Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
To grow old is to lose everything.
Less is more, in prose as in architecture.
Can build plane... Delivery about three months.
But Blake's voices returned to dictate revisions.
Everything important always begins from something trivial.
The greatest kindness would put a bullet in his bright eye.
I really feel better about aging at the age of 86 than I did at 70.
I expect my immortality will last about six seconds after my funeral.
The pleasure we feel, reading a poem, is our assurance of its integrity.
However alert we are, antiquity remains an unknown, unanticipated galaxy.
Opposites are attracted when each one is anxious about its own character.
Contentment is work so engrossing that you do not know that you are working.
Your presence in this house is almost as painful and enormous as your absence.
The form of free verse is as binding and as liberating as the form of a rondeau.
You think that their dying is the worst thing that could happen. Then they stay dead.
Divorce was miserable, as it always is, and we divorce for the same reasons we marry.
Words seem like drops of water in a stream that has its own wholeness and its own motion.
Baseball is fathers and sons. Football is brothers beating each other up in the backyard.
I see no reason to spend your life writing poems unless your goal is to write great poems.
I want to sleep like the birds then wake to write you again without hope that you read me.
I wish you were that birch rising from the clump behind you, and I the gray oak alongside.
We learned how to love each other by loving together good things wholly outside each other.
Today when I begin writing I’m aware: something that I don’t understand drives this engine.
It is sensible of me to be aware that I will die one of these days. I will not 'pass away.'
When I was a child, I loved old people. My New Hampshire grandfather was my model human being.
Friends die, friends become demented, friends quarrel, friends drift with old age into silence.
Many times I have written something, and after it was published, I understood what I was saying.
Sound had always been my portal to poetry, but in the beginning, sound was imagined through the eye.
One Oxford poet confessed to me that I had been scary because I talked American and wore tennis shoes.
Sweet death, small son, our instrument Of immortality, Your cries and hungers document Our bodily decay.
Mere literary talent is common; what is rare is endurance, the continuing desire to work hard at writing.
Poetry is what I've done my whole life. And every important thing in my life had found itself into poems.
Even famous poets such as Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams were rarely asked to read their poems.
Every afternoon, I shut the door of my bedroom to write: Poetry was secret, dangerous, wicked and delicious.
If our goal is to write poetry, the only way we are likely to be any good is to try to be as great as the best.
When I was 12, I had a fondness for horror movies like the 'Wolfman.' The boy next door said I should read Poe.
If work is no antidote to death, nor a denial of it, death is a powerful stimulus to work. Get done what you can.
Of course newspaper sportswriting is mostly terrible - and of course it is usually the best writing in the paper.
Many years, I would publish four books - an anthology, a book of criticism, a new book of poems, a book of essays.
When we put words together - adjective with noun, noun with verb, verb with object - we start to talk to each other.
Generation on generation, your neck rubbed the windowsill of the stall, smoothing the wood as the sea smooths glass.
In anything you write - in a short story, a poem - there has to be a counter-motion; it can't go all in one direction.
Baseball, because of its continuity over the space of America and the time of America, is a place where memory gathers.
Not everything in old age is grim. I haven't walked through an airport for years, and wheelchairs are the way to travel.
Some days I feel good about my work, and sometimes I feel I've never written anything worthwhile. That's par for the course.
In December of 1952, my first wife, Kirby, and I left Vienna to drive through the Russian sector of Austria into Yugoslavia.
I have to do draft after draft... It takes me a long time, but I love doing it, and I have to do it every day, or I feel slack.
In my life, I've seen enormous increase in the consumption of poetry. When I was young, there were virtually no poetry readings.
My problem isn't death but old age. I fret about my lack of balance, my buckling knee, my difficulty standing up and sitting down.
I felt the need to be more open and expressive of my feelings, not just about the hills and the countryside, but about the daily life.