Quotes to inspire and reflect

I don’t see how Henry, pried open for all the world to see, survived.

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.

Huffy Henry hid the day, Unappeasable Henry sulked.

Mountainous, woman not breaks and will bend: sways God nearby: anguish comes to an end. Blossomed Sarah, and I blossom. Is that thing alive? I hear a famisht howl.

One day beside some flowers near his nose He will be thinking, When will I look at it? And pain, still in the middle distance, will reply At what? and he will know it’s gone, O where! and begin to tremble and cry. He will begin to cry as a child cries Whose puppy is mangled under a screaming wheel.

To hurt the Negro and avoid the Jew Is the curriculum.

That inescapable animal walks with me. Has followed me since the black womb held, Moves where I move, distorting my gesture, A caricature, a swollen shadow, A stupid clown of the spirit’s motive, Perplexes and affronts with his own darkness, The secret life of belly and bone.

The mind is a city like London, Smoky and populous: it is a capital Like Rome, ruined and eternal, Marked by the monument which no one Now remembers.

my negritude riddles with holes the dense affliction of its worthy patience.

Time is the school in which we learn, Time is the fire in which we burn.

Color of cinnamon Clove’s sweet smell, I’ve come a long way To see Gabrielle.

Oh lonesome’s a bad place To get crowded into.

I take the word Europe Or the word death And tear them into tiny pieces; I scatter them at your feet.

I am the magical mouse I don’t eat cheese I eat sunsets And the tops of trees.

I’d like to die like this… with the dark fingers of the water closing and unclosing over these sleepy lights and a sad bell somewhere murmuring good night.

Do I not deal with angels When her lips I touch.

Human reason is beautiful and invincible. No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books, No sentence of banishment can prevail against it.

Let us have madness openly, O men Of my generation. Let us follow The footsteps of this slaughtered age.

The purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person, for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors, and invisible guests come in and out at will.

May the gentle mountains and the bells of the flocks Remind us of everything we have lost, For we have seen on our way and fallen in love With the world that will pass in a twinkling.

Life and the memory of it cramped, dim, on a piece of Bristol board.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster. Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I’d have nightmares of other islands stretching away from mine, infinities of islands, islands spawning islands like frogs’ eggs turning into polliwogs of islands, knowing that I had to live on each and every one, eventually, for ages, registering their flora, their fauna, their geography.

—And Friday, my dear Friday, died of measles seventeen years ago come March.

How had I come to be here like them, and overhear a cry of pain that could have got loud and worse but hadn’t?

Home-made, home-made! But aren’t we all?

I knew that nothing stranger had ever happened.

The staring sailor that shakes his watch that tells the time of the poet, the man that lies in the house of Bedlam.

Time to plant tears, says the almanac. The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove and the child draws another inscrutable house.

His beak is focussed; he is preoccupied, looking for something, something, something. Poor bird, he is obsessed! The millions of grains are black, white, tan, and gray, mixed with quartz grains, rose and amethyst.

It is like what we imagine knowledge to be: dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free, drawn from the cold hard mouth of the world, derived from the rocky breasts forever, flowing and drawn, and since our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

Should we have stayed at home, wherever that may be?

Cold dark deep and absolutely clear, element bearable to no mortal, to fish and to seals…

Until everything was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! And I let the fish go.

Icebergs behoove the soul (both being self-made from elements least visible) to see them so: fleshed, fair, erected, indivisible.

This iceberg cuts its facets from within. Like jewelry from a grave it saves itself perpetually and adorns Only itself.

I have had to learn the simplest things last. Which made for difficulties.

As the dead prey upon us, they are the dead in ourselves, awake, my sleeping ones, I cry out to you, disentangle the nets of being!

Now I adore my life With the Bird, the abiding Leaf, With the Fish, the questing Snail, And the Eye altering all; And I dance with William Blake For love, for Love’s sake.

Lord, hear me out, and hear me out this day: From me to Thee’s a long and terrible way.

The soul has many motions, body one.

Brooding on God, I may become a man. Pain wanders through my bones like a lost fire; What burns me now? Desire, desire, desire.

What I love is near at hand, Always, in earth and air.

In a dark time, the eye begins to see.

I long for the imperishable quiet at the heart of form.

I see, in evening air, How slowly dark comes down on what we do.

I knew a woman, lovely in her bones, When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them; Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one: The shapes a bright container can contain!

When I was a lark, I sang; When I was a worm, I devoured.