For two decades, 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. Some poets and writers have their own dedicated pages.

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Henceforth, may your heart be three trinities of birdcall and birdsong and caw. — Jeremy Halinen

Grief makes one family / of us all. — Sam Hamill

If you love poetry, you are charged with finding poetry that helps you change your life. — Sam Hamill

Nothing can be by itself alone, no one can be by himself or herself alone, everyone has to inter-be with every one else. That is why, when you look outside, around you, you can see yourself. — Thich Nhat Hanh

This body is not me. / I am not limited by this body. / I am life without boundaries. / I have never been born, / and I have never died. Look at the ocean and the sky filled with stars, / manifestations from my wondrous true mind. Since before time, I have been free. / Birth and death are only doors through which we pass, / sacred thresholds on our journey. / Birth and death are a game of hide-and-seek. So laugh with me, / hold my hand, / let us say good-bye, / say good-bye, to meet again soon.We meet today. / We will meet again tomorrow. / We will meet at the source every moment. / We meet each other in all forms of life. — Thich Nhat Hanh

Writing shit about new snow
for the rich
is not art.

— Kobayashi Issa, trs. Robert Hass

Girl sprawled on a couch, a girl on a horse, girl in a mirror. / The orchid’s tender stem in a hipped-shaped vase. / How long before the vessel breaks? — Terrance Hayes

This torso is a hard seed, / this mouth a lodestar guttered. / The greater sky above this one is the dream / we ever wake from, and remember — Rebecca Hazelton

I write by hand (first draft) / because it’s harder to lie / dissemble or distract / when my body’s involved — Mark Hein

Each moment stands under an enormous vertical and horizontal pressure of information, potent with ambiguity, meaning-full, unfixed, and certainly incomplete. — Lyn Hejinian

Write hard and clear about what hurts. — Ernest Hemingway

I’ve, I’ve got a bone / to pick and a crow to pluck. / I’ve got my tail tucked, wound / to lick. I prefer not to talk. / I said, I prefer not to talk. — Andrea Henchey

Nights I give myself / to memory’s epithet, your chin hard / on my clavicle, your hands / pinioning my wrists to the pillow / as though they were nectar- / containing spurs of delphinium — Sara Henning

Which of us stays at her guttural refrain for days, though our love was never so close to our hunger? What is love but a set of urges? Hold the nape of the neck just so—carry the pieces of the body just so— — Sara Henning

The noisy rooks pass over, and you may / Pace undiverted through the netted light / As silent as a thrush with work to do — John Hewitt

Don’t try to sell anything door-to-door would be my advice, particularly your poems. — Bob Hicok

You never really know / if you’ve done any good with your life, / so why not act as confused / as everyone else — Bob Hicok

My mother’s smile a swing-bridge / to an island city, her voice a parachute / that possessed everything it is possible to know. — Alan Hill

I remember that eight-year-old boy / who had tasted the sweetness of air, / which still clings to my mouth / and disappears when I breathe. — Edward Hirsch

And within my body, / another body … sings; there is no other body, / it sings, / there is no other world — Jane Hirshfield

I don’t want to scream forever, / I don’t want to live without proportion / like some kind of infection from the past — Tony Hoagland

Let it keep falling / Until maybe it lands in the basin of the hips / Let the Earth hold it / Like a giant seed / That’s been waiting to find the soil — Thomas Holmes

First you will come to the Sirens who enchant all who come near them. If any one unwarily draws in too close and hears the singing of the Sirens, his wife and children will never welcome him home again, for they sit in a green field and warble him to death with the sweetness of their song. There is a great heap of dead men’s bones lying all around, with the flesh still rotting off them. — Homer

But the newborn rabbits— / no, they were not so lucky. They didn’t live / for forty years like the crane does. They saw only / grass and a few flowers, maybe the sky / and a black vine moving quickly, a dark mouth. — Patricia Hooper

Resurrect my day and night, the fire of each star. — Kate Houck

I always felt like reading a poem was an experience analogous to that of encountering language. Sure, there’s persona, and the world of the poem, and voice etc etc etc. But it’s all made out of language, and the language is the first thing I am made aware of. — Lisa Howe

At night / deer drift from the dark woods and eat my garden. / They’re like enormous rats on stilts except, / of course, they’re beautiful. — Andrew Hudgins

A hunger catches in our throats. Desire hikes up. / The night swims, fluoresces. This cannot be cured. — Amorak Huey

Saving superpowers for the last act / is such a classic mistake. My body has no plans & no prototype, / though I still expect to rush in & rescue myself. — Amorak Huey

I caution against communication because once language exist only to convey information, it is dying. In news articles the relation of the words to the subject is a strong one. The relation of the words to the writer is weak. (Since the majority of your reading has been newspapers, you are used to seeing language function this way). When you write a poem these relations must reverse themselves: The relation of the word to the subject must weaken—the relation of the words to the writer (you) must take on strength. — Richard Hugo

In a poem you make something up, say for example a town, but an imagined town is at least as real as an actual town. If it isn’t you may be in the wrong business. — Richard Hugo

in less than a small / touch I crumple down, and the tea / I am holding is immersed in the / puddles, and my body turns / the waters fragrant. — Tung-Hui Hu

Most days are crushed / breathless by something far away, / too beautiful, true in a fiery / and glorious way. — Tom C Hunley

What killed this man? / The chorus answered, Bare, bare fat. — Zora Neale Hurston

By this pond-sheened curve of trees and sunset/cloud, I hush. I let quietude creep closer, a wild thing nosing / at my heart — Alison Hurwitz

I want to say that / home’s the place you are: a branch, a rubber tire, abandoned cedar shingles, / bones. We’re those that always find a substrate we can cling to. — Alison Hurwitz

This is what poetry is now: the presentation of self, the presentation of words (and of images [and of images of words]), links to other content, self-promotion, and the integration of poetry into the entirety of one’s personal (and sometimes also professional) life. All of this is good and all of it is dangerous. — Geof Huth