Quotes to inspire and reflect

And you want to travel with her And you want to travel blind And you know that she will trust you For you’ve touched her perfect body with your mind.

Denounce the government and embrace the flag. Hope to live in that free republic for which it stands.

Walk it slow where you go walk it slow… We in the world Poor as dirt Somebody’ll get hurt the world is black the world is green the world is red, yellow, brown the world is mean

I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.

Lately, I’ve become accustomed to the way The ground opens up and envelops me Each time I go out to walk the dog.

Saturday mornings we listened to Red Lantern & his undersea folk. At 11, Let’s Pretend / & we did / & I, the poet, still do, Thank God!

There is no Jewish blood in my veins, But I am hated with a scabby hatred By all the anti-Semites, like a Jew. And therefore I am a true Russian.

Can we talk?

And now I Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.

White Godiva, I unpeel— Dead hands dead stringencies.

I have always been scared of you, With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo. And your neat mustache And your Aryan eye, bright blue. Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You—

Every woman adores a Fascist, The boot in the face, the brute Brute heart of a brute like you.

What a thrill— My thumb instead of an onion.

You do not do, you do not do Any more, black shoe In which I have lived like a foot For thirty years, poor and white, Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

The woman is perfected. Her dead Body wears the smile of accomplishment, The illusion of a Greek necessity Flows in the scrolls of her toga, Her bare Feet seem to be saying: We have come so far, it is over.

Out of the ash I rise with my red hair And I eat men like air.

Dying Is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I’ve a call.

I have done it again.

A living doll, everywhere you look. It can sew, it can cook, It can talk, talk, talk…. My boy, it’s your last resort. Will you marry it, marry it, marry it.

I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart.

When I am an old woman I shall wear purple With a red hat which doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me.

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.

The Caribbean was borne like an elliptical basin in the hands of acolytes, and a people were absolved of a history which they did not commit.

It is still beautiful to feel your heart throbbing. But often the shadow feels more real than the body.

Then after Eden, was there no surprise? O yes, the awe of Adam at the first bead of sweat.

The tourist archipelagoes of my South are prisons too, corruptible, and though there is no harder prison than writing verse, what’s poetry, if it is worth its salt, but a phrase men can pass from hand to mouth?

I who am poisoned with the blood of both, Where shall I turn, divided to the vein? I who have cursed The drunken officer of British rule, how choose Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?

These palms are greater than Versailles, for no man made them.

Daylong this tomcat lies stretched flat As an old rough mat, no mouth and no eyes, Continual wars and wives are what Have tattered his ears and battered his head.

The rat is in the trap, it is in the trap, And attacking heaven and earth with a mouthful of screeches like torn tin.

… with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox, It enters the dark hole of the head. The window is starless still; the clock ticks, The page is printed.

My feet are locked upon the rough bark. It took the whole of Creation To produce my foot, my each feather: Now I hold Creation in my foot Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly— I kill where I please because it is all mine.

There is nothing outside of the text. 1

I imagine this midnight moment’s forest: Something else is alive Beside the clock’s loneliness And this blank page where my fingers move.

I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail. I stroke the beam of my lamp slowly along the flank of something more permanent than fish or weed.

When she introduces me to her parents back straightened, hair finally combed, strangled by a tie, should I sit knees together on their 3rd degree sofa and not ask Where’s the bathroom?

There is a ladder. The ladder is always there hanging innocently close to the side of the schooner.

I came to explore the wreck.

My visionary anger cleansing my sight.

I am the androgyne.

I am an instrument in the shape of a woman trying to translate pulsations into images for the relief of the body and the reconstruction of the mind.

The moment of change is the only poem.

Piece by piece I seem to re-enter the world.

A thinking woman sleeps with monsters. The beak that grips her, she becomes.

Light is the left hand of darkness, and darkness the right hand of light.

Your mind now, moldering like wedding-cake, heavy with useless experience, rich with suspicion, rumor, fantasy, crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge of mere fact.

i speak for none of you now, all you plotters of perfect crimes, nor for me, nor for anyone. i speak for those who can’t speak, for the deaf and dumb witnesses, for otters and seals, for the ancient owls of the earth.

Though they washed her with wine and rubbed her with butter it was to no avail. She lay as still as a gold piece.