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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the way your unhappiness / is a small flood i cannot / sandbag into a song — Mary Lambert

When I was five, my father molested me / you become a strange human that way / You cannot whip yourself awake as a child / I should have been born a bird — Mary Lambert

The shape of my body is hidden / in my body, the way stars are hidden / in daylight. — Suzanne Langlois

Social media is biased, not to the Left or the Right, but downward. ― Jaron Lanier

As monsters do we read / from yield to surrender / or from left to right? — Maryrose Larkin

But how now can we talk of late winter? / TFW: I fell in in love with the rain / and it pinned me to the bed — Maryrose Larkin

I like to make poems that wholly separate from me, and we stand there staring at each other. — Maryrose Larkin

I rhyme with the ground / and all at once it falls / apple I am apple / apple severed from tree / not the snake or the woman but tree itself is discovery / a force based on the world — Maryrose Larkin

Poetry is nobody’s business except the poet’s, and everybody else can fuck off. — Philip Larkin

I knew that somehow in the midst of this confusion / Was the true dawning of myself. / My soul was a man and like a man / I would wander forever among the stars and flowers, lonely. — Dorothea Lasky

We must plant ourselves again in the universe. — D. H. Lawrence

The January days / are raspy whispers, netting / your thoughts into scrum and bother. — Mercedes Lawry

but there was only the rain on the tin roof, / and the steady swish-swish of milk into the bright bucket / as I walked past you, so close we could have touched. — J.T. Ledbetter

There are days we live / as if death were nowhere / in the background; from joy / to joy to joy, from wing to wing, / from blossom to blossom to / impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom. — Li-Young Lee

One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise. ― Aldo Leopold

Poetry wants to be / an eye through which the world will see itself and / tremble. — David Lerner

A certain day became a presence to me; / there it was, confronting me—a sky, air, light: / a being. — Denise Levertov

When a poem comes to you, you’re not going to say, “Oh, no, this goddamned poem is just too mean-spirited.” You’re going to run with it. — Philip Levine

I crave winter. I want a blizzard / that blinds me to my fellow man. / These are my dark times. — Adrian C. Louis

Do not get lost in a sea of despair. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year, it is the struggle of a lifetime. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble. — John Lewis

lend me / a word that means what I would ask him for / so when he says: You give it all away, / I can say: I am not sorry. I sing. — Rebecca Lindenberg

I feel the need for words—and what I’m writing is new to me because until now my true word has never been touched. — Clarice Lispector

In the village nestled between two mountains / the news always arrives one month late, / cleansed in transit, glorified — Luljeta Lleshanaku

Spring kills solitude with solitude, imagination / the sap that shields you from your body. — Luljeta Lleshanaku

my heart knows it is my organ / and my nest / it knows it is a borrowed comfort / like a sudden breeze through the window — Lauren Lockhart

my mother gave me a story / with her blood she gave it to me— / a transfused history which has removed my marrow / and replaced it with / fibers from a Douglas Fir. — Lauren Lockhart

I sent my brother nothing in the desert because / I was busy writing poems. Deciding one by one / where the breath commas went, or else it would / not stand and walk. — Patricia Lockwood

I have admired the bodies of those / who crowd me, the effortless lifting / of a hand, the precision of a step. / I have wanted to rise among them. / Yet, I am become a host, fed upon, / overrun by what aims to heal me. — Sandy Longhorn

I have not been able to touch the destruction / within me. — Audre Lorde

You do not have to be me in order for us to fight alongside each other. I do not have to be you to recognize that our wars are the same. — Audre Lorde

By the river I met you each day. I meet you each / day. I will be meeting you in invariant futures. / By the river leaves turn. Mud cracks pentagonal / shapes. You return and leave. The river remains. — Denise Low

Land is not dead, not living, / but something beyond calculation. — Denise Low

Every man must do two things alone; he must do his own believing and his own dying. ― Martin Luther

Intuition is the key to everything, in painting, filmmaking, business—everything. I think you could have an intellectual ability, but if you can sharpen your intuition, which they say is emotion and intellect joining together, then a knowingness occurs. — David Lynch

We think we understand the rules when we become adults, but what we really experience is a narrowing of the imagination. — David Lynch

imagine heaven / peopled by everyone who has ever hurt me / imagine sailing past the castle / that is really seeds undone / that is really the sun — Germ Lynn

The words themselves speak and survive, not so much the personal brand. — Germ Lynn