Quotes by American Authors - Page 3122

I surrendered my identity in your eyes.Now I'm just like everybody else, and it's so funny, the way monogamy is funny, the waysomeone falling down in the street is funny.I entered a revolving door and emergedas a human being. When you think of meis my face electronically blurred? I remember your collarbone, forming the tiniestsatellite dish in the universe, your smileas the place where parallel lines inevitably crossed.Now dinosaurs freeze to death on your shoulder.I remember your eyes: fifty attack dogs on a single leash, how I once held the soft audience of your hand.I've been ignored by prettier women than you, but none who carried the heavy pitchers of silenceso far, without spilling a drop.
Jeffrey McDaniel
I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same,slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones,icily free above the stones,above the stones and then the world.If you should dip your hand in,your wrist would ache immediately,your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burnas if the water were a transmutation of firethat feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,then briny, then surely burn your tongue.It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,drawn form the cold hard mouthof the world, derived from the rocky breastsforever, flowing and drawn, and sinceour knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.
Elizabeth Bishop
We didn’t deny the obvious,but we didn’t entirely accept it either.I mean, we said hello to it each morningin the foyer. We patted its little headas it made a mess in the backyard,but we never nurtured it. Many nights the obvious showed upat our bedroom door, in its pajamas,unable to sleep, in need of a hug,and we just stared at it like an Armenian,or even worse— hid beneath the coversand pretended not to hear its tiny sobs.
Jeffrey McDaniel
You cannot devote your life to an abstraction. Indeed, life shatters all abstractions in one way or another, including words such as "faith" or "belief". If God is not in the very fabric of existence for you, if you do not find Him (or miss Him!) in the details of your daily life, then religion is just one more way to commit spiritual suicide.
Christian Wiman
anyone who has no feelings for animals has a dead heart.
Raegan Butcher
Those hours given over to basking in the glow of an imaginedfuture, of being carried away in streams of promise by a love ora passion so strong that one felt altered forever and convincedthat even the smallest particle of the surrounding world wascharged with purpose of impossible grandeur; ah, yes, andone would look up into the trees and be thrilled by the wind-loosened river of pale, gold foliage cascading down and by thehigh, melodious singing of countless birds; those moments, somany and so long ago, still come back, but briefly, like firefliesin the perfumed heat of summer night.
Mark Strand
Here dwell together still two men of noteWho never lived and so can never die:How very near they seem, yet how remoteThat age before the world went all awry.But still the game’s afoot for those with earsAttuned to catch the distant view-halloo:England is England yet, for all our fears–Only those things the heart believes are true.A yellow fog swirls past the window-paneAs night descends upon this fabled street:A lonely hansom splashes through the rain,The ghostly gas lamps fail at twenty feet.Here, though the world explode, these two survive,And it is always eighteen ninety-five.
Vincent Starrett
a happy birthdaythis evening, I sat by an open windowand read till the light was gone and the bookwas no more than a part of the darkness.I could easily have switched on a lamp,but I wanted to ride the day down into night,to sit alone, and smooth the unreadable pagewith the pale gray ghost of my hand
Ted Kooser
The crazy thing about poetry is how its simplicity makes it complicated.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Poetry is nothing if it exists only in books. One has to find it in one's own life.
Marty Rubin
Emotion is the poetry of life.
Marty Rubin
I'll be writing as long as I can hold a pen in my curled, crimped arthritic hands and then I'll dictate it, if it comes to that. They'll have to pry my pen out of my cold, dead fingers - and even then, I'll fight 'em for it. Guaranteed.
Wanda Lea Brayton
Moonlight and high wind.Dark poplars toss, insinuate the sea.
Li-Young Lee
Foggy nights bring some comfort.He can get lost in the mistand there is no one to stare or question.
Susie Clevenger
In fiction, the characters have their own lives. They may start as a gloss on the author’s life, but they move on from there. In poetry, especially confessional poetry but in other poetry as well, the poet is not writing characters so much as emotional truth wrapped in metaphor. Bam! Pow! A shot to the gut.
