Quotes

Rae-Ryzhykh

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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The art that moves me most is art that points out unfair or unethical practices in today’s society—especially practices which have become so routine that either they go unnoticed or they are assumed to be “normal.” — Erena Rae

Come / winter they walk outside into the snow, which makes an empire of erasure / a beautiful white shadow dreaming its way behind the closed lids of eyes. — Doug Ramspeck

Nobody wants to make anybody else uncomfortable. Nobody wants to step out … and say, What you have done is unacceptable. — Claudia Rankine

If you seek peace, if you seek prosperity, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Open this gate. Tear down this wall. — Ronald Reagan

We vibrate to the rhythms of our mother’s blood before she herself is born, and this pulse is the thread of blood that runs all the way back through the grandmothers to the first mother. — Layne Redmond

sometimes, we need a reason / To die and sometimes we need only an excuse: / A lover and then nothing like a lover: a car keyed: / The doors rusting in the salt and swagger of a bay — Roger Reeves

Years ago before a massage I’d tell / the therapist there’s a good chance I’ll cry / because my divorce now thirty years on / lives where the trapezius and rhomboid / overlap. — Lisa Rhoades

a touch is enough to let us know we’re not alone in the universe, even in sleep. ― Adrienne Rich

Lying is done with words and also with silence. — Adrienne Rich

There is no simple formula for the relationship of art to justice. But I do know that art—in my own case the art of poetry—means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage. — Adrienne Rich

There is no simple formula for the relationship of art to justice. But I do know that art—in my own case the art of poetry—means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage. — Adrienne Rich

I want my own will, and I want simply to be with my will, / as it goes toward action — Rainer Maria Rilke

We were nostalgic for dirt, / the smell of ruin. / Old things that relinquish their grip. / And we knew, then, / the burden of the former gods— / not the making. The smiting — Laura Ring

From those centuries we human beings bring with us / The simple solutions and songs, / The river bridges and star charts and song harmonies / All in service to a simple idea: / That we can make a house called tomorrow. — Alberto Álvaro Ríos

The jackrabbits and the Tucson Mountains — / We love them, not easily but fiercely, fiercely / In the new way we have had to find. / We love them as who we are now. / We love because that’s what’s left. — Alberto Álvaro Ríos

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 Álvaro Ríos

& the world / was suddenly made / of bridges over low / rivers & these poems / your aviary — Anthony Robinson

Here in the wild oregano / We can’t touch the wind, we / Can’t even see each other. — Anthony Robinson

Plague doctors be walking around looking / Like sinister birds. In 1986 I lost my / Virginity to a blonde plague doctor and now / I still write about birds who’ve split me open — Anthony Robinson

Poetry fits into the world for people who find it important, for people who cling to it, who hold onto it. In the long run, it is essential to me because I always find things I’m going back to, um, you know, that will buoy me. It seems like a weird cliché thing to say, like, “Oh, it helps me survive”—but—you know—it really does. — Anthony Robinson

This is my body, but still I carry yours. I long to be. — Anthony Robinson

White Supremacy is a pervasive system and anybody can be inured to that system. — Anthony Robinson

It’s incredible; You should see it- / But I don’t want you here / And it is mine. — Bailey Rodfield

Every creative act is an act of hypocrisy and violence. You may have to think about it for a while, but I am sure you can discover your own. — Mary Ruefle

Is it really so / that the one I love is everywhere? — Rumi

My heart has become a bird / Which searches in the sky. — Rumi

Ours is not a caravan of despair. — Rumi

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

The cure for the pain is in the pain. — Rumi

Until you’ve kept your eyes / and your wanting still for fifty years, / you don’t begin to cross over from confusion. — 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

Sabbagh-Szymborska

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

I think poetry is vivisection, and if you’re not willing to do that, you’re wasting your time — 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

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

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. — Sarah J. 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

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

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

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

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

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

Anne Sexton, from ‘The Furies’

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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A monkey had his hands cut off / for a medical experiment / and his claws wept. / I know that much.

All day I’ve built / a lifetime and now / the sun sinks to / undo it.

All the cocks of the world are God, / blooming, blooming, blooming / into the sweet blood of woman.

