perfection are the huge absolutely empty holes that astronomers have recently discovered in space. If there's nothing there, how can anything go wrong?
The sun was like a huge 50-cent piece that someone had poured kerosene on and then had lit with a match, and said, "Here, hold this while I go get a newspaper," and put the coin in my hand, but never came back.
Nothing in the universe can travel at the speed of light, they say, forgetful of the shadow's speed.
A wind has blown the rain away and blown the sky away and all the leaves away, and the trees stand. I think, I too, have known autumn too long.
America makes prodigious mistakes, America has colossal faults, but one thing cannot be denied: America is always on the move. She may be going to Hell, of course, but at least she isn't standing still.
At least the Pilgrim Fathers used to shoot Indians: the Pilgrim Children merely punch time clocks.
Be of love a little more careful than of anything.
Humanity I love you because when you're hard up you pawn your intelligence to buy a drink.
I imagine that yes is the only living thing.
I like my body when it is with your body. It is so quite new a thing. Muscles better and nerves more.
I thank you God for this most amazing day, for the leaping greenly spirits of trees, and for the blue dream of sky and for everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes.
I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing than to teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.
I'm living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be living apart.
It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.
It takes three to make a child.
Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination.
Private property began the instant somebody had a mind of his own.
The earth laughs in flowers.
The most wasted of all days is one without laughter.
The sensual mysticism of entire vertical being.
The world is mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful.
To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
Unbeing dead isn't being alive.
