Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work, which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.
I think one thing is that prayer has become more useful, interesting, fruitful, and... almost involuntary in my life.
I saw that worrying had come to nothing and gave it up. And took my old body and went out into the morning, and sang.
I had a very dysfunctional family, and a very hard childhood. So I made a world out of words. And it was my salvation.
Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth.
And now you'll be telling stories of my coming back and they won't be false, and they won't be true but they'll be real
The stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds, and there was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own.
Far off in the red mangroves an alligator has heaved himself onto a hummock of grass and lies there, studying his poems.
Poetry is one of the original arts, and it began, as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth.
Do you love this world? Do you cherish your humble and silky life? Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath?
It is what I was born for - to look, to listen, to lose myself inside this soft world - to instruct myself over and over.
If I have any lasting worth, it will be because I have tried to make people remember what the Earth is meant to look like.
... the natural world is the old river that runs through everything, and I think poets will forever fish along its shores.
This is the first, wildest, and wisest thing I know, that the soul exists, and that it is built entirely out of attention.
I tell you this to break your heart, by which I mean only that it break open and never close again to the rest of the world.
The dream of my life is to lie down by a slow river and stare at the light in the trees - to learn something by being nothing
Poetry isn't a profession, it's a way of life. It's an empty basket; you put your life into it and make something out of that.
I have a notion that if you are going to be spiritually curious, you better not get cluttered up with too many material things.
A dog can never tell you what she knows from the smells of the world, but you know, watching her, that you know almost nothing.
I'm going to die one day. I know it's coming for me, too. I'll be a mountain, I'll be a stone on the beach. I'll be nourishment.
Every day I see or hear something that more or less kills me with delight, that leaves me like a needle in the haystack of light.
We can know a lot. And still, no doubt, there are rash and wonderful ideas brewing somewhere; there are many surprises yet to come.
When it's over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
All my life I have been restless-- I have felt there is something more wonderful than gloss-- than wholeness-- than staying at home.
A mind that is lively and inquiring, compassionate, curious, angry, full of music, full of feeling, is a mind full of possible poetry.
Wasn't it Emerson who said, 'My life is for itself and not for a spectacle'? I have a happy, full, good life because I hold it private.
Poetry is a serious business; literature is the apparatus through which the world tries to keep intact its important ideas and feelings.
You can have the other words-chance, luck, coincidence, serendipity. I'll take grace. I don't know what it is exactly, but I'll take it.
We all have a hungry heart, and one of the things we hunger for is happiness. So as much as I possibly could, I stayed where I was happy.
So come to the pond, or the river of your imagination, or the harbor of your longing, and put your lips to the world. And live your life.
Don't we all die someday and someday comes all too soon? What will you do with your own wild, glorious chance at this thing we call life.
If I've done my work well, I vanish completely from the scene. I believe it is invasive of the work when you know too much about the writer.
Snow was falling, so much like stars filling the dak trees that one could easily imagine its reason for being was nothing more the prettiness.
My work is the world. Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird - equal seekers of sweetness. Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Rhythm is one of the most powerful of pleasures, and when we feel a pleasurable rhythm we hope it will continue. When it does, it grows sweeter.
Every year everything I have ever learned in my lifetime leads back to this: the fires and the black river of loss whose other side is salvation
Hello, sun in my face. Hello you who made the morning and spread it over the fields...Watch, now, how I start the day in happiness, in kindness.
For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.
But I also say this: that light is an invitation to happiness, and that happiness, when it's done right, is a kind of holiness, palpable and redemptive.
I went to India and was quite taken with it. There's a feeling there that things are holy first and useful second. And in America, we have it backwards.
Instead of taking the reader by the hand and running him down the hill, I want to lead him into a house of many rooms, and leave him alone in each of them.
I don't know lots of things but I know this: next year when spring flows over the starting point I'll think I'm going to drown in the shimmering miles of it.
Still, what I want in my life is to be willing to be dazzled---to cast aside the weight of facts and maybe even to float a little above this difficult world.
Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do With your one wild and precious life?
And to tell the truth I don't want to let go of the wrists of idleness, I don't want to sell my life for money, I don't even want to come in out of the rain.
Almost anything is too much. I am trying in my poems to have the reader be the experiencer. I do not want to be there. It is not even a walk we take together.
Oh, to love what is lovely, and will not last! What a task to ask of anything, or anyone, yet it is ours, and not by the century or the year, but by the hours.
You have to be in the world to understand what the spiritual is about, and you have to be spiritual in order to truly be able to accept what the world is about.
To tell you the truth, I believe everything - tigers, trees, stones - are sentient in one way or another. You'd never catch me idly kicking a stone, for example.
Like Magellan, let us find our islands To die in, far from home, from anywhere Familiar. Let us risk the wildest places, Lest we go down in comfort, and despair.