For more than a decade, I’ve maintained a list of quotes I like by poets, writers, and thinkers I find interesting. This post is part of that series. All posts in the series are organized alphabetically.

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I can’t think how you bring yourself / to cut your throat like that yourself—I asked / the counselor they called in to the school, / and she said something like, “What better ink / to write the language of the heart?” — Rafael Campo

Artists, like everyone else, must take up their oars, without dying, if possible — that is to say, by continuing to live and create. — Albert Camus

Because the fields of my childhood vanished, / I carry smoke in my hair. I bed dank dirt in my / hands. — Tina Carlson

There are things unbearable. / Scorn, princes, this little size / of dying. — Anne Carson

Slowly the summer warmth was drained from the water. The young crabs, mussels, barnacles, worms, starfish, and crustaceans of scores of species had disappeared from the plankton, for in the ocean spring and summer are the seasons of birth and youth. — Rachel Carson

I hate and I love. Why I do this, perhaps you ask. / I know not, but I feel it happening and I am tortured. — Catullus

After this I’m going to cut out my tongue and use it as fertilizer for all / the flowers I’m going to grow in every window of my house. / I’m telling you there’s an after. / I’m telling you this will end. — Sarah Certa

I want to spend a day not thinking my usual thoughts: / how many warm beds there are in the world and how still my hands are homeless. — Sarah Xerta

we / are just like everyone else / trying to build a house out of flames / in a world full of flames — Sarah Xerta

how you pull me out from under / the blue-glass table / then fix me like bark / against your kitchen counter. / how you separate the blood / from sacred deermeat. easy, / easy. — Amrita Chakraborty

The town I call home, it boasts a bumper crop / of white life. Our white life seem ready to grow / on all the land we can claim. — Sara Biggs Chaney

Have a sense of gratitude to everything, even difficult emotions, because of their potential to wake you up. — Pema Chödrön

The pain is the wake-up call. — Pema Chödrön

I wonder what Rorschach / would make of this place, this / asymmetrical black hole or space / or face or possibly the shape / of things to come — Kim Clark

I’m tired / of small catastrophe, the delicate / balance between shrugged-off accident / and tiny horror — Abigail Cloud

a body is a meaty thing, a weighty one / it lugs itself around, beats on glass, destroys itself in what light remains — Elizabeth Colen

The point of experiencing love is to engage the greater openings. — CAConrad

he loved her as a drowning man / loves a drowning woman, weary, fish-breathed / and failing — Krista Cox

Subverted my psychosis to watery ornament. / Was found drowned in a cream velvet / Mini gown, mind blown out like a city / With no electricity, all lines cut. / The brain, a kaleidoscopic disco. — Cynthia Cruz

There will be no other / Life, other than the sweet / Lavender, sweet / Blossoming dream / Of this one. — Cynthia Cruz