Am I in your ear still singing songs in the rain, / me of the death rattle, me of the magnolias, / me of the sawdust tavern at the city’s edge.

and the birds in their chains / going mad with throat noises

Body of moss, body of glass, / body of peat, how sharp / you lie, emerald as heavy / as a golf course

dark mother, / brood mother, let the sea birds / bring you into our lives / as from a distant island, / heavy as death.

I’d won the world / but like a / forsaken explorer, / I’d lost / my map.

It was as if a morning-glory / had bloomed in her throat / and all that blue / and small pollen / ate into my heart / violent and religious.

more God, more God everywhere / lighter, lighter, / more world everywhere, / sheets bent back for people, / the strange heads of love

Our bodies were trash. / We leave them on the shore.

Out of the mournful sweetness of touching / comes love / like breakfast.

The daisies grow wild / like popcorn. / They are God’s promise to the field.

Vandana Shiva on Living with the Earth

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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A seed giving rise to a seed is a biological process.

A very important part of food safety is knowledge democracy.

At no point do regimes create justice.

Gene shufflers are not creators of life.

Healthy people don’t make the GDP rise.

I don’t call it animal food because animals don’t think it’s food, either. They’re called herbivores for a reason; they like grass.

I think genetic modification of crops is the single biggest violation of the rights of the earth and the rights of human beings.

Ignorance of harm is not proof of safety; it’s ignorance.

It is our duty as human beings to stand up … to work for higher laws … the laws of the earth.

Ninety percent of the corn and soya grown is going to fuel cars and torture animals.

On companies developing genetically modified foods: They’re not breeding anyway; they’re gambling.

On unhealthy, subsidized processed foods: It’s not just not safe; it’s not just not affordable; it’s not food.

Responsibility in science means understanding implications.

[Seed patents are] violative of every principle of science, laws and ethics.

Seventy-five percent of the health burden comes from the food system.

We ought to be calling [genetically modified plants] pesticide-producing plants.

When you love anything … the knowledge comes from that.

—

These quotes from Vandana Shiva’s talk in Kansas City tonight at Unity Temple on the Plaza. Shiva is a world-renowned environmental leader and thinker. Her books include Making Peace with the Earth, Staying Alive, Soil Not Oil, Earth Democracy, Water Wars, Biopiracy, Monocultures of the Mind, and The Violence of the Green Revolution. She holds a master’s in the philosophy of science and a doctorate in particle physics. Before becoming an activist, she was one of India’s leading physicists.

Tate-Tulee

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

My work is therapy. My work is autobiographical. So much of my inner life is non-verbal and so it spills out as art. And my work saves me. And so I work. My work is about being broken and mending and healing and being human. I make my work alone, but then someone else sees it and feels it and then I’m no longer alone. It’s easy for me to be an artist. It’s hard somedays to be a person. And so I work. — 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

How I wish her here / without a girlfriend shield, / without my brother’s strut / turning her from me forever. — Isaac Timm

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

What a terrible gift / to learn how to say the hardest things / straight. — Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

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

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

Every language has a problem because it doesn’t have a tense to use for the dead. — Brian Turner

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

Stephan Torre, from ‘Iron Fever’

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 it’s okay that no one is left / and no one will be there, around the next switchback / as the windshield is smoking blue. — from “Buck Road”

it is love that draws me again / and again from the word emptiness — from “Practice”

jumping / jesus this is some kind of mutha / fucking fun. — from “I/ Excavation”

Not easy to step away / from the sink by an open window / or the plums darkening beneath / cracked rafters of the tool shed, / to stroll without singing / through the first veins of April, / no need to return. — from “After Juarroz”

Now only the tree beside him has / a shape; and he doesn’t reach for it. Dusk breathes out of / the dogwood, and the odor of horses drifts around him. A gentle and enormous sweetness rising, with no body at all, / out of the dark pasture. — from “Walking Barb Wire”

some lives will not root / in geometry / or hold anything / but the coastal / edges / of rivers and tides — from “Windshake”

This light on your wrist / is always ample and exquisite / for the certain feast you have / dug for and deserved. — from “Under the Badger’s Nose, Late January”

You were always good at dreaming yourself / into abandoned places. — from “Buck Road”

—

Source: Iron Fever, by Stephan Torre.

