Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Justice lacking passion fails, betrays.
If truth is the lure, humans are fishes.
Life is short. But desire, desire is long.
How silently the heart pivots on its hinge.
In the dictionary of Cat, mercy is missing.
A poem can use anything to talk about anything.
The same words come from each mouth differently.
How fragile we are, between the few good moments.
Between certainty and the real, an ancient enmity.
The untranslatable thought must be the most precise.
Your fate is to be yourself, both punishment and crime.
What lives in words is what words were needed to learn.
In order to gain anything, you must first lose everything
In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble.
There are openings in our lives of which we know nothing.
Wrong solitude vinegars the soul, right solitude oils it.
Time-awareness does indeed watermark my books and my life.
Words are not the end of thought, they are where it begins.
How fine is the mesh of death. You can almost see through it.
As this life is not a gate, but the horse plunging through it.
Poetry's work is the clarification and magnification of being.
Something looks back from the trees, and knows me for who I am.
The moonlight builds its cold chapel again out of piecemeal darkness.
Near even a candle, the visible heat. So it is with a person in love.
Metaphors get under your skin by ghosting right past the logical mind.
I don't have a cell phone (though for years I've kept saying, "soon").
Leave a door open long enough, a cat will enter. Leave food, it will stay.
A person is full of sorrow the way a burlap sack is full of stones or sand.
Habit, laziness, and fear conspire to keep us comfortably within the familiar.
Existence itself is nothing if not an amazement. Good poems restore amazement.
Poetry's task is to increase the available stock of reality, R P Blackmur said.
Passion does not make careful arguments: it declares itself, and that is enough.
You may do this, I tell you, it is permitted. Begin again the story of your life.
Every morning is new as the last one, uncreased as the not quite imaginable first.
Any woodthrush shows it - he sings, not to fill the world, but because he is filled.
An ordinary hole beside a path through the woods might begin to open to altered worlds.
At some unnoticed moment, I began to understand that a life is written in indelible ink.
Within the silence, expansion, and sustained day by day concentration, I grow permeable.
So few the grains of happiness measured against all the dark and still the scales balance.
as some strings, untouched, sound when no one is speaking. So it was when love slipped inside us.
There is no paradise, no place of true completion that does not include within its walls the unknown.
The nourishment of Cezanne's awkward apples is in the tenderness and alertness they awaken inside us.
One breath taken completely; one poem, fully written, fully read - in such a moment, anything can happen.
Zen pretty much comes down to three things -- everything changes; everything is connected; pay attention.
The heat of autumn is different from the heat of summer. One ripens apples, the other turns them to cider.
Gestation requires protected space; ripening requires both permeability to the outer — and non-disturbance.
I will never become a horse trainer, a biologist, a person competent with a hammer. My loves were my loves.
Time ... brings us everything we have and are, then comes with a back-loader and starts taking it all away.
I feel like I am in the service of the poem. The poem isn't something I make. The poem is something I serve.
Self carries grief as a pack mule carries the side bags, being careful between the trees to leave extra room.