Saki says that youth is like hors d'oeuvres: you are so busy thinking of the next courses you don't notice it. When you've had them, you wish you'd had more hors d'oeuvres.
Let them shoot us in the head, My blood will grow roots and will blossom.
There is bad in all good authors: what a pity the converse isn't true!
Within my reflection I see tears, for what I see is the truth, are my greatest fears.
It was as important to live poetically as to write poems.
β¦wisely mingled poetry and prose.
Sexual intercourse began in nineteen sixty-three (Which was rather late for me) between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles' first LP.
The first fact of the world is that it repeats itself. I had been taught to believe that the freshness of children lay in their capacity for wonder at the vividness and strangeness of the particular, but what is fresh in them is that they still experience the power of repetition, from which our first sense of the power of mastery comes. Though predictable is an ugly little world in daily life, in our first experience of it we are clued to the hope of a shapeliness in things. To see that power working on adults, you have to catch them out: the look of foolish happiness on the faces of people who have just sat down to dinner is their knowledge that dinner will be served. Probably, that is the psychological basis for the power and the necessity of artistic form...Maybe our first experience of form is the experience of our own formation...And I am not thinking mainly of poems about form; Iβm thinking of the form of a poem, the shape of its understanding. The presence of that shaping constitutes the presence of poetry.
L'aube exalteΓ© ainsi qu'un peuple de colombes, et j'ai vu quelquefois ce que l'homme a cru voir! (And dawn, exalted like a host of doves - and then I've seen what men believe they've seen!)
We remember though all the firelit glow Of a great hearth's gleam and glare, And we looked for a space at each happy face And the love that was written there.
I am not obsessing. I am just sitting here perforating this post-it with a push-pin.
We are spirits clad in veils.
One writes a poem when one is so taken up by an emotional concept that one is unable to remain silent.
... unfools of unbeing ... means quite clearly people who are too stereotyped to be eccentric β people who are too dead spiritually to exist at all and who call alive individual fools
I was compared to Charles Bukowski yesterday. It was the best and worst compliment I've ever gotten.
If we knew how to find the lost, we would know how to rediscover the parts of our minds left behind in battle.
I can speak of you now to anyone because Iβve stopped wanting anything like what I once wanted from you.
bad breath and butt smell; that is prison, in a nutshell.
Living is the opposite of poetry. Poetry is the recollection of living, or, more often than not, the lament of having not lived. Or worse yet, merely the contemplation of living. My advice to you, Ms. Harper, is this: Live. And keep living. And never stop to look back to write about what you have lived and observed and overcome, lest you turn into a pillar of salt. This desert life is already full of such monoliths.
Live for everything, or die for nothing
