Einstein-Evans

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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Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one. — Albert Einstein

We need to decolonize our language. — Nawal El Saadawi

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

To be conscious is not to be in time / But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden, / The moment in the arbour where the rain beat, / The moment in the draughty church at smokefall / Be remembered; involved with past and future. / Only through time is time conquered — T.S. Eliot

I have three closets and one / is filled with my black clothes—the crying closet—dark when the door opens— / clothes difficult to tell apart — Carol Ellis

he will smile at her way of doing things / the way he smiled at your way of doing things / and at night, he will draw her close, / like you, assimilated, beloved. — C Malcolm Ellsworth

From the porch / I watched you become shadowless, / then featureless, until I knew / you couldn’t see either, and still / the dusk rang out, your aim that easy; / between the iron stakes you had driven / into the hard earth yourself — Claudia Emerson

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

You are a poet and sometimes it helps you / and sometimes it distances you from others. — Shira Erlichman

Let me warn you now: / There is no shame in running away, no / lie you have to tell for being afraid. We / are all supposed to jump. — Justin Evans

I want the right line / for our marriage, but the exact emotion / is a peach packed in ice. I cannot accept this, / though clearly, here it is, cold / and ripe, and now, in hand, passed / between us like a desperate artifact. — Kerry James Evans

Change one letter and womb is bomb. — Kate Evans

Faizullah-Fritsch

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 flyswatter was / a whip. The flyswatter was a flyswatter. / I was thrown into a fire ant bed. I wanted to be / a man. It was summer in Texas and dry. / I burned. — Tarfia Faizullah

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

for years she tells me / we are never so blessed / as to lose the things / we have left behind / or to survive clean / the water’s determined rinse — Jose Faus

I never saw writing as being not art. They’re the same medium. They’re giving you the same things.” — Jose Faus

[paraphrasing] In painting, there are some things that come easier. He talks about the time he saw a log pop out when painting two colors against each other. Painting gives you a strong emotional response, makes you feel more. Words make you feel, they want to go deeper. Dan Jaffe talks about the way words rub against each other. Words can be strict. Color can be freeing. — Jose Faus

Jose Faus tries to find enough “animas” in something to be interested in it. He refers to switching between languages as “code switching.” His real father was out of his life by the time he was three years old.

One nail at the foot / a fecund rabbit / a slithering snake / a bouquet infused / with rose madder eyes / alizarin fugitive color / dripping cadmium bands / thick impasto whites / layer upon layer / ceremoniously ordained — Jose Faus

God is a potato / and a can of boiling water / and it has never been otherwise. / There is no god you cannot eat / or swing against an enemy. — Ari Feld

I saw one in a grocery store / come out with a pint / I saw another come out / with nothing / I saw another putting a rope / through the loops of his pants / I saw one / with a bird on his shoulder — Lawrence Ferlinghetti

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

You’re not a citizen of language or memory, / but I am. — Kathleen Flenniken

Let me drift, let me come / to nothing for a while. Let nothing come to me, let / a hush move with the seeping certainty of water — Ruth Foley

our liver is oak, / it filters your blood like rain through / the leaves it clutches even in January. / It sprouts acorns and will not let them drop. — Ruth Foley

Your liver is oak, / it filters your blood like rain through / the leaves it clutches even in January. / It sprouts acorns and will not let them drop. — Ruth Foley

I don’t want to go down the street smiling like a salesman trying to sell the product of me. — Melissa Fondakowski

Reading poetry requires a quietness not unlike meditation, where oftentimes attempts at “making logical sense” of a poem will both alienate you from the poem, and ruin the poem’s—for lack of a better word—duende. — Melissa Fondakowski

Poetry is what maintains our capacity for contemplation and difficulty. — Carolyn Forché

I am 18 years of age and a proud member of the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma. I believe the most intoxicating aspect about poetry is its tendency to defy the structures that we’ve built around ourselves to comprehend the world in a material, systematic way, and open our eyes, ears, and mind to the unspoken insight of the soul. I truly believe that, in the face of rising hate, greed, and abuse of power, poetry is a form of unapologetic liberation. — Domonic Leading Fox

That’s the very bluff which peers down into / the river. The enemy: the river— / the water violent flowing surging so horribly and deadly / it’s the Devil, I reckon. — Dominic Leading Fox

He curled as / tightly as when he fell. Head tucked. / Isn’t that how it is? Head up, head down, / death. No matter the matter. — Sarah Miller Freehauf

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

I cannot accept that the opposite of desire looks so much like loss. — Joseph Fritsch

