For more than a decade, 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.

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

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

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

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

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

For more than a decade, 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.

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Midfield,
attached to nothing,
the skylark singing.

— Basho

It is silly: this constant falling, this ebullient animal / tumble, this dizzy, over-worded, breathless groping / to some place only named in ancient, unknown tongues. — John Belk

Even after we called the neighbors for water, more water, and the volunteer fire department came to mist the dying herd, cattle kept falling. They died all day long until even the sun grew tired of watching. — Darla Biel

There are four channels on the black and white TV which seem swept from the cosmic corners of an emptiness you’re learning about in school, along with Sex Ed and its ragged chalkboard diagrams of ungainly organs deployed with all the dignity of trying to smuggle accordions across state lines. — Simeon Berry

The subject of pain is the business I am in. To give meaning and shape to frustration and suffering. The existence of pain cannot be denied. I propose no remedies or excuses. — Louise Bourgeois

What modern art means is that you have to keep finding new ways to express yourself, to express the problems, that there are no settled ways, no fixed approach. This is a painful situation, and modern art is about this painful situation of having no absolutely definite way of expressing yourself. — Louise Bourgeois

We are all born in Oklahoma, in a certain way. — Andrew Brusletten

One very important aspect of art is that it makes people aware of what they know and don’t know they know. … Once the breakthrough is made, there is a permanent expansion of awareness. But there is always a reaction of rage, of outrage, at the first breakthrough. … So the artist, then, expands awareness. And once the breakthrough is made, this becomes part of the general awareness. — William S. Burroughs

With our thoughts we make the world. — from the Dhammapada, as translated by Thomas Byrom

For more than a decade, 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.

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I can’t think how you bring yourself / to cut your throat like that yourself—I asked / the counselor they called in to the school, / and she said something like, “What better ink / to write the language of the heart?” — Rafael Campo

Artists, like everyone else, must take up their oars, without dying, if possible — that is to say, by continuing to live and create. — Albert Camus

Because the fields of my childhood vanished, / I carry smoke in my hair. I bed dank dirt in my / hands. — Tina Carlson

There are things unbearable. / Scorn, princes, this little size / of dying. — Anne Carson

Slowly the summer warmth was drained from the water. The young crabs, mussels, barnacles, worms, starfish, and crustaceans of scores of species had disappeared from the plankton, for in the ocean spring and summer are the seasons of birth and youth. — Rachel Carson

I hate and I love. Why I do this, perhaps you ask. / I know not, but I feel it happening and I am tortured. — Catullus

how you pull me out from under / the blue-glass table / then fix me like bark / against your kitchen counter. / how you separate the blood / from sacred deermeat. easy, / easy. — Amrita Chakraborty

The town I call home, it boasts a bumper crop / of white life. Our white life seem ready to grow / on all the land we can claim. — Sara Biggs Chaney

Have a sense of gratitude to everything, even difficult emotions, because of their potential to wake you up. — Pema Chödrön

The pain is the wake-up call. — Pema Chödrön

I wonder what Rorschach / would make of this place, this / asymmetrical black hole or space / or face or possibly the shape / of things to come — Kim Clark

I’m tired / of small catastrophe, the delicate / balance between shrugged-off accident / and tiny horror — Abigail Cloud

a body is a meaty thing, a weighty one / it lugs itself around, beats on glass, destroys itself in what light remains — Elizabeth Colen

The point of experiencing love is to engage the greater openings. — CAConrad

he loved her as a drowning man / loves a drowning woman, weary, fish-breathed / and failing — Krista Cox

Subverted my psychosis to watery ornament. / Was found drowned in a cream velvet / Mini gown, mind blown out like a city / With no electricity, all lines cut. / The brain, a kaleidoscopic disco. — Cynthia Cruz

There will be no other / Life, other than the sweet / Lavender, sweet / Blossoming dream / Of this one. — Cynthia Cruz

For more than a decade, 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.

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The future is light drifting like water, / light emptying itself on the white / beaches of the earth, / on the sidewalks of cities, / at roadsides where the dying watch their own ghosts / rising — Joyce Ellen Davis

My lovers know the blast of my chaotic giving; / they tremble at the whip of my supple thighs; / you cross me at your peril, I swallow light / when the warm of anger lashes me into a spin — Kwame Dawes

We who gave, owned nothing / learned the value of dirt, how / a man or woman can stand / among the unruly growth, / look far into its limits, / a place of stone and entanglements, / and suddenly understand / the meaning of a name, a deed — Kwame Dawes

‎I will make me beautiful if it takes / Uglying everything else — Nick Demske

We draw ponies. / Over and over again, to keep the fires of hell / At bay. Pretty ponies. — Nick Demske

My bedraggled / animal-body vetoes evolution, wants to crawl off / behind the couch and die like an old house-cat. — Risa Denenberg

In my chest I am two-hearted always— / love and what love becomes / arrive when they want to, and hungry. — Natalie Diaz

Words, words were truly alive on the tongue, in the head / Warm, beating, frantic, winged; music and blood / But then I was young. — Carol Ann Duffy

For more than a decade, 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.

