I am an idealist. I don't know where I'm going but I'm on my way.
This is said to us, even as this counterfeit president has legalized the Confederate Flag in Mississippi.
I am perfectly conscious that this contempt and hatred underlies the general tone of the community towards us, and yet when I even remotely hint at the fact that we are not a favorite people I am accused of stirring up strife and setting barriers between the two sects.
There's a difference between beauty and charm. A beautiful woman is one I notice. A charming woman is one who notices me.
Let us be of cheer, remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never come.
The age I'm at now, you go from being a young girl to suddenly you blossom into a woman. You ripen, you know? And then you start to rot.
To keep your marriage brimming, With love in the loving cup, Whenever you're wrong, admit it; Whenever you're right, shut up.
He played the King as though under momentary apprehension that someone else was about to play the ace.
My situation is different from Mark's. I'm not looking for home runs, I'm looking for the playoffs.
I am unjust, but I can strive for justice. My life's unkind, but I can vote for kindness. I, the unloving, say life should be lovely. I, that am blind, cry out against my blindness.
Pressed caviar has the consistency of chilled tar.
There are those who will say that the liberation of humanity, the freedom of man and mind is nothing but a dream. They are right. It is the American Dream.
I'm saying look, here they come, pay attention. Let your eyes transform what appears ordinary, commonplace, into what it is, a moment in time, an observed fragment of eternity.
In the simplest terms, a leader is one who knows where she wants and gets up and goes.
There are moments when the body is as numinous as words, days that are the good flesh continuing. Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.
Kristin Brown looks as though she could have been mailed first-class to New York for about a dollar and a half.
I just kept on doing what everyone starts out doing. The real question is, why did other people stop?
The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; not in silence, but restraint.
Thought is more important than art. To revere art and have no understanding of the process that forces it into existence, is finally not even to understand what art is.
Lets tell young people the best books are yet to written; the best painting, the best government the best of everything is yet to be done by them.
The good poet sticks to his real loves, those within the realm of possibility. He never tries to hold hands with God or the human race.
Grown men have been seen fleeing after reading the menu posted outside.
God has been replaced, as he has all over the West, with respectability and air conditioning.
The particular article ought in my opinion to be treated with absolute contempt. It is too vile to touch.
Scrooge pushed past Mary number 1 and Joseph number 2 in the wings without so much as an "excuse me". Typical.
I'll be me, but I don't like it.
If what I do prove well, it won't advance. They'll say it's stolen, or else it was by chance.
Help us to be ever faithful gardeners of the spirit, who know that without darkness nothing comes to birth, and without light nothing flowers.
It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything.
I would live all my life in nonchalance and insouciance, Were it not for making a living, which is rather a nouciance.
To love is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.
Take everything easy and quit dreaming and brooding and you will be well guarded from a thousand evils.
All poets' wives have rotten lives Their husbands look at them like knives.
Life - the way it really is - is a battle not between Bad and Good but between Bad and Worse.
There must be such a thing as a child with average ability, but you can't find a parent who will admit that it is his child.
In the tight belly of the dead, Burrow with hungry head, And inlay maggots like a jewel.
Remorse is a violent dyspepsia of the mind.
He thinks that Schiller and St Paul were just two Partisan Review editors.
Lastly, his tomb shall list and founder in the troughs of grass. And none shall speak his name.
I can't do it every day. They're not going to give me much to hit right now. They're pitching me real well. If I get there, fine.
Moon! Moon! I am prone before you. Pity me, and drench me in loneliness.
But maybe it's up in the hills under the leaves or in a ditch somewhere. Maybe it's never found. But what you find, whatever you find, is always only part of the missing, and writing is the way the poet finds out what it is he found.
Each day, and the living of it, has to be a conscious creation in which discipline and order are relieved with some play and pure foolishness.
I'm not keeping track, but the record is there for someone to break.
I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections, Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling, Or just after.
Our poems will have failed if our readers are not brought by them beyond the poems.
The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring.
I said to myself I've got to go up there and do it because the New York Mets keep winning every day. The game was on the line and I wanted to go out there and come through for my team. That win tonight means a lot for us.
Weep not that the world changes - did it keep a stable, changeless state, it were cause indeed to weep.
I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover's quarrel with the world.
A family is a unit composed not only of children but of men, women, an occasional animal, and the common cold.
I was influenced by surrealist poetry and painting as were thousands of other people, and it seems to me to have become a part of the way I write, but it's not.
