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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If you can’t delight in the everyday, / you have no future here. / And if you can, no future either. — from “Future Tense”
If you don’t shine you are darkness. / The future is merciless — from “Tomorrow”
There comes a time in one’s life when one wants time, / a lot of time, with inanimate things. — from “Cowboy Up”
We live on Orphan Mountain, / each of us, and that’s how it is — from “The Waters of Babylon”
We won’t meet again. So what? / The rust will remain in the trees, / and pine needles stretch their necks, / Their tiny necks, and sunlight will snore in the limp grass. — “This World Is Not My Home, I’m Only Passing Through”
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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If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there’s no progress. If you pull it all the way out, that’s not progress. The progress is healing the wound that’s below, that the blow made. And they haven’t even begun to pull the knife out, much less pull, heal the wound. They won’t even admit the knife is there. — Malcolm X
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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After all, I don’t need to know how to love / to know I do. — Jeremy Y
A single snowflake with its fractals can become a gun scope with its crosshairs. A fallen tree branch in the road can become a limb of a stranger we’ll never know but have empathy for in a ravaged home or land. … And if we can turn the _____ into the _____, we can turn it back again into something akin to hope and healing. — Sandy Yannone
We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry. — William Butler Yeats
all that separates the ghost is / the body / the sea / the salt. — Hannah Yerington
But to live against all odds, to walk / through this world instead of crawling because / told to crawl? Yes, a dark and powerful magic. — C. Dale Young
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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Before taking a workshop with Afaa Michael Weaver, I didn’t know that when we write about our traumas, our brain reworks the neuroplasticity of that event. Meaning that we have the power to shape how we remember trauma. At the atomic level, poetry has the power to heal us through transgressions. Remembering is a transgression because I do not want to relive the trauma, but shaping it, redrafting it, moves me away from it; I can control it. This process is not much different than cutting a saguaro in the desert because you do not want to scrape needles, to hack at the beautiful cactus, but you must. Shaping a hole, not too small and not too big, moves you away from death; you can drink the green water and live. — Javier Zamora
Sometimes / I wake and my throat is dry, so I drive to botanical gardens / to search for red fruit clutched to saguaros, the ones at dusk / I threw rocks at for the sake of slashing hunger. / But I never find them here. These bats say speak English only. / Sometimes in my car, that viscous red syrup / clings to my throat, and it’s a tender seed toward my survival — Javier Zamora
Well, basically sounds are for listening to, and composition is the act of organizing sounds. — Frank Zappa
The true story of this place / recalls people walking / deserts all their lives and / continuing today, if only / in their dreams. — Ofelia Zepeda
The right to life for everyone. This is exactly what we are fighting for in Ukraine. Very fiercely, together with our military. This is exactly what these weak invaders want to deprive us of. This is exactly what the whole world must protect. — Volodymyr Zelensky
Manifest an emotional landscape. Don’t tell the reader your emotion. Beautiful is an abstract word that doesn’t mean shit. — Susan Zwinger
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 poem is a poem. — A student in one of my poetry workshops
I am drawing more Christians. — A fifth-grade student from one of my poetry workshops
I don’t need sentences. — One of my third-grade students
I know I know what it is … but I … kind of … forgot. Could you remind me what poetry is again? — A student in one of my poetry workshops
I’ve seen the future; it’s scary. I’ve seen it in my dreams. — The same third-grade student
Poem by one of my third-grade students: There is a dog, / two more dogs. / Something that is black will / pop out, like the bird is / flying a kite.
Singsong singing. I look around: gerbil, hamster, hamster. — A fourth-grade student from one of my poetry workshops
omething bad happened to me when I was six. I still remember it. I’m ten now. — A student in one of my poetry workshops
The pen also includes the passages. — A fifth-grade student from one of my poetry workshop.
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These quotes are from the poetry classes I taught children when I lived in Walla Walla, Washington.
Dana Henry Martin 