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Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something / Upon which to rejoice — T. S. Eliot

What I want to say is that culture—art, if you like—has an important set of functions in preparing us for the future. — Brian Eno

For more than a decade, 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.

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What matters is the individual movements that you can have with other people and maybe, by this strange magic, you write these little characters in black and white on a page and someone picks it up somewhere and they feel heard or understood or comforted. Even if the poem is about the darkest thing in the world, someone else felt that. You know, you can talk in these big terms. All I can do is speak for myself and say my life has been literally saved by some of those moments. — Joseph Fasano

The small one, / the one joined with the sky, / the one we carried, / the one we sang / into the blue, into the black — Greg Field

Subtle ways to sign our names / in concealed, sheltered places / where those who search will find them. — Meg Freer

For more than a decade, 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.

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The heart / never fits / the journey. / Always / one ends / first. — Jack Gilbert

the darkness of the tree line broken / only by my brother, who runs to me / with a look of great hope / carrying the tiny blind unicorn / we, together, are meant to save — Andrew Grace

The day is tick tock and as slow as waiting / for that needed check to arrive. / I collect the noises from outside / but have nowhere to put them. I open my mouth, / but my voice has gone underground. — Allison Grayhurst

For more than a decade, 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.

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Girl sprawled on a couch, a girl on a horse, girl in a mirror. / The orchid’s tender stem in a hipped-shaped vase. / How long before the vessel breaks? — Terrance Hayes

I remember that eight-year-old boy / who had tasted the sweetness of air, / which still clings to my mouth / and disappears when I breathe. — Edward Hirsch

Resurrect my day and night, the fire of each star. — Kate Houck

At night / deer drift from the dark woods and eat my garden. / They’re like enormous rats on stilts except, / of course, they’re beautiful. — Andrew Hudgins

A hunger catches in our throats. Desire hikes up. / The night swims, fluoresces. This cannot be cured. — Amorak Huey

I caution against communication because once language exist only to convey information, it is dying. In news articles the relation of the words to the subject is a strong one. The relation of the words to the writer is weak. (Since the majority of your reading has been newspapers, you are used to seeing language function this way). When you write a poem these relations must reverse themselves: The relation of the word to the subject must weaken—the relation of the words to the writer (you) must take on strength. — Richard Hugo

In a poem you make something up, say for example a town, but an imagined town is at least as real as an actual town. If it isn’t you may be in the wrong business. — Richard Hugo

in less than a small / touch I crumple down, and the tea / I am holding is immersed in the / puddles, and my body turns / the waters fragrant. — Tung-Hui Hu

Most days are crushed / breathless by something far away, / too beautiful, true in a fiery / and glorious way. — Tom C Hunley

What killed this man? / The chorus answered, Bare, bare fat. — Zora Neale Hurston

By this pond-sheened curve of trees and sunset/cloud, I hush. I let quietude creep closer, a wild thing nosing / at my heart — Alison Hurwitz

I want to say that / home’s the place you are: a branch, a rubber tire, abandoned cedar shingles, / bones. We’re those that always find a substrate we can cling to. — Alison Hurwitz

For more than a decade, 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.

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Every night, / high tide, cheapest of makeup removers, / wipes away any trace / of the previous night’s look. / In the morning, I’m swallowed again / in my body’s masculine quicksand. — Kenan Ince

For more than a decade, 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.

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It is not always obvious when listening to scientists or talking with poets that their intellectual and emotional worlds overlie. But of course they do. Poetry and science have common roots in observation and they take their cues from the rhythms and patterns of the natural world. Scientists and poets alike must put words to what they see and think and both require rigorous intellectual discipline in order to do so. Scientists and poets share a keen response to the beauty of nature and take delight in the act of discovery or creating. Both must communicate their ideas to others and so appreciate the use of language and a clarity of image. Psychological science, in particular, has in common with poetry a profound interest in human nature and emotion. — Kay Redfield Jamison

As the broken vessel is more frightening than the clay it was made from, / and as the clay it was made from is more frightening than the day our lives go on without us. — Matt Jasper

I am often assailed by devastating revelations of the obvious. — Matt Jasper

I think we save by touching, intersecting with, remembering. — Matt Jasper

In pure dark, a new bed is rafted / on the flow of not knowing where we are. — Matt Jasper

One definition of a poem for me is that it is the center of the universe where some degree of context and place and poise is sketched in to set stage with realia and the life that will breathe through it at the intersection of what the moment contains and time. My more heartfelt answer is that a poem spans not knowing and asking to know and having that prayer answered in a slightly different voice than the voice that asked. — Matt Jasper

One moment passes / to another moment the secret— / We are the same. — Matt Jasper

Swallows pass through windows freely / once the panes have gone. — Matt Jasper

The creatures washed up share a limb made of limbs / And an eye of all the eyes that have ever been / Our skin the sand spreading on and on— — Matt Jasper

We gather into song what balms / we need more of. — Matt Jasper

We try to possess the endless scattering of light, we are left dumbfounded by the clenching of our fists. — Georgi Y. Johnson

All I wanted was a mom without / wounds. — Luke Johnson

The reason for evil in the world is that people are not able to tell their stories. ― Carl Jung

Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens. — Carl Jung