Quotes to inspire and reflect

Leaving the page of the book carelessly open, something unsaid, the phone off the hook and the love, whatever it was, an infection.

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.

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.

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

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.

Something like living occurs, a movement Out of the dream into its codification.

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.

For this is action, this not being sure, this careless Preparing, sowing the seeds crooked in the furrow, Making ready to forget, and always coming back To the mooring of starting out, that day so long ago.

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.

You and I Are suddenly what the trees try To tell us we are: That their merely being there Means something; that soon We may touch, love, explain.

As I sit looking out of a window of the building I wish I did not have to write the instruction manual on the uses of a new metal.

often. I want my feet to be bare, I want my face to be shaven, and my heart— you can’t plan on the heart, but the better part of it, my poetry, is open.

“Sun, don’t go!” I was awake at last. “No, go I must, they’re calling me.” “Who are they?” Rising he said, “Some day you’ll know. They’re calling to you too.” Darkly he rose, and then I slept.

If anyone was looking for me I hid behind a tree and cried out “I am an orphan.” And here I am, the center of all beauty! writing these poems! Imagine!

My quietness has a man in it, he is transparent and he carries me quietly, like a gondola, through the streets.

LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED! there is no snow in Hollywood there is no rain in California I have been to lots of parties and acted perfectly disgraceful but I never actually collapsed oh Lana Turner we love you get up

oh god it’s wonderful to get out of bed and drink too much coffee and smoke too many cigarettes and love you so much

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday three days after Bastille Day, yes it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner and I don’t know the people who will feed me

Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern.

I wanted to be sure to reach you; though my ship was on the way it got caught in some moorings. I am always tying up and then deciding to depart.

Candor ends paranoia.

O mother what have I left out O mother what have I forgotten

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night.

America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.

America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

America free Tom Mooney America save the Spanish Loyalists America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die America I am the Scottsboro boys.

The individual is the product of power.

Into the company of love it all returns.

How can I die alone. Where will I be then who am now alone, what groans so pathetically in this room where I am alone?

drive, he sd, for christ’s sake, look out where yr going.

Springtime for Hitler and Germany, Deutschland is happy and gay. We’re moving to a faster pace, Look out, here comes the Master Race!

Aimlessly It pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. No One listens to poetry.

Total absorption in poetry is one of the finest things in existence— It should not make you feel guilty. Everyone is absorbed in something. The sailor is absorbed in the sea. Poetry is the mediation of life.

Time has passed like a courier with urgent news. But that’s just our simile. The character’s invented, his haste is make-believe, his news inhuman.

You were saved because you were the first. You were saved because you were the last. Alone. With others. On the right. On the left. Because it was raining. Because of the shade. Because the day was sunny.

God has pity on kindergarten children. He has less pity on school children. And on grownups he has no pity at all, he leaves them alone, and sometimes they must crawl on all fours in the burning sand to reach the first-aid station covered with blood.

The pebble is a perfect creature equal to itself mindful of its limits filled exactly with a pebbly meaning

Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms Inside your head, and people in them, acting. People you know, yet can’t quite name.

They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you.

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.

One of those old-type natural fouled-up guys.

Give me your arm, old toad; Help me down Cemetery Road.

If I were called in To construct a religion I should make use of water.

Never such innocence again.

Where can we live but days?