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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Somewhere an octopus is being eaten by an octopus and not panicking. / Black dress to the floor, red acrylic nails, silver teardrop earrings, waterproof mascara. / I am excited to do this for the rest of my life and be terrified. / I hear a noise behind me and I don’t turn around. — Jackie Sabbagh

Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you. — Jean-Paul Sartre

And I want more for myself / than rare moments of clarity. / I want my entire life. — Amy Saul-Zerby

The only dirty water I will submit to be drowned or / bathed in is the mythic sea of incontrovertible / fortune — Alexej Savreux

a president can say “audacity” or / a president can say “sad” & both eat / the slow-cured meat of empire. — Sam Sax

how you can look back / on a life & see only salt there — Sam Sax

there are so many words for you children & / none of them are dirty—tho not all of them / are yours. now as you eat what your mother eats / her fear is your world torn & thrown to birds. — Sam Sax

The centuries-old debate should be settled: an intellectual world bereft of poetry is a damaged one. — Elaine Scarry

All I can think of is how fitting it is that in the end / it is your own poisons that get you. — Lauren Scharhag

I collect toadstools and hemlock / believing that it’s possible / to be impervious to their properties, / to know only their joys. — Lauren Scharhag

I dream myself wielder of the spear, / stunner, tanner, carrier of the bolt-gun. — Lauren Scharhag

I like the idea of serving the wholeness of others, / Purer than the laying-on of hands. — Lauren Scharhag

To take an object out of time renders it beautiful. That might be a big problem, as beauty shocks us more than ugliness. — Susan M. Schultz

all this / Memory for us each to read through / the long night and the cold winter — Jeffrey Schwaner

Does it matter that I was not counting? That I did not count the leaves / On the backyard maple but still enjoyed its new green shade. / Some things are not made to count. This fine spring rain in the dark. — Jeffrey Schwaner

God resides in the forearm, / Waiting like an owl. / In the lucid gloaming, / In the throttled air of hotels. — Jeff Schwaner

In the dark we pass / Through the membrane like birds / Escaping the owls of yesterday. — Jeffrey Schwaner

In the world are some animals whose feet / Never touch the ground. Birds who only / Land on the uncertainty of open water. — Jeff Schwaner

It’s not a ghost / which keeps you up at night / It’s certainty — Jeff Schwaner

Starlings pull up the garland of the sky and hang it on trees. — Jeff Schwaner

The continuous migration, slowing. That’s our life. — Jeffrey Schwaner

The end is a bridge / We have crossed before — Jeffrey Schwaner

The trunk’s shadow runs down the slope / Like a creek then rivulets of branches reach across / The road towards your porch like it has / Something to tell you, only you. — Jeff Schwaner

Whose migration over open space / Turns everyone’s heads though they hear / Only your voice on a quiet morning. — Jeff Schwaner

You are more / Than what you have paid in pain to be / transported here. — Jeffrey Schwaner

I used to think to be not alone meant / never having to walk through the high wheat / or struggle in the water. — Allison Seay

The only things here that don’t know / death are the mice that skulk / among the fruit, already gnawing / at the unshelled almond— / they’ve cracked the shell of another / one nearby—and you, of course. — Shane Seely

Again, with the digging, again with the digging up. / Once more with the shovels. / Once more, the shovels full of dirt. — Diane Seuss

I remember the color of music / and how forever / all the trembling bells of you / were mine. — Anne Sexton

Let me praise men for eating the apple / and finding woman / like a big brain of coral. — Anne Sexton

What a monster I’ve made. You see, instead of a lot of beauty from the throat, I make monsters. — Anne Sexton

You are the twelve faces of the Atlantic / and I am the rowboat. I am the burden. — Anne Sexton

Again, with the digging, again with the digging up. / Once more with the shovels. / Once more, the shovels full of dirt. — Diane Seuss

The only dirty water I will submit to be drowned or / bathed in is the mythic sea of incontrovertible / fortune — Alexej Savreux

Above the bed, the ceiling and the stars. Below the bed the floor, the earth, then out the other side and stars. I fell in all directions. — Richard Siken

After Crush was published, many people accused me of contaminating their bookshelf or bedside table with my melancholy. You never make me happy, but you can always make me sad, they said. I hadn’t anticipated this response and I wondered about what kind of culpability I might have. I, personally, was being held responsible, rather than the work — which had the undertone of “poetry isn’t art” because they refused to, or were unable to, understand that I had made a thing. They didn’t see the thing, they only saw me. — Richard Siken

