Quotes to inspire and reflect

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I feel my fate in what I cannot fear. I learn by going where I have to go.

I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils, And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile.

A lively understandable spirit Once entertained you. It will come again. Be still. Wait.

And the new plants, still awkward in their soil, The lovely diminutives. I could watch! I could watch! I saw the separateness of all things!

I study the lives on a leaf: the little Sleepers, numb nudgers in cold dimensions, Beetles in caves, newts, stone-deaf fishes, Lice tethered to long limp subterranean weeds, Squirmers in bogs, And bacterial creepers.

Fear was my father, Father Fear. His look drained the stones.

The whiskey on your breath Could make a small boy dizzy; But I hung on like death: Such waltzing was not easy.

Tugging all day at perverse life: The indignity of it!

Nothing would give up life: Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath.

Nothing would sleep in that cellar.

My secrets cry aloud. I have no need for tongue. My heart keeps open house, My doors are widely flung.

This urge, wrestle, resurrection of dry sticks, Cut stems struggling to put down feet, What saint strained so much, Rose on such lopped limbs to a new life?

If thou must choose Between the chances, choose the odd; Read the New Yorker; trust in God; And take short views.

The girls are all giggling, then one girl suddenly remembers the wild goat. Up there, on the hilltop, in the woods and rocky ravines, the peasants saw him butting his head against the trees, looking for the nannies. He’s gone wild, and the reason why is this: if you don’t make an animal work, if you keep him only for stud, he likes to hurt, he kills.

And children swarmed to him like settlers. He became a land.

Thou shalt not sit With statisticians nor commit A social science.

O let none say I Love until aware What huge resources it will take to nurse One ruining speck, one tiny hair That casts a shadow through the universe.

At Dirty Dick’s and Sloppy Joe’s We drank our liquor straight, Some went upstairs with Margery, And some, alas, with Kate.

Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd: Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter, And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

Our researchers into Public Opinion are content That he held the proper opinions for the time of year; When there was peace, he was for peace; when there was war, he went.

Like love we don’t know where or why Like love we can’t compel or fly Like love we often weep Like love we seldom keep.

Law, says the judge as he looks down his nose, Speaking clearly and most severely, Law is as I’ve told you before, Law is as you know I suppose, Law is but let me explain it once more, Law is The Law.

One rational voice is dumb: over a grave The household of Impulse mourns one dearly loved.

To us he is no more a person Now but a whole climate of opinion.

Intellectual disgrace Stares from every human face, And the seas of pity lie Locked and frozen in each eye.

In the nightmare of the dark All the dogs of Europe bark.

Earth, receive an honored guest; William Yeats is laid to rest. Let the Irish vessel lie Emptied of its poetry.

We must love one another or die.

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives In the valley of its saying where executives Would never want to tamper

I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-second Street Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade: Waves of anger and fear Circulate over the bright And darkened lands of the earth, Obsessing our private lives; The unmentionable odor of death Offends the September night.

Evil is unspectacular and always human, And shares our bed and eats at our own table.

He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone, Silence the pianos and with muffled drum Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Every farthing of the cost, All the dreaded cards foretell, Shall be paid, but from this night Not a whisper, not a thought, Not a kiss nor look be lost.

About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters: how well they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window Or just walking dully along.

O plunge your hands in water, Plunge them in up to the wrist; Stare, stare in the basin And wonder what you’ve missed. The glacier knocks in the cupboard, The desert sighs in the bed, And the crack in the tea cup opens A lane to the land of the dead.

Lay your sleeping head, my love, Human on my faithless arm.

The greater the love, the more false to its object, Not to be born is the best for man; After the kiss comes the impulse to throttle, Break the embraces, dance while you can.

The stars are dead. The animals will not look. We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and History to the defeated May say Alas but cannot help or pardon.

Harrow the house of the dead; look shining at New styles of architecture, a change of heart.

Sir, no man’s enemy, forgiving all But will his negative inversion, be prodigal.

Let us honor if we can The vertical man Though we value none But the horizontal one.

Patrick Maguire, the old peasant, can neither be damned nor glorified: The graveyard in which he will lie will be just a deep-drilled potato-field Where the seed gets no chance to come through To the fun of the sun. The tongue in his mouth is the root of a yew.

Come up with me, American love. Kiss these secret stones with me. The torrential silver of the Urubamba makes the pollen fly to its golden cup. The hollow of the bindweed’s maze, the petrified plant, the inflexible garland, soar above the silence of these mountain coffers.

The longest journey Is the journey inwards Of him who has chosen his destiny.

But from each crime are born bullets that will one day seek out in you where the heart lies.

But from each hollow of Spain Spain comes forth.