I think that I shall never see a billboard lovely as a tree. Perhaps, unless the billboards fall, I'll never see a tree at all.
The most exciting happiness is the happiness generated by forces beyond your control.
A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of.
Middle age is when you've met so many people that every new person you meet reminds you of someone else.
The way of life is not as easy as some people think... like me.
There are people who are very resourceful, at being remorseful, and who apparently feel that the best way to make friends is to do something terrible and then make amends.
After the final no there comes a yes and on that yes the future of the world hangs.
I had a lovers quarrel with the world.
I may be as bad as the worst, but, thank God, I am as good as the best.
Unknown to her the rigid rule, the dull restraint, the chiding frown, the weary torture of the school, the taming of wild nature down.
Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul. Worry, fear, self-distrust bows the heart and turns the spirit back to dust.
Words can have no single fixed meaning. Like wayward electrons, they can spin away from their initial orbit and enter a wider magnetic field. No one owns them or has a proprietary right to dictate how they will be used.
When I edited Thirteenth Moon, a feminist literary magazine, I basically supported it myself with an essential grant here and there.
Let's say I live to be eighty - I'm seventy-one now - nothing I do between now and eighty is going to change the way people think about my poetry.
Old myths, old gods, old heroes have never died. They are only sleeping at the bottom of our mind, waiting for our call. We have need for them. They represent the wisdom of our race.
My grandmothers are full of memories,Smelling of soap and onions and wet clay, With veins rolling roughly over quick hands, They have many clean words to say, My grandmothers were strong.
I would rather learn from one bird how to sing than to teach 10,000 stars how not to dance.
If we see light at the end of the tunnel, it the light of the oncoming train.
Hold fast to your dreams, for without them life is a broken winged bird that cannot fly.
It is because the people are citizens that they are with safety armed.
The reaction has been overwhelming, and I'm just getting used to it. I think I actually, though, could get used to it for a long time.
To be nobody but yourself in a world that's doing its best to make you somebody else, is to fight the hardest battle you are ever going to fight. Never stop fighting.
To this congress the poet speaks not of peculiar and personal things, but of what in himself is most common, most anonymous, most fundamental, most true of all men.
Yet would we die as some have done, beating a way for the rising sun.
Various on-line discussion groups are ways to find out about books and writers that one might have remained ignorant of otherwise.
What is lovely never dies, put passes into other loveliness.
I should like you to consider this letter as a resignation; I want to resign as one of your most studious and faithful admirers.
It would be nice to stumble onto one of those great projects so I could stay busy right through my dotage, but I'm not counting on it.
Often and often must he have thought, that, to be or not to be forever, was a question, which must be settled; as it is the foundation, and the only foundation upon which we feel that there can rest one thought, one feeling, or one purpose worthy of a human soul.
A world of blossoms for the bee, Flowers for the sick girl's silent room, For the glad infant sprigs of bloom, We plant with the apple tree.
They, that unnamed "they," they've knocked me down but I got up. I always get up-and I swear when I went down quite often I took the fall; nothing moves a mountain but itself. They, I've long ago named them me.
American poets have been criticized for anything you can think of. For being too English, recently for not being English enough.
Everyone knows that what happened to me is great, but at the other side I care about winning. I care about the team and the situation right now.
Oh, it is I, Incredibly skinny, stooped, and neat as pie, Ignorant as dirt, erotic as an ape, Dreamy as puberty - with dirty hair!
Is there something we have forgotten? Some precious thing we have lost, wandering in strange lands?
If he could sleep on it. He would make his bed with white sheets And disappear into the white, Like a man diving, If he could be certain That the light Would not keep him awake, The light that reaches To the bottom.
He puts his right hand lightly on the cup, I put my left, leaving the right free to transcribe, and away we go. We get, oh, 500 to 600 words an hour. Better than gasoline.
These are matters of external history. They are indeed prominent objects, often changing and giving a new direction to the current; but they tell us not why it flows onward and will ever flow.
A habitual disuse of physical forces totally destroys the moral; and men lose at once the power of protecting themselves, and of discerning the cause of their oppression.
Nature has no mercy at all. Nature says, I'm going to snow. If you have on a bikini and no snowshoes, that's tough. I am going to snow anyway.
Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it ''the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul.'' The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of ''Artist.''
To have great poets, there must be great audiences too.
The need for change bulldozed road down the center of my mind.
If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can totally transform a million realities.
I celebrate myself, and what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease... observing a spear of summer grass.
The trouble with a kitten is that when it grows up, it's always a cat.