When the others were picked up and walked home by friends or fathers or best friend’s sisters,I was the kid in a grey hoodie, walking with the poets, the singers, the thinkers, and I was...

The poet or the revolutionary is there to articulate the necessity, but until the people themselves apprehend it, nothing can happen … Perhaps it can’t be done without the poet, but it certainly can’t be...

I had never known any man to die while speaking in terza-rima

I’d spent way more years worrying about how to look like a poet — buying black clothes, smearing on scarlet lipstick, languidly draping myself over thrift-store furniture — than I had learning how to assemble...

Oh, there are no living poets, Miss Van Damn. We’re not entirely sure there ever were. They’ve found some shreds of sonnets in England and, embedded in a chalk wall of a cave in France,...

A poem is a meteor.

a flower knows, when its butterfly will return, and if the moon walks out, the sky will understand;but now it hurts, to watch you leave so soon,when I don’t know, if you will ever come...

poets. have the toughest jobin the universe-of turning silenceinto eloquence.

Evening came, a paw, to the gray hut by the river.

Omnipotence and omniscience are the end of power and knowledge.

Nobility is not only in forgiveness.

We hear only our own voices, still echoes returning to our emptiness.

Absolute equals nothingness.

The seasonal urge is strong in poets. Milton wrote chiefly in winter. Keats looked for spring to wake him up (as it did in the miraculous months of April and May, 1819). Burns chose autumn....

Don’t ask me any questions. I’ve seen how things that seek their way find their void instead.

Poets create gods, philosophers destroy them.

It is ferocious, life, but it must eat . . .

If the poets offered us nothing more than another make-believe world, they would be mere sellers of drugs or, at best, sweetmeats.

I think writers are the most narcissistic people. Well, I musn’t say this, I like many of them, a great many of my friends are writers.

A poem in the heart is worthmore than a million dollarsin the bank account.

Although Poets are vain and ambitious, their vanity and ambition are of the purest kind attainable in this world. They are ambitious to be accepted for what they altimately are as revealed in their poetry.

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.