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