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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Language was our secret weapon, and as soon we got language we became a really dangerous species. — Mark Pagel

Gary Snyder / is a haiku / far Write this. There is pleasure and pain and there are marks and signs. / A word may be shaped like a fig or a pig, an effigy or an egg / but / there is only time for fasting and desire, device and design, there is / only time to swerve without limbs, organs or face into a / scientific / silence, pinhole of light — Michael Palmer

I want everything to be / Different and remain / The same / And vice versa / The way a door closes because of the wind / But we imagine / Other reasons — Dean Pasch

It was not a poet, but a poem that walks, that smiles, that suddenly opens a smile that becomes a bird, then fish and disappears. — Octavio Paz

Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone. — Octavio Paz

It’s finally over—I’m going home. I want to show the world I’m a good person with a good heart. I want to help the people, just like my grandmother taught me. — Leonard Peltier

Make me your kuksa, and take me out to / the cold where you will hold me with birch-white / shaking hands laced in devil’s nettle. — Chris Petruccelli

You can imagine the kerosene lights flickering and making all kinds of shadows / Sparks and flames falling down above the cross / It was the sound of trees snapping and crackling / It was like Godzilla going through the woods — Eugenia Hepworth Petty

The first cause of waste is probably even buried in our DNA. Human beings have a need for maintaining consistency of the apperceptive mass. — Dan Phillips

Cold worlds shake from the oar. / The spirit of blackness is in us, it is in the fishes. / A snag is lifting a valedictory, pale hand; / Stars open among the lilies. / Are you not blinded by such expressionless sirens? / This is the silence of astounded souls. — Sylvia Plath

How I would like to believe in tenderness— / The face of the effigy, gentled by candles, / Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes. — Sylvia Plath

The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it. — Sylvia Plath

You were in love, you were a saint, / you were going to walk the sunlight blessing water, / you were almost word for word forever. — Stanley Plumly

But on we go, as others go—together, / hands at our sides, separate links. / I am the memory of our satin days. / I am the expectation of a knock on your door. — Anzhelina Polonskaya

But it’s not like you have a dysregulated autonomic nervous system as the roll of the dice. The autonomic nervous system for many people gets retuned because it’s very trauma-sensitive, it’s threat-sensitive, averse-sensitive. And if the nervous system thinks … you are in a state of chronic threat, it’s going to tuned to be defensive.

When it’s tuned to be defensive, it’s reallocating resources from homeostatic function (health growth and restoration) now to protecting you, but protecting you is not a social state. It’s not a thoughtful state. It’s a state of conservation of resources.

— Steve Porges on polyvagal theory and the freeze response

The inevitable result of this worship of the self is self-worship, as broadcasting turns ego-casting and each person becomes a solitary producer and their own solitary audience. — Andrew Potter

We domesticated the ocean / In a single continuous strand / And brought it ashore in our hearts. — Charles Potts

Today the cardboard is unfolded / under the tree in the sun, maybe the person using it / was alone, or maybe two lay in each other’s arms / during the uneasy night, wrapped in streaks of light. — Minnie Bruce Pratt