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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An audience is a group of people listening. The more devotedly this is done, that is the more attentive one is to each sound and the more curiosity one has about those to come, the more an audience is an audience. — John Cage, from Zero: Contemporary Buddhist Life and Thought, Vol. III, 1979.

We have eyes as well as ears, and it is our business while we’re alive to use them. — John Cage

When you start working, everybody is in your studio—the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas—all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you are lucky, even you leave. — John Cage

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

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

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

Everything I know about love and its necessities / I learned in that one moment / when I found myself / thrusting my little burning red backside like a baboon / at a man who no longer cherished me. — Anne Carson

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

Trust me. The trotting animal can restore / red hearts to red. — Anne Carson

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

So sweet / are we / to know / earth’s calloused / verses — Camille Carter

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

Don’t hope for things elsewhere: there is no ship for you, there is no road. As you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner, you’ve destroyed it everywhere else in the world. — C. P. Cavafy

Now that you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner, / you’ve destroyed it everywhere in the world. — C. P. Cavafy

Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong / and my heart lies buried like something dead. — C. P. Cavafy

After this I’m going to cut out my tongue and use it as fertilizer for all / the flowers I’m going to grow in every window of my house. / I’m telling you there’s an after. / I’m telling you this will end. — Sarah Certa

I want to spend a day not thinking my usual thoughts: / how many warm beds there are in the world and how still my hands are homeless. — Sarah Certa

we / are just like everyone else / trying to build a house out of flames / in a world full of flames — Sarah Certa

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

What I can see is that saving public land is saving ourselves. — Cody Chamberlain

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

Read poetry so when you are no longer lonely and are wrapping your arms and legs around your beloved your beloved will tell you “I have never known arms and legs to have such wild abandon.” — Dan Chelotti

The world seems to be a certain thing / until a moment illuminates the text / so brightly it becomes unreadable. — Allisa Cherry

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

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

Someday we’ll lie in dirt. / With mouths and mushrooms, the earth / will accept our apology. — Franny Choi

Our glances, our smiles are spent; laughs exude from all our mouths; our blood flows and we extend ourselves without ever reaching an end; we never hold back our thoughts, our signs, our writing; and we’re not afraid of lacking. — Hélène Cixous

I tell myself in my more curmudgeonly moods that relationships with animals are preferable to those with people. I keep forgetting that people are in fact animals: complicated, conflicted, gloriously noble and hilarious animals. — Chris Clarke

Get as close as possible to who and what you are, and you will become original. — Kevin Clark

To write in your own voice means taking a risk. — Kevin Clark

We carry different authentic voices within ourselves. — Kevin Clark

You have to risk embarrassment to write in a voice that is yours. — Kevin Clark

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

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

Writing is an act of love. If not, it is merely paperwork. — Jean Cocteau

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

Feels like I’m drifting off / to some great mistake—here, to a nameless / atoll somewhere in the Pacific, / seeking—what? — Daniel Comiskey and C.E. Putnam

i came along like an accident, just after my mother’s first miscarrage. i dropped into her life like a toy from a claw machine. who’d thought she’d win a prize, much less the one she wanted. — John Compton

those poems, / like mottled wings, / are my soul. — John Compton

If you haven’t been stabbed or shot, if they took your money under threat and left, consider a poem. — CAConrad

Poetry has NEVER BEEN MORE ALIVE AND I FILL MY TANK WITH IT EVERY MORNING ALIVE ALIVE ALIVE! — CAConrad

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

We need to treat our creative organs like they are vital organs, and we need to protect them. — CA Conrad

Instead of writing a book review, / I write another review of my own / pair of socks. What makes someone else / a perfect judge of my legs? I’m my own / tiny branch in a series of broken / poetry books that I made myself. — Juliet Cook

Poetry is not all that popular; nor is my vagina. — Juliet Cook

Oh and let’s not forget / the heartbreak, / the heartbreak of newly-mown grass, / of any and every awful beauty. — Kay McKenzie Cook

We have homeostatic biological systems. Disease results because of an imbalance of homeostasis. — Dr. Ryan Cooley

how do you come / to be when there are no others, except / science fiction? I am a child feeling / extraterrestrial; whose history, untold, / is not enough. Anyway, it begins with abduction — Rio Cortez

In one story I come from a sea god / with the forest as my mother, and in / the other, I have no mother at all. — Rio Cortez

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

In an oral culture, cliché and stereotype are valued, as accumulations of wisdom, and analysis is frowned upon, for putting those accumulations at risk. There’s no such concept as plagiarism, and redundancy is an asset that helps an audience follow a complex argument. Opponents in struggle are more memorable than calm and abstract investigations, so bards revel in name-calling and in “enthusiastic description of physical violence.” Since there’s no way to erase a mistake invisibly, as one may in writing, speakers tend not to correct themselves at all. Words have their present meanings but no older ones, and if the past seems to tell a story with values different from current ones, it is either forgotten or silently adjusted. As the scholars Jack Goody and Ian Watt observed, it is only in a literate culture that the past’s inconsistencies have to be accounted for, a process that encourages skepticism and forces history to diverge from myth. — Caleb Crain, from “Twilight of the Books”

The third and the last— / he died with / and gave up loving / and lived with her. — Robert Creeley

One eye goes laughing / One eye goes crying / Through the trials / And trying of one life — King Crimson

A California of snow and the surprise / Of illness. I throned myself in the white / Noise of its silence and watched as the world / Fell away. — Cynthia Cruz

An IV drip of consumption, whether or not / I want it. Fashion and excess. / Decadence, and its magnificent diamond / Of glut, / Glittering its warn doom and contagion. — Cynthia Cruz

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

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

This is not meant to be a koan / Or a fable. / I am telling you everything. / One day they’ll remove / The memory out of me. — Cynthia Cruz

The others didn’t let me peep, she mewed beneath a grate / until I found her: mutilated, undernourished. No sibling, no mother. Her / paws were dry magic beads. I touched them. All the love I was not allowed / to give in the human house, she let me. She let me touch them one by one. — Jessica Cuello

(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud / and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows / higher than soul can hope or mind can hide) / and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart / i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart) — E. E. Cummings