Uschuk

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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Do these refugees remind you, too, of migrant winter birds / tourists drive thousands of miles to see, writing down / in moleskine waterproof notebooks wing shape, / breast color as they click on an app to identify / each nuance of song they meant / to actually hear? — Pam Uschuk

Valéry-Vuong

For more than a decade, I’ve maintained aFor 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. 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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There is in you what is beyond you. — Paul Valéry

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I think about all the women who want you more than me. / I think about yanking the necklaces from the girls’ throats, / unconcerned whether I break the clasps or the girl. — Shelby Vane

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How we live like water: touching / a new tongue with no telling / what we’ve been through. — Ocean Vuong

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I want to take care of our planet because I need a beautiful graveyard. — Ocean Vuong

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Say autumn despite the green / in your eyes. Beauty despite / daylight. Say you’d kill for it. Unbreakable dawn / mounting in your throat. / My thrashing beneath you / like a sparrow stunned / with falling. — Ocean Vuong

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To even write the word father / is to carve a portion of the day / out of a bomb-bright page. — Ocean Vuong

Wainwright-Wunderlich

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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‎I am increasingly in love with the idea of love flowing from each of us according to our abilities, and to each of us according to our needs. — Colleen Wainwright

People love to make a great noise about the importance of hewing to your path. There is a fair amount of literature out there on the noble struggle involved. But rarely do we get into the gruesome details of how doing your own thing will make you feel on a day-to-day basis. Like crazy, for starters. — Colleen Wainwright

… when [Jim] Wilson slows people down, it gives you a chance to watch them moving through space. — Tom Waits

As boys / we knew the difference / between light and dark / We gutted light / skinned it / left the guts at the edge / of the woods — Michael Wasson

Some crumpled carton of cigarettes / a bottle of black death in your hand. / Hold onto me like that. / Like you want to get drunk, stare at the sky — Michael Wasson

In unity of the Holy Spirit / All honour and glory is yours / Almighty Father / Forever and ever / Amazing grace / How sweet the love / That tell me / Nah, I’m just kidding, here’s a song / Here we go, this is it / This is it, though / For real — Reggie Watts

Our dreams are an absence / of fire. They take us / all the way to heaven, / by a curious path. / They take us / all the way to hell. — Jeff Weddle

There are more dead poets
in this world
              than living police officers
and that’s fine,
                      but some poets are still alive
even breathing
                           and some stay alive
           in the ground.
I want to claim hope and there it is.

— Jeff Weddle

it took me years / to reach / this age — John Weeren

Falling in love is a desolating experience, but not when it is with a countryside. — T. H. White

We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. ― Elie Wiesel

My chest is a stranger / I don’t want to know. / Hills mudslide into my armpits. / I can’t reach my arm far enough / across my body. I can only touch / where my heart is. — Ren Wilding

You won’t speak to me if I love / anyone else, leaving me / with cochineals blighting / my chest. I can’t hold enough / water for us both to survive. — Ren Wilding

Our kinship with Earth must be maintained; otherwise, we will find ourselves trapped in the center of our own paved-over souls with no way out. ― Terry Tempest Williams

as each of us wants the other / watching at the end, / as both want not to leave the other alone, / as wanting to love beyond this meat and bone, / we gaze across breakfast and pretend. — Miller Williams

At our age the imagination / across the sorry facts / lifts us / to make roses / stand before thorns. — William Carlos Williams

The body is a formal constraint. It has this one life with which to make eternity. — Elizabeth Willis

Our kinship with Earth must be maintained; otherwise, we will find ourselves trapped in the center of our own paved-over souls with no way out. ― Terry Tempest Williams

Turns out soil is a good audience. — Ella Wilson

Craziness in the air seldom comes / to such barren places. — Thomas Zvi Wilson

Everyone waits for mud to freeze, for cold / that tears flesh like teeth do, the sky / darkened as if by shame and on the ground / the white sheet of surrender. — Thomas Zvi Wilson

“Some buildings loiter, loiter — / and that is why I have seen suddenly everyone is a rat.” Craziness in the air seldom comes / to such barren places. — Thomas Zvi Wilson