Jane Yolen
Brimming. That's what it is, I want to get to a place where my sentences enact brimming.
Li-Young Lee
I am a student of life, and don't want to miss any experience. There's poetry in this sort of thing, you know--or perhaps you don't know, but it's all the same.
H.P. Lovecraft
Little WordsWhen you are gone, there is nor bloom nor leaf,Nor singing sea at night, nor silver birds;And I can only stare, and shape my griefIn little words.I cannot conjure loveliness, to drownThe bitter woe that racks my cords apart.The weary pen that sets my sorrow downFeeds at my heart.There is no mercy in the shifting year,No beauty wraps me tenderly about.I turn to little words- so you, my dear,Can spell them out.
Dorothy Parker
Those moments before a poem comes, when the heightened awareness comes over you, and you realize a poem is buried there somewhere, you prepare yourself. I run around, you know, kind of skipping around the house, marvelous elation. It’s as though I could fly.
Anne Sexton
Born into thisInto hospitals which are so expensive that it's cheaper to dieInto lawyers who charge so much it's cheaper to plead guiltyInto a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closedInto a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes...
Charles Bukowski
For my part, I love to give myself up to the illusion of poetry. A hero of fiction that never existed is just as valuable to me as a hero of history that existed a thousand years ago.
Washington Irving
Lives of great men all remind us We can make our lives sublime, And, departing, leave behind us Footprints on the sand of time; Footprints, that perhaps another, Sailing o'er life's solenm main, A forlorn and shipwrecked brother, Seeing, shall take heart again. Let us then be up and doing, With a heart for any fate; Still achieving, still pursuing, Learn to labor and to wait.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Many women are singing together of this: one is in a shoe factory cursing the machine, one is at the aquarium tending a seal, one is dull at the wheel of her Ford, one is at the toll gate collecting,one is tying the cord of a calf in Arizona, one is straddling a cello in Russia,one is shifting pots on the stove in Egypt,one is painting her bedroom walls moon color, one is dying but remembering a breakfast, one is stretching on her mat in Thailand, one is wiping the ass of her child,one is staring out the window of a train in the middle of Wyoming and one is anywhere and some are everywhere and all seem to be singing, although some can not sing a note.
Anne Sexton
I have daughters and I have sons.When one of them lays a handOn my shoulder, shining fishTurn suddenly in the deep sea.
Robert Bly
When we walk in the sunour shadows are like barges of silence.
Mark Strand
Depression/The assassin inside me
HastyWords
Door of passage to the other side, the soul frees itself in stride.
Jim Morrison
Though I play at the edges of knowing, truly I know our part is not knowing, but looking, and touching, and loving
Mary Oliver
Even the most political poem is an act of faith.
Martín Espada
This is definitely / for the brothers / who ain't here.
Willie Perdomo
I many times thought peace had come,tWhen peace was far away;tAs wrecked men deem they sight the landtAt centre of the sea,tAnd struggle slacker, but to prove,t As hopelessly as I,tHow many the fictitious shorestBefore the harbor lie.
Emily Dickinson
Be true to your word and your work and your friend.
John Boyle O'Reilly
Don't be afraid of poetry.
Clifton Fadiman
From her thighs, she gives you lifeAnd how you treat she who gives you lifeShows how much you value the life given to you by the Creator.And from seed to dustThere is ONE soul above all others --That you must always show patience, respect, and trustAnd this woman is your mother.And when your soul departs your bodyAnd your deeds are weighed against the featherThere is only one soul who can save yoursAnd this woman is your mother.And when the heart of the universeAsks her hair and mind,Whether you were gentle and kind to herHer heart will be forced to remain silentAnd her hair will speak freely as a separate entity,Very much like the seaweed in the sea --It will reveal all that it has heard and seen.This woman whose heart has seen yours,First before anybody else in the world,And whose womb had opened the doorFor your eyes to experience light and more --Is your very own MOTHER.So, no matter whether your mother has been cruel,Manipulative, abusive, mentally sick, or simply childishHow you treat her is the ultimate test.If she misguides you, forgive her and show her the right wayWith simple wisdom, gentleness, and kindness.And always remember,That the queen in the Creator's kingdom,Who sits on the throne of all existence,Is exactly the same as in yours.And her name is,THE DIVINE MOTHER.
