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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Whatever work you’re trying to do now to benefit the world, sink into that. Get a full taste of that. — His Holiness the Karmapa

Gary Snyder / is a haiku / far away — Jack Kerouac

The closer you get to real matter, rock, air, firewood, boy, the more spiritual the world is. — Jack Kerouac

And the breeze wound through my mouth and empty sockets / so my lungs would sigh and my dead tongue mutter. — Carolyn Kizer

My knees were hung with tin triangular medals / to cure all forms of hysterical disease. — Carolyn Kizer

O what a bright day it was! / This empty body danced on the river bank. — Carolyn Kizer

When he found my torso, he called it his canoe, / and, using my arms as paddles, / he rowed me up and down the scummy river. — Carolyn Kizer

Half the world wants to be like Thoreau worrying about the noise of traffic on the way up to Boston; the other half use up their lives being part of that noise. I like the second half. — Franz Kline

The mud we go through / In the mornings / To say we are here, / On the literal edge / Where we don’t know / The draft and heat / Of summertime again. — Noelle Kocot

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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Social media is biased, not to the Left or the Right, but downward. ― Jaron Lanier

I rhyme with the ground / and all at once it falls / apple I am apple / apple severed from tree / not the snake or the woman but tree itself is discovery / a force based on the world — Maryrose Larkin

The January days / are raspy whispers, netting / your thoughts into scrum and bother. — Mercedes Lawry

One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise. ― Aldo Leopold

Intuition is the key to everything, in painting, filmmaking, business—everything. I think you could have an intellectual ability, but if you can sharpen your intuition, which they say is emotion and intellect joining together, then a knowingness occurs. — David Lynch

We think we understand the rules when we become adults, but what we really experience is a narrowing of the imagination. — David Lynch

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 takes / a while and then a while longer / to live as though you are / your single tenant, to find / the narrative that is more than / a drone of loss. — Al Maginnes

I also learned to think of a syllable as a way / to divide a word / like how a window divides / a building from a bird / or how breath divides / the living from the dead. — Clint Margrave

Each success, no matter how small, in practice of what I love is a lightning strike against the dark. — Clare L. Martin

I’ll have to take your computer away if it makes you cry too much. — Jon Martin

Normal people seem like they are from TV. — Jon Martin

The language is like gravity. — Jon Martin

I’ve stayed up all night, pushing away my darkness. / Outside, there’s a buck who walks around the cathedral grounds. / Looking for lost fawns. Sometimes, I almost believe it’s you. — Eduardo Martínez-Leyva

Earth finds a way, the spring of a brown-faced song / in its teeth, pushing demise back on its knees. — Rethabile Masilo

Oklahoma happens when you try to say something and you have a big thumb — Rethabile Masilo

Overwhelming, / to sit here among his things, and pull a writing pad / forward, and find you have absolutely nothing to say / to the world. — Rethabile Masilo

What that struggle has made of me is a living man. / I’m covered in loss. What must vindicate him / is the sun: planets whirling around, the moon stuck / among reeds outside our hut, lighting the lake / with a reverence that even midnight needs. — Rethabile Masilo

This birdlessness. — Kristi Maxwell

Coming black / into the deep South, / my friend says, / is like returning / to an elegant home / you were beat in / as a child. — Jamaal May

as the dark withdrew / and gave slow light to the swallows, / to the words we’d given / each other, which were few and kind and true. — Linda McCarriston

My mind is fingers holding a pen. — Michael McClure

I was transformed / My father’s only son my other self / My other half invisible and lived / The only one of us in the visible / World in the world where horses do not speak / And humans do not hide in horses’ bod- / ies — Shane McCrae

I love art that captures the essence of a specific region. I’m absolutely obsessed with Frank Stanford’s poetry, for example. But I also love poetry that’s seemingly placeless, even private—like Vasko Popa’s “The Little Box.” I used to feel more partisan about concrete/personal vs. abstract/private. But I don’t have those feelings anymore—these days, partisan attitudes about poetry bore me. — Michael McGriff

If my life has been a series of inadequacies, at least I know / by these great whirls of dust how beauty / and oblivion never ask permission of anyone. — Michael McGriff

It was never feasible: no skin no light / no prayers save us for we have, / all of us, swallowed / ourselves, and contain / only one another. — Kristen McHenry

When uncertain, you look to the Star-Nosed Mole, of the genus Condylura; its pink, fleshy tentacles used to sort matter by touch. — Kristen McHenry

I want to walk into the chilly desert draped under your arm, / blanketed by all of you and all of the stars / that seem more like ancestors, / winking and beaming down at us, / granting me the wish that has lived in my skeleton since my / conception: / to be loved unconditionally / a freedom they’ve prayed over me endlessly. — Kaitlyn McNab

Left to ourselves, / we always go over and over what’s missing — / tooth, dog, money, self-control, and even losses / as troubling as the absence the widower can’t stop / reaching for on the other side of his bed a year / later. — Wesley McNair

Waiting for planks to cure for your coffin / is like painting your own house over and / over. — Carrie Meadows

Ye, though I zodiac in troughs / of violent human history, / I will feel no evil in pillboxes and bomb scars. — Karla Linn Merrifield

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers … .There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun. — Thomas Merton

The great temptation of modern man is not physical solitude but immersion in the mass of other men, not escape to the mountains or the desert (would that more men were so tempted!) but escape into the great formless sea of irresponsibility which is the crowd. — Thomas Merton

