Quotes to inspire and reflect

Can we talk?

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

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—

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.

What a thrill— My thumb instead of an onion.

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.

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

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.

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

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?

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.

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

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

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?

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

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.

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.

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

… 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.

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.

There is nothing outside of the text. 1

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

I came to explore the wreck.

I am the androgyne.

My visionary anger cleansing my sight.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Beauty is a simple passion, but, oh my friends, in the end you will dance the fire dance in iron shoes.

A woman is her mother. That’s the main thing.

A woman like that is not a woman, quite. I have been her kind.

I have gone out, a possessed witch, haunting the black air, braver at night.

You, Doctor Martin, walk from breakfast to madness. Late August, I speed through the antiseptic tunnel where the moving dead still talk of pushing their bones against the thrust of cure. And I am queen of this summer hotel or the laughing bee on a stalk of death.

History, despite its wrenching pain, Cannot be unlived, but if faced With courage, need not be lived again.

You may trod me in the very dirt But still, like dust, I’ll rise.

The seasons are no longer what they once were, But it is the nature of things to be seen only once, As they happen along, bumping into other things, getting along Somehow. That’s where Orpheus made his mistake.

As Parmigianino did it, the right hand Bigger than the head, thrust at the viewer And swerving easily away, as though to protect What it advertises.