The river quickly divides what spoils / then eats away at last / the last of everything that was — Thomas Zvi Wilson

Watch over me. / Night is here / and I am naked. — Thomas Zvi Wilson

Construct an instrument, or find something, or use an instrument as part of a construction which can make 5 different pitches, or 11 or 3 different pitches; 6 different qualities of sound (they can be made to depend on the manner of performance), or 2; and which can sustain sounds at least somewhat before they begin to fade. — Christian Wolff

Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind. Instead of being a single, downright, bluff piece of work of which no man need feel ashamed, our commonest deeds are set about with a fluttering and flickering of wings, a rising and falling of lights. — Virginia Woolf

I like to come and go through different doors more than I like to throw my weight against the same one every time only to discover it was never locked; and I like to change the locks once in a while too; but it isn’t just about keeping it interesting for the Author or Dear Reader; it is about how differently things actually are if you come and go by different portals. — C.D. Wright

Actually, nights are hard for everybody because it’s dark. — Charles Wright

There it stood again: / wood’s edge, and depression’s / deepening / shade inviting me in / saying / no one is here. / No one was there / to be ashamed of me. — Franz Wright

The cowbells follow one another / Into the distances of the afternoon. — James Wright

Suddenly I realize / That if I stepped out of my body I would break / Into blossom. — James Wright

Keep the wars on opposite shores, / spare us from wandering, hungry soldiers / cut loose from all that keeps a man / from doing his worst. — Mark Wunderlich

Charles Wright, from ‘Halflife’

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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All of which is to say, I write poems, I don’t write sermons.

All the well-made, passionless, wooden little poems one sees everywhere nowadays, panting like tongues in the books and magazines. But poetry is not a tongue. Poetry is the dark beast with its mouth open, and you’ve got to walk down that tongue and into the windy mouth. And you’ve got to sing while you walk (33).

“Bar Giamaica, 1959-60” is from a section of The Southern Cross in which each poem—and there are twenty in the section—answers to some technical problem I gave myself. Since technical, these problems are formal by definition, some more exaggerated than others. One poem contains no verbs, for instance, while the following one has a verb in every line. There is a poem that tries to imitate, however shallowly, a musical form, and another that tries to assemble itself as a painting might be composed. There are portraits of the poet with people he could not possibly have been seen with, a poem written entirely in hotel rooms (very difficult for me), a poem that was written at one sitting and without changing one word later (a first for me), a poem that has two endings, one on top of the other, a poem with no reference point, two poems whose major imagery comes from the work of another poet. And so on.

[On Cézanne’s paintings] I think they are even more personally engaged because he is the landscape. And that’s what I would like to become. I would like to become the mental landscape that I write about (103).

I’m a primitive poet, I think. I trust my ear, I trust my instincts because I’m not particularly well-read or learned (86).

If, as Keats has it, Melancholy has her shrine in the temple of Delight, then Experimentation has hers in the temple of Form (121).

[On poetry endings] If you end it on a statement, you’d better have one that looks as though it were squeezed out of the poem, and not just tacked on at the end.

[On his concept of God] It was altered by the same things that formed it. I hold it now like a very delicate object, careful not to drop it (109).

[On Emily Dickinson] She wrote about What Mattered, landscape and eternity, the here and the there, the now and then.

Such a line as has “pippiroo, pippera, pippirum” in it, the evasion of emotion. This is very shaky ground for me (96).

The correct image is always a seed—it contains its own explanation, and defines itself (28).

The Jazz Age is over, the mid-century posturing and frenetics and self-important divisions seem to have passed, or at least settled, and the long, high-energy, self-contained imagistic line’s time has come.

The secret of the universe is Form, even if poems are not the secret of the universe. They’re only clues to the secret of the universe.

Unless you love the music of words, you are merely a pamphleteer (24).

Well, I don’t want to tell a story. That’s why I quote the Chinese student who told Pound years ago that poetry is made up of gists and piths — from one meaningful thing to the next, from one strong image to the next, from one musical moment to the next. That’s how I like to put poems together, rather than an overall narrative story (152).

When I write to myself, l’m writing to the landscape, and the landscape is a personification of the people on the other side. That would be my ideal audience (112).

When the finger of God appears, it’s usually the wrong finger (22).