Swing by starwhite buildings and / Lights come to life with a sound / Of bugs under the dead rib. / Miles of it. Still the same city. — Thomas Merton

There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun. — Thomas Merton

The destruction creates poetry. Destruction creates fragmented singing. — K. Silem Mohammad

This is my life now, / missing one beautiful thing / because I’m transfixed by another — Lisa Mottolo

And language is the thrill that holds the unknown in its vague and shifting ways. — Eileen Myles

But female reality has consumed male reality abundantly—we have to in order just to survive so female reality always contains male and female. — Eileen Myles

Writers are alone too much with their thoughts, and they are bent over. They’re wizened, thin-blooded. They’re living in an abstract realm all the time of ideas, whereas the painter is plastic, you know. And the musician of course is living, well, this is not true, but you would think he’s living an angelic life. He’s up there with the birds. — Henry Miller

Our lore: deceit. I miss you. My / crud enters, imitating the ocean. — Nathan Moore

Even the hardest part of the self / will be lost in tiny increments / to strangers / Yesterday was shoved / off a moving train — Nathan Moore and Dana Henry Martin

I would rather speak in tongue clicks and superlunary broomsticks than utter words of hate. — Peggy Munson

My daughter returns / to show me how she scraped together / just enough sidewalk grit and ice to sculpt / a snowman the size of a pigeon. She props it up / in the weeds we call a yard and it stays for days, / long after the sun revokes what’s left / of the frost and glitter. It delights us without / the burden of surprise, which has never improved / anyone’s life, or built a single beautiful thing. — Abby E. Murray

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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… a man can be always in the wrong and always appear to be in the right, and in the end become with the clearest conscience in the world the most unendurable tyrant and bore; and what applies to the individual can also apply to entire classes of society. — Friedrich Nietzsche

And if you are not a bird, then beware of coming to rest above an abyss. ― Friedrich Nietzsche

Art makes the sight of life bearable by laying over it the veil of unclear thinking. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Close beside the woe of the world, and often upon its volcanic soil, man has laid out his little garden of happiness. — Friedrich Nietzsche

He who directs his passion upon causes … deprives his passion for people … of much of its fire. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species. — Friedrich Nietzsche

One man’s morality is higher compared with another’s often only because its goals are quantitatively greater. The latter is drawn down by his narrowly bounded occupation with the petty. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Why after the usual sort of social gatherings do we suffer from pangs of conscience? Because we have taken important things lightly, because in discussing people we have spoken without complete loyalty or because we have kept silent when we should have spoken, because occasionally we have not leaped up and run off, in short because we have behaved in society as though we belonged to it. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Women … speak like creatures who have for millennia sat a the loom, or plied the needle, or been childish with children. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Yes, there are friends, but it is error and deception regarding yourself that led them to you; and they must have learned how to keep silent in order to remain your friend; for such human relationships almost always depend upon the fact that two or three things are never said or even so much as touched upon: if these little boulders do start to roll, however, friendship follows after them and shatters. — Friedrich Nietzsche

I know the shock of hitting paved road after riding grass-track roads and walking in the country all day. The rhythm of the tires on the two-lane blacktop says to me: civilization, town, other people, and I don’t want that. As when I was a child, I want to remain in the open, becoming something other than human under the sky. — Kathleen Norris

Maybe the desert wisdom of the Dakotas can teach us to love anyway, to love what is dying, in the face of death, and not pretend that things are other than they are. The irony and wonder of all of this is that it is the desert’s grimness, its stillness and isolation, that brings us back to love. — Kathleen Norris

I began to see each of us as a treasure-bearer, carrying our souls like a great blessing through the world. After the relative emptiness of the Plains, partaking in such a feast of humanity was a blessing in itself. — Kathleen Norris

I was a New Yorker for nearly six years and still love to visit my friends in the city. But now I am conscious of carrying a Plains silence within me into cities, and of carrying my city experiences back to the Plains so that they may be absorbed again back into silence, the fruitful silence that produces poems and essays. — Kathleen Norris

The city no longer appeals to me for the cultural experiences and possessions I might acquire there, but because its population is less homogenous than Plains society. Its holiness is to be found in being open to humanity in all its diversity. And the western Plains now seem bountiful in their emptiness, offering solitude and room to grow. — Kathleen Norris

sex is for god because it’s a furious / violent brightness so I make a straw fetish / with a red tonguelike clitoris to protect me / from literature and from my dear friends — Alice Notley

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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To name ourselves rather than be named / we must first see ourselves … / So long unmirrored in our true selves / we may have forgotten how we look. — Lorraine O’Grady, epigraph for Bluest Nude: Poems, by Ama Codjoe

You forget / the contours slowly, in / the long second leaving, / neutrality a structure / you learned to glamorize, / the way you have come to / imagine doors as rectangular. — Cindy Juyoung Ok

oh, to be / that tongue / and palate, / those lips / surrounding you, / to be your / consonant / in a field of vowels. — Robert Okaji

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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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

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

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

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

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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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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When something explodes, / Turn exactly opposite from it and see what there is to see. / The loud will take care of itself, and everyone will be able to say / What happened in that direction. But who is looking / The other way? — Alberto Ríos

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing / and rightdoing there is a field. / I’ll meet you there. — Rumi

Thanks be / to god—again— / for extractable elements / which are not / carriers of pain, / for this periodic / table at which / the self-taught / salvagers disassemble / the unthinkable / to the unthought. — Kay Ryan

Unborn kittens wait for news / from the water / in their mother’s belly. — Mykyta Ryzhykh

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When this / vacation from the 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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’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