Quotes to inspire and reflect

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

In a dark time, the eye begins to see.

The soul has many motions, body one.

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

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

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

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

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 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!

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

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.

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

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.

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?

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