Gallaher-Guzlowski

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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By arrogance I mean that when you are writing you must assume that the next thing you put down belongs not for reasons of logic, good sense, or narrative development, but because you put it there. — John Gallaher

It is impossible to write meaningless sequences. In a sense the next thing always belongs. In the world of imagination, all things belong. If you take that on faith, you may be foolish, but foolish like a trout. — John Gallaher

Time doesn’t know which genre this is, / so it’s using all of them. — John Gallaher

The wealthiest 1% are protected by the law but are not bound by it. The bottom 99% are bound by the law but are not protected by it. — Scott Galloway

Like species, poems are not invented, but develop out of a kind of discourse, each poet tensed against another’s poetics, in conversation. — Forrest Gander

At least when placentas clap their / hands while we all play / patty cake, / they are not foreshadowing / the sins / of generations that / do nothing else but / feast upon weakness. — Robert Gano

Some people say I communicate exactly / like goose liver / force fed by / an invisible-handed economy — Robert Gano

Everything but “I LOVE YOU” is small talk. — Andrea Gibson

The first time in my life I’d ever rested, / the first time I didn’t have to play a role / I’d never really wanted to get. / That’s the medicine it is / to be finally seen by someone. — Andrea Gibson

I pray he’s high on the long line rivered across the country / of his open palm held out the window / while driving and singing along / to a stranger’s favorite song he suddenly knows / all the words to but doesn’t know why. — Andrea Gibson

I say moon is horses in the tempered dark, / because horse is the closest I can get to it. — Jack Gilbert

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

We stand / looking at the ruin of our garden / in early November. — Jack Gilbert

Earth pollution identical with Mind pollution, consciousness / Pollution identical with filthy sky. — Allen Ginsberg

I’ll tell you / what I was meant to be— / a device that listened. — Louise Glück

When I’m quiet, that’s when the truth emerges. — Louise Glück

All I have to do after I have the vision is to find the language of music to describe what I have heard, which can take a certain amount of time. I’ve been working in the language of music all my life, and it’s within that language that I’ve learned how ideas can unfold. — Phillip Glass

The word “cancer” follows me. It is the scariest word / in the language, scarier somehow than even “death.” I am being / murdered by my own body. The sparrows go on chirping their / simple three-note song as if there is no extra time for complexity. — Howie Good

now i can’t believe— / that the bible and qur’an and bhagavad gita are sliding long hairs behind my ear like mom / used to & exhaling from their mouths “make room for wonder”— / all my understanding dribbles down the chin onto the chest & is summarized as: / life is merely / to ovum and sperm / and where those two meet / and how often and how well / and what dies there. — Renée Nicole Good

Winnowed, we are—the wind / in widdershins spin; the clock hiding / its souvenirs in a blue wound. — Jessica Goodfellow

Every landscape turns inside out / as we journey through. Shadows stretch but the stars / keep swallowing us. — Brent Goodman

a filigree of illusion against light / that like crab in sand disappears / into the dark heart of nowhere. — Uma Gowrishankar

Hollowing the walls that make my home, I build a scaffold to hold an empty space. Bricks crumble when intimacy pours through the hole like loosened cement. It’s time to leave the building that exists only in my heart and nowhere else. — Uma Gowrishankar

If gold coins are anathema for an ascetic, what about words / that like lust tangle thoughts? — Uma Gowrishankar

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

Nature is making and / Unmaking itself at once — Jason Gray

I’m just like all the rest. I’m in the WORLD THAT IS. — Spalding Gray

Trace my gender / back to its oldest root & you will find my father’s footprint / on my chest, sinking all the way down to my blood. — Torrin A. Greathouse

Particular / and luminous, things tilt / into vision. — Samuel Green

There was the voice in your head the first time / we came / I will die here / like a benediction, light as the first leaf / fall, and you unafraid. — Samuel Green

We have only / the compass of how we walk here / how our feet move / over the soil that will feed us. — Samuel Green

What you thought was a rock / moves, and you think other. / Whatever you focus on becomes / something else, moves away / from its joining. — Samuel Green

You begin by not knowing / where you are, by just / standing and looking for landmarks. — Samuel Green

Fish! Fish! White sun! Tell me we are one / and that it’s the others who scare me, / not you. — Linda Gregg

An illness weakens a handshake; an illness within a handshake; the handshake equals water. November will end soon, I don’t know who I’ll be in December, maybe afraid. — Dan Gutstein

