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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Right now, I’m doing something that matters to me—which is simply putting words on a page. It’s a privilege, too, the allowance to write these words for an audience that I care about—an audience that is interested in what I have to say. — Mark Danowsky

From a Hindu perspective, you are born as what you need to deal with, and if you just try and push it away, whatever it is, it’s got you. — Ram Dass

The future is light drifting like water, / light emptying itself on the white / beaches of the earth, / on the sidewalks of cities, / at roadsides where the dying watch their own ghosts / rising — Joyce Ellen Davis

My lovers know the blast of my chaotic giving; / they tremble at the whip of my supple thighs; / you cross me at your peril, I swallow light / when the warm of anger lashes me into a spin — Kwame Dawes

This is how a man seizes / what he wants, how a man / turns the world over in dreams, / eats a solid meal and waits / for death to come like nothing, / like the open sky, like light / at early morning. — Kwame Dawes

We who gave, owned nothing / learned the value of dirt, how / a man or woman can stand / among the unruly growth, / look far into its limits, / a place of stone and entanglements, / and suddenly understand / the meaning of a name, a deed — Kwame Dawes

this is how it all starts, and now that they’ve found me / things are only going to get louder around here / louder until I give up or give in. — Holly Day

I believe authentic peer support lives at the intersection of love and outrage. — Pat Deegan

For a long time I considered / Hating everything in the world. Instead, I decided / To huff it. All of it. Porcelain. Impotence. The taste of wounds. — Nick Demske

I will make me beautiful if it takes / Uglying everything else — Nick Demske

We draw ponies. / Over and over again, to keep the fires of hell / At bay. Pretty ponies. — Nick Demske

But we are exoskeletons, / vain and lordly, thinking we are hair, skin, nails, teeth.— Risa Denenberg

Either you swallow the pill or you refuse to swallow the pill. You can’t do both, our current model of time being what it is. — Risa Denenberg

My bedraggled / animal-body vetoes evolution, wants to crawl off / behind the couch and die like an old house-cat. — Risa Denenberg

There is not enough salve / on the continent to swathe this busted body — Risa Denenberg

My love for you, my love, for my friends, untethers and floats, / snaps apart and off me like the I.V. tubes and monitor wires / the flailed arms of an octopus unfolding without gravity, / as I reach up in a Frankensteinian effort to shut off my monitors, / the constant alarming of the human prototype my own body keeps rejecting — Tory Dent

I wanna end this prophylactic tour / Afraid that no-one around me / Understands my potato / Think I’m only a spud boy / Looking for a real tomato — DEVO

In my chest I am two-hearted always— / love and what love becomes / arrive when they want to, and hungry. — Natalie Diaz

The things that never can come back, are several. / Childhood, some forms of Hope — the Dead. — Emily Dickinson, as written on the back of a coconut cake recipe card

That watery light people get sometimes / when they’re first arriving / and when / they’re / leaving for good — Michael Dickman

I love to watch them sheathe themselves mid-air, / shut wings and ride the light’s poor spine / to earth, to touch down in gutters, in the rainbowed / urine of suicides, just outside Bellevue’s walls. — Deborah Digges

Words, words were truly alive on the tongue, in the head / Warm, beating, frantic, winged; music and blood / But then I was young. — Carol Ann Duffy

Any fictionist knows that one event, even if poorly executed, can make another happen, the slightest authenticity creating a path to the hidden. — Stephen Dunn

You come to the realization that you probably hate your partner. Naturally, you marry this person, move upstate, and build a tree house. — Bryn Durgin