Be disturbing and seductive and your poetry will follow. — Richard Siken

When this / vacation from thte void closes shop, my lungs losing their / winsome urge to rise and fall, when I can no longer / xxx and ooo, even via text, breathe deep the gathering gloom, / yak, yap, yawn, yes, yarn, yield, or do that lub-dub thing, until / zapping myself with a cocktail takes me where I haven’t been. — Martha Silano

I don’t know where the next poem is going to come from—a bit of language, an image, a mood, a recalled experience. Something sets off a train of associations and the poem begins. — Charles Simic

Inside my empty bottle I was constructing a lighthouse while all the others were making ships. — Charles Simic

I am a world in a world. All worlds are subject to death and decay, entropy. My feet hurt. — Eric Simpson

I lie on my back in the grass because I have been put in charge of the sky. — S. Jane Sloat

The future is coming with the sole purpose that I might regret it. — Sarah J. Sloat

to remember the happy ending / in every book. to forget they were all white. to name desire as everyone who hasn’t killed you yet. — Jayson Smith

When we say that something makes sense, we’re saying that the mind can feel it. We don’t mean simply that the words it comprises make impressions individually. We mean that the utterance as a whole can be felt by the mind. — Matthew Buckley Smith

everyday’s an eggshell. / Hamilton thinks he’s a flying horse; / strapping him to the bed / slows his airscape gallop / somehow they get it into our rocky heads / madness is a crime & more. — Mbembe Milton Smith

Even the black mares shy at my lowing, / its widowish timbre / an emblem of morning, / a sickle heaving hay. — Joseph Spece

Writing is the gradual revelation of a wholeness already felt when one has the idea for the poem. — Stephen Spender

We pick up the shards of the world. / We cut our hands. / We pick up the shards of the world. — Ankh Spice

Awareness doesn’t have problems. In order to have a problem, we have to resist the situation. — Rupert Spira

You catch at the edge of a feeling or idea or glimpse or sound—and you don’t let go. You merge along with it, almost as if your hands play over it, pushing, extending, turning it over, encouraging it. And all this activity awakes other feelings, ideas, glimpses, sounds. Things get exciting; you let yourself be persuaded that a unity is possible. — William Stafford

a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt / color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, / not unordered in not resembling. — Gertrude Stein

After all anybody is as their land and air is. Anybody is as the sky is low or high. Anybody is as there is wind or no wind there. That is what makes a people, makes their kind of looks, their kind of thinking, their subtlety and their stupidity, and their eating and their drinking and their language. ― Gertrude Stein

An audience is always warming but it must never be necessary to your work. — Gertrude Stein

and their eating and their drinking and their language. — Gertrude Stein

I wish that I had spoken only of it all. — Gertrude Stein

Which I wish to say is this / There is no beginning to an end / But there is a beginning and an end / To beginning. / Why yes of course. / Any one can learn that north of course / Is not only north but north as north / Why were they worried. / What I wish to say is this. / Yes of course — Gertrude Stein

It’s not every day that the world arranges itself into a poem. — Wallace Stevens

Society, ignorant of medical research, makes a stigma out of something our bodies do quite naturally: not conform to a sexual binary. — Kathryn Bond Stockton

Jealousy is nothing more than fear. Except when it’s a bird landing on the same wire day after day and simply flying away. — Mary Stone

Look: the boy / has come back, is looking you / hard in the eye, through / the crack of the door. / There, in his hand, a neon / plastic BB / gun. He does this for / his grandmother and for his / son. — Nomi Stone

In the longer view it doesn’t matter. / However, it’s that having lived, it matters. / So that every death breaks you apart. / You find yourself weeping at the door / of your own kitchen, overwhelmed / by loss. — Ruth Stone

So often it is this. I wake up, urgent, fatalistic, / with the taste of nectar on my boughs. / I replay on a loop my one stoic consistency, / my middle of the night vow, / that I will start tomorrow / the essential dismantling / of what I live. — Bianca Stone

I ask him if he knows what it’s like / to drink two-day old coffee over lipstick stains, / to drag a road-sign with your mother’s / maiden name out of the ground, only to leave it / on your front porch in the rain — Mary Stone

The things he knows / of us. The things he remembers / and how it’s our father’s fault / we all learned to lie to survive. / She still wants to see him. / Says brother like it’s a word / like a brother is a real thing. — Mary Stone

In a field I am the absence / of field. / This is always the case. / Wherever I am / I am what is missing. ⁠— Mark Strand⁠

Writing is an experience that changes each time we do it. Each writing experience takes its own form. — Christine Swint

In consequence, the sorry fact is / that we arrive here improvised / and leave without the chance to practice. — Wislawa Szymborska