Literature and Words

What a lost person needs is a map of the territory . . . so he can see where he is in relation to everything else. Literature is not only a mirror; it is a map, a geography of the mind.

I can’t understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems; it’s like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife.

The language [German] which enables aman to travel all day in one sentence withoutchanging cars.

In reality every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have perceived in himself.

Seeds in a dry pod, tick, tick, tick, Tick, tick, tick, what little iambics, While Homer and Whitman roared in the pines!

As good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye.

Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.

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.

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt

If you steal from one author, it’s plagiarism;

A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu: voyelles,

The poet is a pretender.

News is history in its first and best form, its vivid and fascinating form . . . history is the pale and tranquil reflection of it.

There is but one art—to omit! O if I knew how to omit, I would ask no other knowledge.

What are the proper proportions of a maxim? A minimum of sound to a maximum of sense.

The true nature of poetry. The drive to connect. The dream of a common language.

Un poème n’est jamais achevé—c’est toujours un accident qui le termine .

Get stewed: Books are a load of crap.

Between my finger and my thumb

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!

Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.

There is no advice to give young poets.

If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.

Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet’s job.