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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And the calm that returned to us / was not even our own. — James Tate

Take a little ride on my donkey, I love that donkey. Hell, I love everybody. — James Tate

I fall and fuck around about, / clumsy, confused and cracked. — Glen Martin Taylor

It’s a bit of last chance alchemy, / to take the kitchen floor suffering, / and turn it into art, screaming art, / to turn a winter’s silence into a song, / to find a sunrise in the last darkness / it’s a bit alchemy, it’s a bit of hope. — Glen Martin Taylor

May God break my heart so completely that an entire world falls in. — Mother Teresa

I / ground myself / back into the / body with the / smallest and most / controlled of pains. — Allison Thung

When the suffering of another creature causes you to feel pain, do not submit to the initial desire to flee from the suffering one, but on the contrary, come closer, as close as you can to him who suffers, and try to help him. — Leo Tolstoy

rain outside is like god shaking fine / sugar on a cake — Louise Tondeur

By now you’re surely understanding that writing is not my primary work, but an urgency, perhaps an affliction—a consequence of my life. — Stephan Torre

I was given / a wild place to be. Sometimes / it hurt to move out there / as evening rippled, and no voice / came back from the animals. — Stephan Torre

it is love that draws me again / and again from the word emptiness — Stephan Torre

Poems, certainly lyric poems but even most narrative poems, come from an ecstatic surplus of joy or grief which one can no longer hold in one’s veins or keep secret. — Stephan Torre

some lives will not root / in geometry / or hold anything / but the coastal / edges / of rivers and tides — Stephan Torre

Spring, and yet all / the world wrinkles / so easy — Stephan Torre

The culture I toss my poems into is fractured, divorced from nature, frightened, and addicted to technology. I’m not sure I have the language, or generative questions, for it. — Stephan Torre

It is still beautiful to hear the heart beat / but often the shadow seems more real than the body. — Tomas Tranströmer

like when you’ve sloshed in / wet cement and don’t know it till you see the tracks / on your new carpet, yeah, and then see darker tracks, / from when you set your sock on fire trying to light / a cigarette — William Trowbridge

the tires still sing, / Gone. Over and out, / as we drive off, suckers / for the high roll / of center line and landscape, / shedding cares, / shedding cells, / half-hypnotized / by expectation’s / slippery caress — William Trowbridge

The name that can be named / is not the universal name. — Lao Tzu

The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why. — Mark Twain

I want to be a faint pencil line / under the important words, / the ones that tell the truth. — Chase Twichell

My boundaries are as much in thoughts and behaviors as in geography and geological features. My maps are drawn up by culture, custom, tribe, family, and myself. — Arthur Tulee