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 when I didn’t speak / I became a secret, a testimony / against my own body. — Carl Adamshick

I was immense / and empty out there. I filled myself / with their lives, I stored up / the whole town, generations / of the town, other towns. / I have them now and it’s nothing. — Carl Adamshick

Apaths are an integral part of the sociopath’s arsenal and contribute to sociopathic abuse. Sociopaths have an uncanny knack of knowing who will assist them in bringing down the person they are targeting. It is not necessarily easy to identify an apath; in other circumstances, an apath can show ample empathy and concern for others—just not in this case. The one attribute an apath must have is a link to the target. — Addiction Today

we are what we are, / the two of us pulling together to form a single passage / through the dark — Neil Aitken

I seem to myself, as in a dream, / An accidental guest in this dreadful body. ― Anna Akhmatova

We’re waiting for a war to begin / or a delectable sweet to eat after lunch. — Jeff Alessandrelli

To me, in a poem the writer reaches for the reader and the reader reaches back—in this moment of contact the unknowable or unthought is illuminated. — Kazim Ali

I need you to do more than survive. As writers, as revolutionaries, tell the truth, your truth in your own way. Do not buy into their system of censorship, imagining that if you drop this character or hide that emotion, you can slide through their blockades. Do not eat your heart out in the hope of pleasing them. ― Dorothy Allison

It’s the first thing I think of when trouble comes―the geographic solution. Change your name, leave town, disappear, make yourself over. What hides behind that impulse is the conviction that the life you have lived, the person you are, is valueless, better off abandoned, that running away is easier than trying to change things, that change itself is not possible. ― Dorothy Allison

Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is what it means to have no loved version of your life but the one you made. ― Dorothy Allison

All my life / I’ve always dreamed of a somewhere. / It took me awhile to realize / that somewhere is here. — Odessa Alpuerto

The trains let us / on and the trains let us off. We wait for the next. Our bags / overflow. These people, this pretty. We stand on the / platforms, dressed like we are cured of pretty. — Hala Alyan

but though I have looked everywhere, / I can find nothing / to give myself to: / everything is / magnificent with existence — A. R. Ammons

how heavy this bag of knowledge as I hit the road again, / the road inside me, the questioning, the yes, hope, / that finally, in a day I’ll not live to see, we’ll be free. / Or not: our telescopes and satellites still roaming / when the earth is an orbiting, smoking ash, / sending back the knowledge that might have saved us. — Doug Anderson

What can a man / like me do besides take one word after another / right out of my body and hand it to you? — Doug Anderson

I plucked up an acorn, / thinking I would find a place to plant it on my walk. / Not beside the road. / Not in the mowed field by the cemetery. / Not in a stranger’s lawn. / There’s something about an errand to plant an oak that shows much of what troubles our world, / a place where a new tree is inconvenient. — Jarod K. Anderson

There are two paths to magic: imagination and paying attention. Imagination is the fiction we love, the truths built of falsehoods, glowing dust on the water’s surface. Paying attention is about intentional noticing, participating in making meaning to lend new weight to our world. An acorn. The geometry of a beehive. The complexity of whale song. The perfect slowness of a heron. — Jarod K. Anderson

There’s something about an errand to plant an oak that shows / much of what troubles our world, / a place where a new tree is inconvenient. — Jarod K. Anderson

This morning, I found a bluejay feather tucked like a bookmark in the pages of red and yellow leaf litter.

That book tells the story of here, where unguessable magic drifted through time like seeds on the wind, taking root where I would find my parcel of days and sip black coffee on a muddy trail.

What can we say about a universe, ancient and vast, that populates its tiniest corners with oaks and jays, impossible bits of art hidden away in a turning gallery beneath an ocean of chance and empty dark?

What is that if not kindness?

Kindness for its own sake.

— Jarod K. Anderson

This bizarre pretense that everyone is equally good at everything doesn’t stand up to reality. — Annoyed Librarian

A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know. — Diane Arbus

What remains is this deer at the edge of the woods, my dappled antlers my toiled meaning & no meaning making music like a heretic. After all what is a soul crawling out of the black dirt if it has no teeth or nails. — William Archila

At first we loved because / we startled one another. — Rae Armantrout

To believe non-referentiality is possible is to believe language can be divorced from thought, words from their histories. — Rae Armantrout, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Vol 1, No. 1

The wordplay / Between us gets very intense when there are / Fewer feelings around to confuse things. — John Ashbery

You can always catch up with the past. I think it’s very important to read what’s being written now and figure out how you stand in relation to it and how it represents what you do or don’t want to get into. — John Ashbery

About suffering they were never wrong, / The old Masters: how well they understood / Its human position: how it takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along — W. H. Auden

Everything turns away / Quite leisurely from the disaster. — W.H. Auden

The association of singing with women is an inevitable consequence considering the connection between the patriarchal construction and representation of woman first and foremost as a bodily entity and the presence of more bodily elements in singing than in instrumental music. To elaborate on the latter, there is literally more body in the singing voice—”more breath, more diaphragm muscles, a more open mouth”—because of the intensified and exaggerated vocalization when singing. Furthermore, singing is inherently a more embodied, more carnal realm than instrumental music in that the sound is produced within the performer’s body, from her throat, whereas in instrumental music, the sound source, whether piano, violin or others, is placed outside the performer’s body. — Linda Austern and Inna Naroditskaya, Music of the Sirens

if it’s true we’re infused with something not found in doorknob bird or bee / why am I confused about all the important things — Elizabeth Austen

What does she see / when she looks back at me, glassed-in, / unfeathered, gaping? — Elizabeth Austen