20th-century Poet Quotes

With my teeth
I have seized life
Upon the knife of my youth.
With my lips today,
With my lips alone…

When I was an animal I evolved through selfishness. Now that I am a man my evolution can be achieved only through self-sacrifice.

Enthusiasm is achieved chiefly by means of provocations. In these cases, something inside of us resonates vibrantly with something outside. / The form of the provocation—be it book, music, sporting event, conversation—matters insofar as it might help to us find these sources of resonance.

Carson Cistulli

In my sleep, which is the song of the tombs, I have just seen her again, as beautiful as in her youth.

Here's to the wind blowing against this lighted house and to the vast, windless spaces between the stars.

There are so many kinds of awful men One can't avoid them all. She often said She'd never make the same mistake again: She always made a new mistake instead.

It has taken a great deal of energy, which has not been so difficult to summon as the necessary patience to wait, simply wait much of the time - until my instincts assured me that I had assembled my materials in proper order for a final welding into their natural form.

Oh I'm in love with the janitor's boy,
And the janitor's boy loves me;
He's going to hunt for a desert isle
In our geography.

If at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you've written one line of one poem, you'll be very lucky indeed.

An old dissembler who lived out his lie
Lies here as if he did not fear to die.

J. V. Cunningham

I know everything, but I don't understand any of it.

Making art means not only using languages, but also creating new ones. To do this, new tools are indispensable. Even returning to more traditional languages such as linear poetry or narration, after being enriched by the experience of hypertext, hypermedia and multimedia, allows us to rethink the older forms of expression and transfer the lessons of the new media into even the more traditional modalities of language, such as narrative, for example.

Caterina Davinio

There are so many selves in everybody, and just to explore and exploit one is wrong, dead wrong, for the creative person.

Self-consciousness is the curse of the city and all that sophistication implies.

The words you spoke were frenzied prayers to chemistry..

Carol Ann Duffy

Mind is a most delicate evidence. Not a soul has seen it yet.

Richard Eberhart

Farewell sadness
Good-day sadness
You are inscribed in the lines of the ceiling.

Sex suppressed will go berserk, But it keeps us all alive. It's a wonderful change from wives and work And it ends at half past five.

All the things we hide in water
Hoping we won't see them go.
Forests growing under water
Press against the ones we know.

My precious child, I love you and will never leave you
Never, ever, during your trials and testings.
When you saw only one set of footprints,
It was then that I carried you.

Margaret Fishback

If they don't depend on true evidence, scientists are no better than gossips.

Penelope Fitzgerald

Dawn crept over the Downs like a sinister white animal, followed by the snarling cries of a wind eating its way between the black boughs of the thorns. The wind was the furious voice of this sluggish animal light that was baring the dormers and mullions and scullions of Cold Comfort Farm.

We consider the artist a special sort of person. It is more likely that each of us is a special sort of artist.

Everyone enjoys stories of double lives and secret identities. Children have Superman; intellectuals have Wallace Stevens.

If you're a writer, you can make the death of a canary stand for the whole mystery of death.

Nadine Gordimer