Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
the set pieces of your faces stir me - leading citizens - but not in the same way.
The only human value of anything, writing included, is intense vision of the facts.
The business of love is cruelty which, by our wills, we transform to live together.
all to no end save beauty the eternal-- So in detail they, the crowd, are beautiful
Old age is a flight of small cheeping birds skimming bare trees above a snow glaze.
beauty’ is related not to ‘loveliness’ but to a state in which reality plays a part.
The American idiom has much to offer us that the English language has never heard of
O Marvelous! What new configuration will come next? I am bewildered with multiplicity.
Compose. (No ideas but in things) Invent! Saxifrage is my flower that splits the rocks.
so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens.
[History is] a tyranny over the souls of the dead - and so the imagination of the living.
My surface is myself. Under which to witness, youth is buried. Roots? Everybody has roots.
Your thighs are appletrees whose blossoms touch the sky. Your knees are a southern breeze.
What "love" is I don't know if it's not the response of our deepest natures to one another.
Sure love is cruel and selfish and totally obtuse-- at least, blinded by the light, young love is.
A profusion of pink roses being ragged in the rain speaks to me of all gentleness and its enduring.
Imagination though it cannot wipe out the sting of remorse can instruct the mind in its proper uses.
There's nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words.
Being an art form, verse cannot be "free" in the sense of having no limitations or guiding principle.
It is not what you say that matters but the manner in which you say it; there lies the secret of the ages.
It's a strange courage you give me ancient star: Shine alone in the sunrise toward which you lend no part!
It's the anarchy of poverty delights me, the old yellow wooden house indented among the new brick tenements
Either I exist or I do not exist, and no amount of pap which I happen to be lapping can dull me to the loss.
It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.
For the beginning is assuredly the end- since we know nothing, pure and simple, beyond our own complexities.
It is difficult to get the news from poetry, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.
The job of the poet is to use language effectively, his own language, the only language which is to him authentic.
Unless there is a new mind there cannot be a new line, the old will go on repeating itself with recurring deadliness
You have the chicken, the hen, and the rooster. The chicken goes with the hen So who is having sex with the rooster?
Poe gives the sense for the first time in America, that literature is serious, not a matter of courtesy but of truth.
Remorse is a virtue in that it is a stirrer up of the emotions but it is a folly to accept it is a criticism of conduct.
By the road to the contagious hospital under the surge of the blue mottled clouds driven from the northeast - a cold wind.
There is nothing beginning nor end to the imagination but it delights in its own seasons reversing the usual order at will.
To refine, to clarify, to intensify that eternal moment in which we alone live there is but a single force the imagination.
A poem is a small machine made of words. . .Its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character.
and there grows in the mind a scent, it may be, of locust blossoms whose perfume is itself a wind moving to lead the mind away.
I tried to put a bird in a cage. O fool that I am! For the bird was Truth. Sing merrily, Truth: I tried to put Truth in a cage!
we, in that instant, lost, breathless to be witnesses, as if we stood ourselves refreshed among the shining fauna of that fire.
As birds' wings beat the solid air without which none could fly so words freed by the imagination affirm reality by their flight.
Prose may carry a load of ill-defined matters like a ship. But poetry is the machine which drives it, pruned to a perfect economy.
You lethargic, waiting upon me, waiting for the fire and I attendant upon you, shaken by your beauty Shaken by your beauty Shaken.
What power has love but forgiveness? In other words by its intervention what has been done can be undone. What good is it otherwise?
The instant trivial as it is is all we have unless-unless things the imagination feeds upon, the scent of the rose, startle us anew.
Lifeless in appearance, sluggish dazed spring approaches They enter the new world naked, cold, uncertain of all save that they enter.
A poem is this:/A nuance of sound/delicately operating/upon a cataract of sense/...the particulars/of a song waking/upon a bed of sound.
Sorrow is my own yard where the new grass flames as it has flamed often before but not with the cold fire that closes round me this year.
For what we cannot accomplish, what is denied to love, what we have lost in the anticipation a descent follows, endless and indestructible.
I'll write whatever I damn please, whenever I damn please and as I damn please and it'll be good if the authentic spirit of change is on it.
Hell take curtains! Go with some show of inconvenience; sit openly - to the weather as to grief. Or do you think you can shut your grief in?
My first poem was a bolt from the blue … it broke a spell of disillusion and suicidal despondence. ... it filled me with soul satisfying joy.