Suzy Kassem
Once a poet calls his myth a myth, he prevents the reader from treating it as a reality; we use the word 'myth' only for stories we ourselves cannot believe.
Adam Kirsch
To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoopin the oats, to air in the lunglet evening come.Let it come, as it will, and don'tbe afraid. God does not leave uscomfortless, so let evening come.
Jane Kenyon
How does a poet know when a poem is ended? Because it lies flat, taut; nothing can be added or subtracted. How does a woman know when a marriage is over? Because of the way her life suddenly shears off in just two directions: past and future.
Carol Shields
I will learn your anger. I will lick your sadness.I will feast on your hunger.
Caitlyn Siehl
Criticism is like politics: if you don't make your own you are by default accepting the status quo and are finally yourself responsible for whatever the status quo does to you.
Annie Finch
A word is elegy to what it signifies.
Robert Haas
At any moment, you know, your manufactured cool could blow.
Nicole Blackman
I don't like a kind of workshop that is about editing--I don't want to sit there and be an editor. I don't want to tell someone how to "fix" a poem.
Natasha Trethewey
When the heart stops oozing blood & the outpouring is clear as water (so to speak) then you know you've turned the corner & will be well.When you look inward & all pathwaysare no longer dark but clearly lighted& shine like transparent drinking strawsthen you know you'll find your way alone.When the gray morning has nothing to do with you & doesn't weigh you downlike a heavy blanket, then you knowthat moving will be easy again and your body will flow through timelike the river it really is, smooth & deep.no rocks, no shallows to smash or catch you,keep you from moving on.When the heart slowsto its normal rhythm and the beautyof birdsong at dawn doesn't make you cry because you are alone listening, then you know that everything has happened that is going to for now, and you can get on withyour life & everything about it that was yours alone and always finer thananyone could ever imagine it would bewithout him.
Grace Butcher
Let be be finale of seem.The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
Wallace Stevens
As she laughed I was aware of becoming involved in her laughter and being part of it, until her teeth were only accidental stars with a talent for squad-drill.
T.S Eliot
Language is fossil Poetry.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I have to live with myself and so, I want to be fit for myself to know.
Edgar A. Guest
In their effort to divorce language and experience, deconstructionist critics remind me of middle-class parents who do not allow their children to play in the street.
Charles Simic
If what we need to dream, to move our spirits most deeply and directly toward and through promise, is discounted as a luxury, then we give up the core -- the fountain -- of our power, our womanness; we give up the future of our worlds. (From "Poetry is Not a Luxury")
Audre Lorde
Every poem I write falls short in some important way. But I go on trying to write the one that won’t.
Dorianne Laux
It’s not the word made flesh we want in writing, in poetry and fiction, but the flesh made word
William H. Gass
We are all old-timers,each of us holds a locked razor.
Robert Lowell
Danse Russe If I when my wife is sleeping and the baby and Kathleen are sleeping and the sun is a flame-white disc in silken mists above shining trees,-- if I in my north room dance naked, grotesquely before my mirror waving my shirt round my head and singing softly to myself: "I am lonely, lonely. I was born to be lonely, I am best so!" If I admire my arms, my face, my shoulders, flanks, buttocks against the yellow drawn shades,-- Who shall say I am not the happy genius of my household?
William Carlos Williams
One way poetry connects is across time. . . . Some echo of a writer's physical experience comes into us when we read her poem.
Jane Hirshfield
You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.
Mario Cuomo
And I or you pocketless of a dime, may purchase the pick of the earth.
Walt Whitman
Poetry: three mismatched shoes at the entrance of a dark alley.
Charles Simic
A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them.
William Stafford
One could say that artists are people who think naturally in highly patterned ways.
Helen Vendler
Maybe if I could slip into Sylvia's mind, sort out the spices in her rack, alphabetize them and dust them off. Maybe then I'd understand how it's the little things that pull you under.
Kelli Russell Agodon