Let me tell you: / God doesn’t give / you any favors / He doesn’t say / now you’ve seen / this bad thing / but tomorrow / you’ll see this good thing / and when you see it / you’ll be smiling — John Guzlowski

Tomorrow / I will be walking in the dawn / and smiling at the closeness / of my honey, the sky. — John Guzlowski

Words appear and I don’t question / why they are there. — John Guzlowski

You come back to the barn / where it all started / where God told you / not to eat the apple / and you find more apples. / And God comes in / And says what are you doing here? / I told you not to come. / And you say I’m just back. — John Guzlowski

Nassir Ghaemi, from His 2017 Letter to a Medical Student

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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As for you, look into your soul. Don’t be shy. Be honest. Be brutal. — Nassir Ghaemi

Awards and rewards aren’t given for great achievements, as society claims, but for small ones. — Nassir Ghaemi

Find your solace inside yourself, not outside. — Nassir Ghaemi

Freud never won a Nobel prize; they gave it to the fellow who introduced frontal lobotomy. — Nassir Ghaemi

It’s an unjust world. How will you live in it? — Nassir Ghaemi

Our ideals are mouthed and empty. — Nassir Ghaemi

Psychiatry is plagued deeply by its self-deception. — Nassir Ghaemi

Society punishes those who improve it. — Nassir Ghaemi

The DSM was and is a social construction, as I said, created by the profession for its own social purposes. — Nassir Ghaemi

There are no DSMs as diagnostic straightjackets in any medical specialty except psychiatry. — Nassir Ghaemi

When we make up our phenotypes for social, economic, and professional purposes why should genetics, biology, neuroimaging, pharmacology, and even psychotherapies correlate with it? — Nassir Ghaemi

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Source: Dr. Nassir Ghaemi’s letter to a medical student who is considering entering the field of psychiatry.

Halinen-Huth

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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Henceforth, may your heart be three trinities of birdcall and birdsong and caw. — Jeremy Halinen

Grief makes one family / of us all. — Sam Hamill

If you love poetry, you are charged with finding poetry that helps you change your life. — Sam Hamill

In that insight of inter-being, it is possible to have real communication with the Earth, which is the highest form of prayer. — Thich Nhat Hanh

Nothing can be by itself alone, no one can be by himself or herself alone, everyone has to inter-be with every one else. That is why, when you look outside, around you, you can see yourself. — Thich Nhat Hanh

This body is not me. / I am not limited by this body. / I am life without boundaries. / I have never been born, / and I have never died. Look at the ocean and the sky filled with stars, / manifestations from my wondrous true mind. Since before time, I have been free. / Birth and death are only doors through which we pass, / sacred thresholds on our journey. / Birth and death are a game of hide-and-seek. So laugh with me, / hold my hand, / let us say good-bye, / say good-bye, to meet again soon.We meet today. / We will meet again tomorrow. / We will meet at the source every moment. / We meet each other in all forms of life. — Thich Nhat Hanh

Writing shit about new snow
for the rich
is not art.

— Kobayashi Issa, trs. Robert Hass

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

This torso is a hard seed, / this mouth a lodestar guttered. / The greater sky above this one is the dream / we ever wake from, and remember — Rebecca Hazelton

I write by hand (first draft) / because it’s harder to lie / dissemble or distract / when my body’s involved — Mark Hein

Each moment stands under an enormous vertical and horizontal pressure of information, potent with ambiguity, meaning-full, unfixed, and certainly incomplete. — Lyn Hejinian

It was a brilliant cure, but we lost the patient. — Ernest Hemingway

Write hard and clear about what hurts. — Ernest Hemingway

I’ve, I’ve got a bone / to pick and a crow to pluck. / I’ve got my tail tucked, wound / to lick. I prefer not to talk. / I said, I prefer not to talk. — Andrea Henchey

How can I make it beautiful? That’s always my goal. — Sara Henning

Nights I give myself / to memory’s epithet, your chin hard / on my clavicle, your hands / pinioning my wrists to the pillow / as though they were nectar- / containing spurs of delphinium — Sara Henning

tell me the story / of the body we carry with us. — Sara Henning

Which of us stays at her guttural refrain for days, though our love was never so close to our hunger? What is love but a set of urges? Hold the nape of the neck just so—carry the pieces of the body just so— — Sara Henning

The noisy rooks pass over, and you may / Pace undiverted through the netted light / As silent as a thrush with work to do — John Hewitt

