Quotes to inspire and reflect

Forgive us all our trespasses, Little creatures, everywhere!

No wreaths please— especially no hothouse flowers. Some common memento is better, something he prized and is known by: his old clothes—a few books perhaps.

I hear a sudden cry of pain! There is a rabbit in a snare.

So always look for the silver lining And try to find the sunny side of life.

As a white candle In a holy place, So is the beauty Of an aged face.

It takes a heap o’ livin’ in a house t’ make it home, A heap o’ sun an’ shadder, an’ ye sometimes have Afore ye really ’preciate the things ye lef’ behind, An’ hunger fer ’em somehow, with ’em allus on yer mind.

O Milky Way, sister in whiteness To Canaan’s rivers and the bright Bodies of lovers drowned, Can we follow toilsomely Your path to other nebulae? 6

I hibernated in my past. 5

Come night, strike hour. Days go, I endure. 4

Under Pont Mirabeau flows the Seine. 3

Shepherdess, O Eiffel Tower, your flock of bridges is bleating this morning. 1

The palm at the end of the mind, Beyond the last thought, rises… A gold-feathered bird Sings in the palm.

That scrawny cry—It was A chorister whose c preceded the choir. It was part of the colossal sun.

His self and the sun were one And his poems, although makings of his self, Were no less makings of the sun.

We say God and the imagination are one… How high that highest candle lights the dark. 1

There it was, word for word, The poem that took the place of a mountain.

Light the first light of evening, as in a room In which we rest and, for small reason, think The world imagined is the ultimate good.

Total grandeur of a total edifice, Chosen by an inquisitor of structures For himself. He stops upon this threshold As if the design of all his words takes form And frame from thinking and is realized.

And one trembles to be so understood and, at last, To understand, as if to know became The fatality of seeing things too well.

We keep coming back and coming back To the real: to the hotel instead of the hymns That fall upon it out of the wind.

They will get it straight one day at the Sorbonne.

The man-hero is not the exceptional monster, But he that of repetition is most master.

These external regions, what do we fill them with Except reflections, the escapades of death, Cinderella fulfilling herself beneath the roof.

That in each other are included, the whole, The complicate, the amassing harmony.

Booming and booming of the new-come bee.

The President ordains the bee to be Immortal.

We are the mimics. Clouds are pedagogues.

And still the grossest iridescence of ocean Howls hoo and rises and howls hoo and falls.

It is the celestial ennui of apartments That sends us back to the first idea.

The death of one god is the death of all.

By the terrible incantations of defeats And by the fear that defeats and dreams The whole race is a poet that writes down The eccentric propositions of its fate.

The inconceivable idea of the sun. You must become an ignorant man again And see the sun again with an ignorant eye And see it clearly in the idea of it.

The greatest poverty is not to live In a physical world, to feel that one’s desire Is too difficult to tell from despair.

Thus the theory of description matters most. It is the theory of the word for those For whom the word is the making of the world, The buzzing world and lisping firmament. It is a world of words to the end of it, In which nothing solid is its solid self.

It was the last nostalgia: that he Should understand.

And, capable, created in his mind, Eventual victor, out of the martyrs’ bones The ultimate elegance: the imagined land.

One’s grand flights, one’s Sunday baths, One’s tootings at the weddings of the soul Occur as they occur.

He is like a man In the body of a violent beast. Its muscles are his own… The lion sleeps in the sun. Its nose is on its paws. It can kill a man.

A. A violent order is disorder; and B. A great disorder is an order. These Two things are one.

Is the lion that comes down to drink.

I am a native in this world And think in it as a native thinks.

Poetry is the subject of the poem.

She sang beyond the genius of the sea. The water never formed to mind or voice, Like a body wholly body, fluttering Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry, That was not ours although we understood, Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.

I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling Or just after.

Susanna’s music touched the bawdy strings Of those white elders; but, escaping, Left only Death’s ironic scraping. Now, in its immortality, it plays On the clear viol of her memory, And makes a constant sacrament of praise.

Beauty is momentary in the mind— The fitful tracing of a portal; But in the flesh it is immortal. The body dies; the body’s beauty lives.

Just as my fingers on these keys Make music, so the self-same sounds On my spirit make a music, too.

I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill.