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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Eventually rarity is all they are made of. The condor is an icon of extinction. There’s little else to it now but being the last of its kind. And in this lies the diminution of the world. ― Helen Macdonald

How can you love something, how can you fight to protect it, if all it means is loss? ― Helen Macdonald

I think of what wild animals are in our imaginations. And how they are disappearing — not just from the wild, but from people’s everyday lives, replaced by images of themselves in print and on screen. The rarer they get, the fewer meanings animals can have. ― Helen Macdonald

It takes / a while and then a while longer / to live as though you are / your single tenant, to find / the narrative that is more than / a drone of loss. — Al Maginnes

Photographs economize the truth; they are always moments more or less illusorily abducted from time’s continuum. — Sally Mann

I also learned to think of a syllable as a way / to divide a word / like how a window divides / a building from a bird / or how breath divides / the living from the dead. — Clint Margrave

When water is no longer alive below the surface, then it becomes stagnant. Humanity has the capacity to pollute living water, to deaden it. — David Marquis

If you raise a man from childhood to believe in his own power, it is not surprising that he sometimes abuses it. — Peter Marin

People have an immense capacity for passivity and obedience, and it takes more ego and courage than most of them have to speak out forcefully in a situation where what they believe to be genuine mystical powers stand over and against them. — Peter Marin

Each success, no matter how small, in practice of what I love is a lightning strike against the dark. — Clare L. Martin

I’ll have to take your computer away if it makes you cry too much. — Jon Martin

Normal people seem like they are from TV. — Jon Martin

The language is like gravity. — Jon Martin

I’ve stayed up all night, pushing away my darkness. / Outside, there’s a buck who walks around the cathedral grounds. / Looking for lost fawns. Sometimes, I almost believe it’s you. — Eduardo Martínez-Leyva

Earth finds a way, the spring of a brown-faced song / in its teeth, pushing demise back on its knees. — Rethabile Masilo

Oklahoma happens when you try to say something and you have a big thumb — Rethabile Masilo

Overwhelming, / to sit here among his things, and pull a writing pad / forward, and find you have absolutely nothing to say / to the world. — Rethabile Masilo

What that struggle has made of me is a living man. / I’m covered in loss. What must vindicate him / is the sun: planets whirling around, the moon stuck / among reeds outside our hut, lighting the lake / with a reverence that even midnight needs. — Rethabile Masilo

What we value is not who people are but what they produce or what they consume. — Dr. Gabor Maté

This birdlessness. — Kristi Maxwell

Coming black / into the deep South, / my friend says, / is like returning / to an elegant home / you were beat in / as a child. — Jamaal May

as the dark withdrew / and gave slow light to the swallows, / to the words we’d given / each other, which were few and kind and true. — Linda McCarriston

My mind is fingers holding a pen. — Michael McClure

I was transformed / My father’s only son my other self / My other half invisible and lived / The only one of us in the visible / World in the world where horses do not speak / And humans do not hide in horses’ bod- / ies — Shane McCrae

I love art that captures the essence of a specific region. I’m absolutely obsessed with Frank Stanford’s poetry, for example. But I also love poetry that’s seemingly placeless, even private—like Vasko Popa’s “The Little Box.” I used to feel more partisan about concrete/personal vs. abstract/private. But I don’t have those feelings anymore—these days, partisan attitudes about poetry bore me. — Michael McGriff

If my life has been a series of inadequacies, at least I know / by these great whirls of dust how beauty / and oblivion never ask permission of anyone. — Michael McGriff

It was never feasible: no skin no light / no prayers save us for we have, / all of us, swallowed / ourselves, and contain / only one another. — Kristen McHenry

When uncertain, you look to the Star-Nosed Mole, of the genus Condylura; its pink, fleshy tentacles used to sort matter by touch. — Kristen McHenry

I want to walk into the chilly desert draped under your arm, / blanketed by all of you and all of the stars / that seem more like ancestors, / winking and beaming down at us, / granting me the wish that has lived in my skeleton since my / conception: / to be loved unconditionally / a freedom they’ve prayed over me endlessly. — Kaitlyn McNab

Left to ourselves, / we always go over and over what’s missing — / tooth, dog, money, self-control, and even losses / as troubling as the absence the widower can’t stop / reaching for on the other side of his bed a year / later. — Wesley McNair

Waiting for planks to cure for your coffin / is like painting your own house over and / over. — Carrie Meadows

Trying to forget my own childhood, / like the dream of being hit by a truck, / that shakes you so hard that when you waken, / you wonder for a moment how you will take care / of your daughter with crushed legs. — Rachel Mehl

Ye, though I zodiac in troughs / of violent human history, / I will feel no evil in pillboxes and bomb scars. — Karla Linn Merrifield

If you want to study the social and political history of modern nations, study hell. — Thomas Merton

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers … .There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun. — Thomas Merton

Remember how the naked soul / comes to language and at once knows / loss and distance and believing — W. S. Merwin

Swing by starwhite buildings and / Lights come to life with a sound / Of bugs under the dead rib. / Miles of it. Still the same city. — Thomas Merton

The great temptation of modern man is not physical solitude but immersion in the mass of other men, not escape to the mountains or the desert (would that more men were so tempted!) but escape into the great formless sea of irresponsibility which is the crowd. — Thomas Merton

There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun. — Thomas Merton

This question came up again and again during the Vietnam War when a lot of us were trying to write poems about it. Did the poems do any good? We’ll never know. We certainly wrote, all of us, some very bad poems, and we knew it. But the alternative was not to do it at all, and that seemed unthinkable, and it still does. A bad poem, after all, doesn’t do any harm; it disappears in a little while. — W.S. Merwin

the splintered skyline of the city / glitters in a silence we all know / but cannot touch or reach for with words — W. S. Merwin

The destruction creates poetry. Destruction creates fragmented singing. — K. Silem Mohammad

The age of lawn ornaments is over. — Nathan Moore

Our lore: deceit. I miss you. My / crud enters, imitating the ocean. — Nathan Moore

So far, I’m eluding capture. — Nathan Moore

Even the hardest part of the self / will be lost in tiny increments / to strangers / Yesterday was shoved / off a moving train — Nathan Moore and Dana Henry Martin

This is my life now, / missing one beautiful thing / because I’m transfixed by another — Lisa Mottolo

My daughter returns / to show me how she scraped together / just enough sidewalk grit and ice to sculpt / a snowman the size of a pigeon. She props it up / in the weeds we call a yard and it stays for days, / long after the sun revokes what’s left / of the frost and glitter. It delights us without / the burden of surprise, which has never improved / anyone’s life, or built a single beautiful thing. — Abby E. Murray

I love poetry for the unemployment it causes, for how it constrains one to work always beyond one’s own intelligence, for its not requiring one to rise socially. — Les Murray

And language is the thrill that holds the unknown in its vague and shifting ways. — Eileen Myles

But female reality has consumed male reality abundantly—we have to in order just to survive so female reality always contains male and female. — Eileen Myles

Writers are alone too much with their thoughts, and they are bent over. They’re wizened, thin-blooded. They’re living in an abstract realm all the time of ideas, whereas the painter is plastic, you know. And the musician of course is living, well, this is not true, but you would think he’s living an angelic life. He’s up there with the birds. — Henry Miller

I would rather speak in tongue clicks and superlunary broomsticks than utter words of hate. — Peggy Munson

My daughter returns / to show me how she scraped together / just enough sidewalk grit and ice to sculpt / a snowman the size of a pigeon. She props it up / in the weeds we call a yard and it stays for days, / long after the sun revokes what’s left / of the frost and glitter. It delights us without / the burden of surprise, which has never improved / anyone’s life, or built a single beautiful thing. — Abby E. Murray

When a sense of nature is erased from a place, the place itself conceptually disappears and becomes merely “flyover country.” The middle of the country becomes “the middle of nowhere,” as if it were not a place in the natural world. A place that is conceptually nowhere is negligible, disposable, abandonable. — Benjamin Myers