This is where we are at right now, as a whole. No one is left out of the loop. We are experiencing a reality based on a thin veneer of lies and illusions. A world where greed is our God and wisdom is sin, where division is key and unity is fantasy, where the ego-driven cleverness of the mind is praised, rather than the intelligence of the heart. — Bill Hicks

Don’t try to sell anything door-to-door would be my advice, particularly your poems. — Bob Hicok

You never really know / if you’ve done any good with your life, / so why not act as confused / as everyone else — Bob Hicok

My mother’s smile a swing-bridge / to an island city, her voice a parachute / that possessed everything it is possible to know. — Alan Hill

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

And within my body, / another body … sings; there is no other body, / it sings, / there is no other world — Jane Hirshfield

I don’t want to scream forever, / I don’t want to live without proportion / like some kind of infection from the past — Tony Hoagland

Let it keep falling / Until maybe it lands in the basin of the hips / Let the Earth hold it / Like a giant seed / That’s been waiting to find the soil — Thomas Holmes

Throw out the Cartesian dualism and bio-reductionism AND psychological reductionism. Our minds are embodied, emotive, enacted, socially embedded, and extended through tools, physical and symbolic. No good mental health treatment neglects any of these aspects. — Thomas Holmes

First you will come to the Sirens who enchant all who come near them. If any one unwarily draws in too close and hears the singing of the Sirens, his wife and children will never welcome him home again, for they sit in a green field and warble him to death with the sweetness of their song. There is a great heap of dead men’s bones lying all around, with the flesh still rotting off them. — Homer

But the newborn rabbits— / no, they were not so lucky. They didn’t live / for forty years like the crane does. They saw only / grass and a few flowers, maybe the sky / and a black vine moving quickly, a dark mouth. — Patricia Hooper

It is fascinating to see into other minds, especially across culture. It has given me the impression that experience and perception are much more commonly shared than doctrines of cultural difference often suggest.  — Paul Hoover

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

I always felt like reading a poem was an experience analogous to that of encountering language. Sure, there’s persona, and the world of the poem, and voice etc etc etc. But it’s all made out of language, and the language is the first thing I am made aware of. — Lisa Howe

What happened in our house taught my brothers how to leave, how to walk / down a sidewalk without looking back. / I was the girl. What happened taught me to follow him, whoever he was, / calling and calling his name. — Marie Howe

Truth is / we have been long upon the trail / of this disaster, this smile of stove in boats / and grit along the shore. Does everyone / come home at last / to ruin? — Christopher Howell

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

Saving superpowers for the last act / is such a classic mistake. My body has no plans & no prototype, / though I still expect to rush in & rescue myself. — 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

Semicolons indicate relationships that only idiots need defined by punctuation. — 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

This is what poetry is now: the presentation of self, the presentation of words (and of images [and of images of words]), links to other content, self-promotion, and the integration of poetry into the entirety of one’s personal (and sometimes also professional) life. All of this is good and all of it is dangerous. — Geof Huth

This is what a black bear sounds like. A low deep moan, like I have disappointed him yet again. The yard is littered with sticks. A winter’s harvest collected one at a time. How we count the days. I am running out of hunger. Why do we cry? What does it mean to lose a person when we are all temporary anyway? It is an irrational reality, how beautiful a hewn beam is. How one thing can become another. — Leo Hwang

Julia Hartwig, from ‘In Praise of the Unfinished’

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 absurd hope awakens that everything / scattered chaotically in the world will settle down / again, in natural order. — from “Fortune-Telling from the Seabed”

But the one who reads your poems / doesn’t care how much you paid for them — from “Before”

But there were years no one counted / royal years / when we played under ancient oaks / and eternity was with us — from “Nontime”

consider the rivers and mountains / They remember more than people / their memory is more faithful and deeply hidden — from “My Greetings to a Distant River”

It is better to be careful, however, judging the happiness of others. — from “Not to Be Certain”

Perhaps nothing in the world / is used with such wastefulness / or such stinginess / as time — from “Not Eternity and Not a Void”

The old man does not threaten anyone with his / own death, doesn’t share his despair with anyone, / and doesn’t complain that for him everything was at / first too early, then too late. — from “The Old Man”

To understand nothing. Each time in a different / way, from the first cry to the last breath. / Yet happy moments come to me from the past, like / bridesmaids carrying oil lamps. — from “Return to My Childhood Home”

What in this asphalt suburb / could bring forth such joy / such exaltation of prayer when it is still dark / and not a single streak of light in the sky — from “Before Dawn”

who will reject us with relief / freeing us from the ties of art / which constantly demands something / asks questions / scorns an easy victory — from “Questions”

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Source: In Praise of the Unfinished, by Julia Hartwig.

