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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It takes / a while and then a while longer / to live as though you are / your single tenant, to find / the narrative that is more than / a drone of loss. — Al Maginnes

I also learned to think of a syllable as a way / to divide a word / like how a window divides / a building from a bird / or how breath divides / the living from the dead. — Clint Margrave

Each success, no matter how small, in practice of what I love is a lightning strike against the dark. — Clare L. Martin

I’ll have to take your computer away if it makes you cry too much. — Jon Martin

Normal people seem like they are from TV. — Jon Martin

The language is like gravity. — Jon Martin

I’ve stayed up all night, pushing away my darkness. / Outside, there’s a buck who walks around the cathedral grounds. / Looking for lost fawns. Sometimes, I almost believe it’s you. — Eduardo Martínez-Leyva

Earth finds a way, the spring of a brown-faced song / in its teeth, pushing demise back on its knees. — Rethabile Masilo

Oklahoma happens when you try to say something and you have a big thumb — Rethabile Masilo

Overwhelming, / to sit here among his things, and pull a writing pad / forward, and find you have absolutely nothing to say / to the world. — Rethabile Masilo

What that struggle has made of me is a living man. / I’m covered in loss. What must vindicate him / is the sun: planets whirling around, the moon stuck / among reeds outside our hut, lighting the lake / with a reverence that even midnight needs. — Rethabile Masilo

This birdlessness. — Kristi Maxwell

Coming black / into the deep South, / my friend says, / is like returning / to an elegant home / you were beat in / as a child. — Jamaal May

as the dark withdrew / and gave slow light to the swallows, / to the words we’d given / each other, which were few and kind and true. — Linda McCarriston

My mind is fingers holding a pen. — Michael McClure

I was transformed / My father’s only son my other self / My other half invisible and lived / The only one of us in the visible / World in the world where horses do not speak / And humans do not hide in horses’ bod- / ies — Shane McCrae

I love art that captures the essence of a specific region. I’m absolutely obsessed with Frank Stanford’s poetry, for example. But I also love poetry that’s seemingly placeless, even private—like Vasko Popa’s “The Little Box.” I used to feel more partisan about concrete/personal vs. abstract/private. But I don’t have those feelings anymore—these days, partisan attitudes about poetry bore me. — Michael McGriff

If my life has been a series of inadequacies, at least I know / by these great whirls of dust how beauty / and oblivion never ask permission of anyone. — Michael McGriff

It was never feasible: no skin no light / no prayers save us for we have, / all of us, swallowed / ourselves, and contain / only one another. — Kristen McHenry

When uncertain, you look to the Star-Nosed Mole, of the genus Condylura; its pink, fleshy tentacles used to sort matter by touch. — Kristen McHenry

I want to walk into the chilly desert draped under your arm, / blanketed by all of you and all of the stars / that seem more like ancestors, / winking and beaming down at us, / granting me the wish that has lived in my skeleton since my / conception: / to be loved unconditionally / a freedom they’ve prayed over me endlessly. — Kaitlyn McNab

Left to ourselves, / we always go over and over what’s missing — / tooth, dog, money, self-control, and even losses / as troubling as the absence the widower can’t stop / reaching for on the other side of his bed a year / later. — Wesley McNair

Waiting for planks to cure for your coffin / is like painting your own house over and / over. — Carrie Meadows

Ye, though I zodiac in troughs / of violent human history, / I will feel no evil in pillboxes and bomb scars. — Karla Linn Merrifield

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers … .There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun. — Thomas Merton

The great temptation of modern man is not physical solitude but immersion in the mass of other men, not escape to the mountains or the desert (would that more men were so tempted!) but escape into the great formless sea of irresponsibility which is the crowd. — Thomas Merton

Swing by starwhite buildings and / Lights come to life with a sound / Of bugs under the dead rib. / Miles of it. Still the same city. — Thomas Merton

There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun. — Thomas Merton

The destruction creates poetry. Destruction creates fragmented singing. — K. Silem Mohammad

This is my life now, / missing one beautiful thing / because I’m transfixed by another — Lisa Mottolo

And language is the thrill that holds the unknown in its vague and shifting ways. — Eileen Myles

But female reality has consumed male reality abundantly—we have to in order just to survive so female reality always contains male and female. — Eileen Myles

Writers are alone too much with their thoughts, and they are bent over. They’re wizened, thin-blooded. They’re living in an abstract realm all the time of ideas, whereas the painter is plastic, you know. And the musician of course is living, well, this is not true, but you would think he’s living an angelic life. He’s up there with the birds. — Henry Miller

Our lore: deceit. I miss you. My / crud enters, imitating the ocean. — Nathan Moore

Even the hardest part of the self / will be lost in tiny increments / to strangers / Yesterday was shoved / off a moving train — Nathan Moore and Dana Henry Martin

I would rather speak in tongue clicks and superlunary broomsticks than utter words of hate. — Peggy Munson

My daughter returns / to show me how she scraped together / just enough sidewalk grit and ice to sculpt / a snowman the size of a pigeon. She props it up / in the weeds we call a yard and it stays for days, / long after the sun revokes what’s left / of the frost and glitter. It delights us without / the burden of surprise, which has never improved / anyone’s life, or built a single beautiful thing. — Abby E. Murray