E. E. Cummings Quotes

163 Sourced Quotes

Love is the voice under all silences, the hope which has no opposite in fear; the strength so strong mere force is feebleness: the truth more first than sun, more last than star...

E. E. Cummings
All in green went my love riding
on a great horse of gold
into the silver dawn.

E. E. Cummings
I shall imagine life is not worth dying, if (and when) roses complain their beauties are in vain but though mankind persuades itself that every weed's a rose, roses (you feel certain) will only smile

E. E. Cummings
Love being such, or such, the normal corners of your heart will never guess how much my wonderful jealousy is dark

E. E. Cummings
Out of the mountain of his soul
comes a keen pure silence

E. E. Cummings
An artist doesn't live in some geographical abstraction, superimposed on a part of this beautiful earth by the nonimagination of unanimals and dedicated to the proposition that massacre is a social virtue because murder is an individual vice. Nor does an artist live in some soi-disant world, nor does he live in some so-called universe, nor does he live in any number of "worlds" or in any number of "universes." As for a few trifling delusions like the "past" and "present" and "future" of quote mankind unquote, they may be big enough for a couple of billion supermechanized submorons but they're much too small for one human being.

E. E. Cummings
Anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn't he danced his did.

E. E. Cummings
I carry your heart with me (i carry it in
my heart) i am never without it (anywhere
i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing, my darling)

E. E. Cummings
Miracles are to come. With you I leave a remembrance of miracles.

E. E. Cummings
What if a dawn of a doom of a dream
bites this universe in two,
peels forever out of it's grave
and sprinkles nowhere with me and you?

E. E. Cummings
Why do you paint?
For exactly the same reason I breathe.
That's not an answer.
There isn't any answer.
How long hasn't there been any answer?
As long as I can remember.
And how long have you written?
As long as I can remember.
I mean poetry.
So do I.

E. E. Cummings
Since the thing perhaps is to eat flowers and not to be afraid

E. E. Cummings
When you confuse art with propaganda, you confuse an act of God with something which can be turned on and off like the hot water faucet. If "God" means nothing to you (or less than nothing) I'll cheerfully substitute one of your own favorite words,"freedom". You confuse freedom—the only freedom—with absolute tyranny…
all over this so-called world, hundreds of millions of servile and insolent inhuman unbeings are busily unrolling in the enlightenment of propaganda.

E. E. Cummings
I will take the sun in my mouth and leap into the ripe air Alive with closed eyes to dash against darkness

E. E. Cummings
Concerning this selfstyled world's greatest and most generous literary figure: who had just arrived in our nation's capitol, attired in half a GI uniform and ready to be hanged as a traitor by the only country which ever made even a pretense of fighting for freedom of speech
Re Ezra Pound — poetry happens to be an art; and artists happen to be human beings.

E. E. Cummings
I feel that (false and true are merely to know)
Love only has ever been, is, and will ever be

E. E. Cummings
Milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were; and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles: and may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone for whatever we lose (like a you or a me)
it's always ourselves we find in the sea

E. E. Cummings
Each ignorant gladness —unteaches what despair preaches

E. E. Cummings
Tomorrow is our permanent address
and there they'll scarcely find us (if they do),
we'll move away still further: into now

E. E. Cummings
Though mankind persuades
itself that every weed's
a rose, roses (you feel
certain) will only smile

E. E. Cummings
(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

E. E. Cummings
Poetry and every other art was and is and forever will be strictly and distinctly a question of individuality.... poetry is being, not doing.... if poetry is your goal, you've got to forget all about punishments and all about rewards and all about selfstyled obligations and duties and responsibilities...

E. E. Cummings
—when skies are hanged and oceans drowned, the single secret will still be man

E. E. Cummings
Tumbling-hair picker of buttercups violets dandelions And the big bullying daisies through the field wonderful with eyes a little sorry Another comes also picking flowers

E. E. Cummings
The Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls
are unbeautiful and have comfortable minds.

E. E. Cummings
Love is a deeper season
than reason;
my sweet one
(and april's where we're).

E. E. Cummings
Take me up into your mind once or twice before I die (you know why: just because the eyes of you and me will be full of dirt some day). Quickly take me up into the bright child of your mind.

E. E. Cummings
Nothing false and possible is love
(who's imagined, therefore limitless)
love's to giving as to keeping's give; as yes is to if, love is to yes

E. E. Cummings
Time is a tree (this life one leaf) but love is the sky and i am for you just so long and long enough

E. E. Cummings
The cunning the craven
… they live for until
though the sun in his heaven
says Now

E. E. Cummings