Sam Hamill on Poetry

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 poetry aspires to the condition of music. Which is to say poetry aspires to be heard. Not read. Heard. — Sam Hamill

Do we tend to overexplain ourselves? Absolutely. — Sam Hamill

Even how you break a line is political. — Sam Hamill

I’m often asked ‘Who do you envision as your audience.’ My answer is, I don’t. — Sam Hamill

If you know what the poem is about, you’re already in trouble. — Sam Hamill

In poetry, I don’t have to be an old fat white guy. I can be anyone I want. — Sam Hamill

In the open form, the poem is about the impulse and the discipline to feel that impulse out. — Sam Hamill

Learning to think and act in the active voice is good for you. It breaks slothful habits. — Sam Hamill

Poetry exists as a body attempting communication. — Sam Hamill

Presumably we turn to poetry in part because it has no marketable value. — Sam Hamill

The demands that you make of your readers varies from poem to poem. — Sam Hamill

The only reason I became a poet is because I loved the company. — Sam Hamill

The poem has to be an act of discovery. I insist on this. — Sam Hamill

The possibility of the poem exists in communication. — Sam Hamill

The trick is to feel and think inside the poem, not reflect on thinking and feeling. — Sam Hamill

The way of poetry is a way of being alive. — Sam Hamill

This stuff was settled in the 1950s: The New Critics lost. We won. — Sam Hamill

There’s more jazz than white jazz. Trust me on this. — Sam Hamill

When a poem has no music, it’s prose. I don’t care how you chop up the lines. — Sam Hamill

Write like me: That’s the secret message of every workshop, isn’t it. — Sam Hamill

You can’t write a poem with an audience in mind unless you are writing for children or idiots. — Sam Hamill

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Source: A workshop Sam Hamill led in Seattle in 2008.

Igloria-Issa

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 is elegy, / departing or gone; incessant rain, / language the earth understands. — Luisa A. Igloria

more than once I have been surprised to find / that the light has also has touched a hidden / lever, a fiber of longing in my throat. — Luisa A. Igloria

and now that he can speak it / aware that he has spoken / there is nothing but awareness — David Ignatow

Because words have no effect upon the wind / or the trees, I am a curious onlooker — David Ignatow

Don’t tell me you, too, are inconsolable. / I’ll be in the bathroom forever / building sandcastle cities in the tub, / digging moats to keep out the invading / armies of others’ opinions. — Kenan Ince

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

All the time I pray to Buddha / I keep on / killing mosquitoes. — Issa

Good house: / sparrows out back / feasting in the millet. — Issa

In this world / we walk on the roof of hell, / gazing at flowers. — Issa

Jackson-Jung

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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[We] are being persuaded to spend money we don’t have, on things we don’t need, to create impressions that won’t last, on people we don’t care about. — Tim Jackson

‎But / waiting your turn to talk is never listening. — Russell Jaffe

Poems are proliferated with grassy smells. My friends and family / react like they are going to get something. — Russell Jaffe

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

There is only one world, the world pressing against you at this minute. — Storm Jameson

So stare and consider and stare and consider, for the water is uniform and there / is no wind, and the boat is so small that even it can no longer be spoken of — Christopher Janke

As an animist I can believe in living language that self-arranges. — Matt Jasper

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

It’s not impolite / to frighten if by frightening you can get away. — Matt Jasper

Like the river. / The water and a snake going up to the sky. / That’s bad luck — / a snake going up to the sky for a river. — 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

The lay of the land is that we lay under it. Our voices are buried yet we send up stalks that die unwatered then whistle pretty songs in the wind. — Matt Jasper

There’s no way to pause / or connect / one moment to the next to / the next except by shaking / a dead stalk above the fertile earth / to make ourselves erupt from the ground / for another round of chorusing for all of this / to happen again. — Matt Jasper

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

When I discuss art and expansive, inclusive vision as a great power, I kind of mean it. We need to be visualizing the society we need and the means to it or we will have our daydreams tossed into bookburn piles and our little toddlers left playing in backyards as we’re hauled away to the reeducation camps. — Matt Jasper

While in a conversation, stop listening / and then begin to listen again. / Fill in the parts in between / with whatever you wish. / A llama, perhaps. — Brett Elizabeth Jenkins

Humanity puts itself in a state of condemnation and then begins this whole game of being OK. — Georgi Y. Johnson

It’s OK to grasp at things for a moment, but we have to be able to put them down. — Georgi Y. Johnson

