American Poet Quotes

For should your hands drop white and empty
All the toys of the world would break.

If you will tell me why the fen appears impassable, I then will tell you why I think that I can cross it if I try.

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.

Nathalia Crane
Nathalia Crane
A man's motive in the small actions of daily life, like resting a moment on his pitchfork in the sun and listening intently, may be the most important thing about that man.

Alas! Am I born for this,
To wear this slavish chain?
Deprived of all created bliss,
Through hardship, toil and pain!

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

Right here in our bodies, in our defense of our right to experience joy, in the refusal to abandon the place where we have been most completely invaded & colonized, in our determination to make the bombed & defoliated lands flower again and bear fruit, here where we have been most shamed is one of the most radical & sacred places from which to transform the world.

Chemistry having its equations beyond our range of inequation.

My son called to me that God was inside his red fire engine. He wanted to show me. I did move as fast as I could, spilling like water through the kitchen door into a summer day, but God had left by the time I got there. My son smiled, told me I'd missed him by seconds.

I will look at the footprints going in and out of the water and dream up a small blue good to talk to.

Gerald Stern
Gerald Stern
But when the conquered spirit breaks free And indicates a new light Who'll take care of the cats?

Gregory Corso
Gregory Corso
A book is kind because its pages let us know when it is coming to an end.

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

Billy Collins
Billy Collins
I need to feel that the language in my poems is alive, in the sense of talking on the phone to a friend sharing gossip.

Live blindly and upon the hour. The Lord,
Who was the Future, died full long ago.
Knowledge which is the Past is folly.

The writer who is a mother should, I think, record everything she can: make notes, keep journals, take photographs, use a tape recorder, and remind herself that there is a subject so incalculably vast significance to humanity, about which virtually nothing is known because writers have not been mothers.

Alicia Ostriker
Alicia Ostriker
All finite things reveal infinitude: The mountain with its singular bright shade Like the blue shine on freshly frozen snow, The after-light upon ice-burdened pines; Odor of basswood upon a mountain slope, A scene beloved of bees; Silence of water above a sunken tree: The pure serene of memory of one man,- A ripple widening from a single stone Winding around the waters of the world.

Theodore Roethke
Theodore Roethke
Now: For those of you who are lazy I can offer no hope: death will not bring you an eternal resting place. You may rest, if this is your wish, for a while. Not only must you use your abilities after death, however, but you must face up to yourself for those that you did not use during your previous existence...

Jane Roberts
Jane Roberts
The worst part of losing good fish is that you cannot release them. They tailwalk across the back of your mind for days.

And for a minute, maybe longer... everything that threatens us, threatens to save us.

This is what life does. It lets you walk up to
the store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a
stiff knee. It lets you choose the way you have
your eggs, your coffee. Then it sits a fisherman
down beside you at the counter who says, Last night,
the channel was full of starfish. And you wonder,
is this a message, finally, or just another day?

And you, whiner, who wastes your time
Dawdling over the remorseless earth,
What evil, what unspeakable crime
Have you made your life worth?

Painters have often taught writers how to see.

James Baldwin
James Baldwin
I believe if I should die,
And you should kiss my eyelids where I lie
Cold, dead, and dumb to all the world contains,
The folded orbs would open at thy breath,
And from its exile in the Isles of Death
Life would come gladly back along my veins.

Three hundred years we slaved,
We slave and suffer yet;
Though flesh and bone rebel,
They tell us to forget!