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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Flagstaff was where I first fell in love with Arizona mountains, but it was Tucson that taught me to love the desert. And once you’re under that sinister spell there is no turning back. No one becomes a desert rat by choice. It just snags you, both literally and figuratively. — Roger Naylor

Anyone who hasn’t been in the Chilean forest doesn’t know this planet. I have come out of that landscape, that mud, that silence, to roam, to go singing through the world. — Pablo Neruda

Lament of old mouths, blood of old supplications. / Love me, companion. Don’t forsake me. — Pablo Neruda

Perhaps that sad land
moves in me like a ship:
but I changed planets.
The rain no longer knows me.

— Pablo Neruda

Why do you / treat me as though / I have already left? / I am still here. — Annie Klier Newcomer

How many times would my self have to die before I realized that it was never alive in the first place? — Thandie Newton

In death we belong to everyone / who can pass our names through their warm mouths, / who can smell the rotten air without flinching — Hieu Minh Nguyen

You were once & perhaps continue to be / the myth you tell to scare yourself / into loneliness. — Hieu Minh Nguyen

… a man can be always in the wrong and always appear to be in the right, and in the end become with the clearest conscience in the world the most unendurable tyrant and bore; and what applies to the individual can also apply to entire classes of society. — Friedrich Nietzsche

A subject for a great poet would be God’s boredom after the seventh day of creation. — Friedrich Nietzsche

And if you are not a bird, then beware of coming to rest above an abyss. ― Friedrich Nietzsche

Art makes the sight of life bearable by laying over it the veil of unclear thinking. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Close beside the woe of the world, and often upon its volcanic soil, man has laid out his little garden of happiness. — Friedrich Nietzsche

He who directs his passion upon causes … deprives his passion for people … of much of its fire. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Is life not a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves? — Friedrich Nietzsche

Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species. — Friedrich Nietzsche

One man’s morality is higher compared with another’s often only because its goals are quantitatively greater. The latter is drawn down by his narrowly bounded occupation with the petty. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Why after the usual sort of social gatherings do we suffer from pangs of conscience? Because we have taken important things lightly, because in discussing people we have spoken without complete loyalty or because we have kept silent when we should have spoken, because occasionally we have not leaped up and run off, in short because we have behaved in society as though we belonged to it. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Women … speak like creatures who have for millennia sat a the loom, or plied the needle, or been childish with children. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Yes, there are friends, but it is error and deception regarding yourself that led them to you; and they must have learned how to keep silent in order to remain your friend; for such human relationships almost always depend upon the fact that two or three things are never said or even so much as touched upon: if these little boulders do start to roll, however, friendship follows after them and shatters. — Friedrich Nietzsche

We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection. — Anaïs Nin

I know the shock of hitting paved road after riding grass-track roads and walking in the country all day. The rhythm of the tires on the two-lane blacktop says to me: civilization, town, other people, and I don’t want that. As when I was a child, I want to remain in the open, becoming something other than human under the sky. — Kathleen Norris

Maybe the desert wisdom of the Dakotas can teach us to love anyway, to love what is dying, in the face of death, and not pretend that things are other than they are. The irony and wonder of all of this is that it is the desert’s grimness, its stillness and isolation, that brings us back to love. — Kathleen Norris

I began to see each of us as a treasure-bearer, carrying our souls like a great blessing through the world. After the relative emptiness of the Plains, partaking in such a feast of humanity was a blessing in itself. — Kathleen Norris

I was a New Yorker for nearly six years and still love to visit my friends in the city. But now I am conscious of carrying a Plains silence within me into cities, and of carrying my city experiences back to the Plains so that they may be absorbed again back into silence, the fruitful silence that produces poems and essays. — Kathleen Norris

The city no longer appeals to me for the cultural experiences and possessions I might acquire there, but because its population is less homogenous than Plains society. Its holiness is to be found in being open to humanity in all its diversity. And the western Plains now seem bountiful in their emptiness, offering solitude and room to grow. — Kathleen Norris

We have time on our hands here, in our hearts, and it makes us strange. — Kathleen Norris

A great poet is somehow in control of [prosody] and makes it orderly — Alice Notley

sex is for god because it’s a furious / violent brightness so I make a straw fetish / with a red tonguelike clitoris to protect me / from literature and from my dear friends — Alice Notley

that never being what anyone thought / I never cared what anyone thought / as long as I could go home, and resume my work — Alice Notley

To be is not / to have; nor to belong; nor to have been born. / You are not the child of earth. Beauty still thy name. — Alice Notley