The mind is a mere receiver, yet early on, it identifies itself as the great cause of creation. — Georgi Y. Johnson

The rain is experience—the naked, sentient experience of living—and the mind has no control over that dimension. — Georgi Y. Johnson

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

What is known will be melted, scattered, recycled and reabsorbed. If not now, then in the now of our death. — Georgi Y. Johnson

While we’re manifesting physically, there’s an opportunity to do something, to let something move through us. — Georgi Y. Johnson

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

Long before / the roads, / she tells me, / there were roses, native, / planted by no one, / & when / it rained they / frenzied fields, / to feed local deer. — Luke Johnson

O / tree / into the World, / on the secret top / Of / seed / beginning / out of Chaos / song — Ronald Johnson

Feeding wild birds is a deceptively commonplace activity. Yet, it is one of the most intimate, private, and potentially profound forms of human interaction with nature. — Darryl Jones

In order to trash the planet, you have to trash people. — Van Jones

Whatever lies you have / there in that nail-clipping of time, / give them to me. — Judy Jordan

If the word is a sign, it means nothing. But if the word is a symbol, it means everything. — Carl Jung

No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell. ― Carl Jung

Suffering is not an illness; it is the normal counterpole to happiness. — Carl Jung

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

Kafka-Kunitz

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 think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? … we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. — Franz Kafka

It turns out that the word happiness is just not a useful word anymore because we apply it to too many different things. — Daniel Kahneman

Nothing in life is quite as important as you think it is while you’re thinking about it. — Daniel Kahneman

We do not attend to the same things when we think about life and we actually live. — Daniel Kahneman

We have very little idea of how little we know. We’re not designed to know how little we know. — Daniel Kahneman

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

And when they bombed other people’s houses, we / protested / but not enough, we opposed them but not / enough. — Ilya Kaminsky

Know this: / yours is the name that slid first to my lips / when the light became enormous / and the anxious voices flared / like starlings — Gina Keicher

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

It is just simple attention that allows us to truly listen to the sound of the bird, to see deeply the glory of the autumn leaf, to touch the heart of another and be touched. — Jack Kornfield

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

The windmills of / Oklahoma look / In every direction — Jack Keroac

As life goes on, time isn’t the largest thing to think of, / it’s the smallest. — Suji Kwock Kim

Into the dirty waters of our dead / the ash that was flesh becomes / precious. Hard light drags its claw / through the brine. — Sally Rosen Kindred

If our methods are simply divisive and further traumatizing—without actualizing the justice that we so desperately want to work for—then what are we prioritizing in our quest? Who is being cared for and who has been held accountable? — Amy King

So the hens and geese make us think in terms of help / outside, how they flap and move with fat ease in front of trains, / across the chopping block, to the hungry winters of final leviathans, / even as they land just so on the wires above us ― Amy King

Beyond this is a precise amnesia / a membrane of forgetfulness / I keep my promises / I do not tell this story / Not even to myself — Janice King

and for her, / whose face / I held in my hands / a few hours, whom I gave back / only to keep holding the space where she was — Galway Kinnell

You live / under the Sign / of the Bear, who flounders through chaos / in his starry blubber: / poor fool, / poor forked branch / of applewood, you will feel all your bones / break / over the holy waters you will never drink — Galway Kinnell

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

I am a pond but / when a frog gets intimate / I keep my mouth shut. — Bill Knott

Tate is a poet; Hass (or at least in this instance) is a conveyor-belt. — Bill Knott

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

Everything could be taken from me, except my ability to create. — Jesse Krimes

If I dreamt I set a field on fire, was it a field of plastic? / This green smoke settles on the skin and burns like ice, like stone. — Andrew Kozma

I stumbled along my own blockades / believing friends would come / with food in baskets thinking / there were barriers against blackness — Lisa C. Krueger

The poem on the page is only a shadow of the poem in the mind. And the poem in the mind is only a shadow of the poetry and the mystery of the things in this world. — Stanley Kunitz

Grandfather was giddy / With parturition and slick / “God help me,” I thought / “Letting fast river talk me / Into metempsychosis” / Water flowed one way / The dead the other. — Stephen Kuusisto

It may seem surprising that the world of poetry should be as infected with ableism as it is. Poetry is by its nature an enemy of the normalizing. Its innate antagonism to the normative in favor of the individualizing truths of human experience should make it open its arms wide to the complex sensoria and angle of vision of disability life. And yet it doesn’t. — Stephen Kuusisto