We built tall buildings, but we have not become any taller.

Shelley’s servant”. Wasn’t that a wonderful gesture of humility by someonewho was such a great poet himself? And later, Bharatiyar had his own dasan, the poet Subburathinam, who tookthe pen name Bharathidasan. Subburathinam’s poetry inspired...

At the edge of madness you howl diamonds and pearls.

The life we’re given is on a thread, so wear it well.

Stars ink your fingerswith a lexicon of flameblazing rare knowledge.

Poetry is Life. We experience poetry from the time we awake each morning and inhale that fresh breath of air. You are living poetry. Poetry is not defined by the laws of man. Inspiration is...

We don’t know anything about silent sages, buried knowledge, the eye of the mute poet, serene seers, yet how many talkative destroyers, prophets and ideologues, teachers and beautifiers there are on the other side.

The light teaches you to convert life into a festive promenade.

Rare-book people have this in common with poets: they too are born, not made.

Poets sing our human music for us.

A poet, any real poet, is simply an alchemist who transmutes his cynicism regarding human beings into an optimism regarding the moon, the stars, the heavens, and the flowers, to say nothing of the spring,...

Hope is a most beautiful drug.

When he was in college, a famous poet made a useful distinction for him. He had drunk enough in the poet’s company to be compelled to describe to him a poem he was thinking of....

Poets are never unemployed, just unpaid.

Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought; words will tell you things you never thought or felt before.

He wanders, like a day-appearing dream,Through the dim wildernesses of the mind; Through desert woods and tracts, which seem Like ocean, homeless, boundless, unconfined.

You touched my heart…ever so softlyand I realizedtears had never been…merely saltand the rainOh the Rain!had never been merely water.

And when they dusted my mind for your fingerprints they found yours.

. . . Orpheus struck dumb with hindsight.

Cosmos is God, who whispered the syllable of life.

They grew; they did not talk about growing.

Holy books are an insult to a God with good intentions.

He did not profess to anybody how to reach others without professing.

Loveis not leaning on each other, adjusting to fit a different size.Loveis simply two hands reached out in the darkness,saying; I’ll be your light, if you’ll be mine.

children of the mist” – they must dwell apart from men and contemn their kind, or they fear they shall be only taken for common-place characters. They forget that poetry is the language which speaks...

Charaktere sind vielleicht schon bezeichnet und beschrieben worden, seit es Lebewesen gibt, die sprechen können. Dichter haben das sehr differenziert getan; man denke an Proust, Tolstoi oder Dostojewski. Diese Autoren haben die innere Dynamik eines...

I recall that now and I recall everything for what do we have but the past to parent us?

Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.

We say God and the imagination are one . . .How high that highest candle lights the dark.

your smile.is the ultimategolden dream.all the poemsin the worldare waking up from.

because some thingssometimesaren’t ours to hold,but just beautiful to listen to.

Keep a journal, and don’t assume that your work has to accomplish anything worthy: artists and peace-workers are in it for the long haul, and not to be judged by immediate results.

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.

There can be no forced inspiration.

There are countless circles of hell; believers never penetrate the ninth circle.

How many unuttered words died in the heads of those for whom a word was too expensive.

Stars are only the rain of the Absolute.

There are good reasons to learn how to read. Poetry isn’t one of them… Why can’t poets just say what they want to say and then shut up?

The poets carry feelings, delivering desires and dispatching dreams. Even if sometimes they need pack some sorrows, distill several disappointments and filter strange nightmares.

Only a poet can translate for the dead.

I believe in the fatal hairdo just for the love of saying fatal hairdo.

Walking by yourself in the rain is for college kids who think loneliness makes poets.

Oh what a poet I will flay myself into.

the intensityin your eyesburns my penas i write.

When there’s a moon the shadows in the house grow larger;invisible hands draw back the curtains,a pallid finger writes forgotten words on dustof the piano…

The pure playfulness of certain wholly whimsical portions of (Charles) Cros’s work should not obscure the fact that at the center of some of his most beautiful poems a revolver is leveled straight at us.

Repetita iuvant. Italy, a land of great saints, poets, sailors, artists, statesmen, businessmen, lawyers, intellectuals, professors, journalists, whores, gangsters, religious parasites and dickheads.

There is a moonlight note in the Moonlight Sonata; there is a thunder note in an angry sky.

We need knew knights, but without swords.

Teaching others, he corrected himself.