E. E. Cummings Quotes

163 Sourced Quotes

Art is a mystery.
A mystery is something immeasurable.
In so far as every child and woman and man may be immeasurable, art is the mystery of every man and woman and child. In so far as a human being is an artist, skies and mountains and oceans and thunderbolts and butterflies are immeasurable; and art is every mystery of nature. Nothing measurable can be alive; nothing which is not alive can be art; nothing which cannot be art is true: and everything untrue doesn't matter a very good God damn...

E. E. Cummings
Plato Told
Him: he couldn't
believe it (jesus told him; he
wouldn't believe
it) lao tsze
certainly told
him, and general
(yes mam)
sherman;
and even
(believe it
Or Not)you
Told Him: i told
him; we told him
(he didn't believe it, no sir)

E. E. Cummings
It's no use trying to pretend that mostpeople and ourselves are alike. Mostpeople have less in common with ourselves than thesquarerootofminusone. You and I are human beings; mostpeople are snobs.

E. E. Cummings
Things which in my mind blossom will stumble beneath a clumsiest disguise appear capable of fragility and indecision

E. E. Cummings
For he has the territory of harmonicas, the acres of flutes, the meadows of clarinets, the domain of violins. And God says: Why did they put you in prison? What did you do to the people? "I made them dance and they put me in prison."

E. E. Cummings
Such was a poet and shall be and is -who'll solve the depths of horror to defend a sunbeam's architecture with his life: and carve immortal jungles of despair to hold a mountain's heartbeat in his hand.

E. E. Cummings
A distinct throat. Which breathes. A head: small, smaller than a flower. With eyes and with lips. Lips more slender than light; a smile how carefully and slowly made, a smile made entirely of dream. Eyes deeper than Spring. Eyes darker than Spring, more new... These, these are the further miracles... the breasts. Thighs. The All which is beyond comprehension — the All which is perpetually discovered, yet undiscovered: sexual, sweet, Alive!

E. E. Cummings
It's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

E. E. Cummings
(and from my thighs which shrug and pant a murdering rain leapingly reaches the upward singular deepest flower which she carries in a gesture of her hips)

E. E. Cummings
Time cannot children, poets, lovers tell- measure imagine, mystery, a kiss -not though mankind would rather know than feel

E. E. Cummings
Measureless our pure living complete love
whose doom is beauty and its fate to grow

E. E. Cummings
Certainly the most obvious... example of the strictly infantile essence of America's all-conquering mentality greets our eyes daily, anywhere and everywhere, in the guise of the tabloid newspaper.

E. E. Cummings
On the grammar skills of US President Warren G. Harding following his death:
The only man, woman or child who wrote a simple declarative sentence with seven grammatical errors is dead.

E. E. Cummings
All ignorance toboggans into know
and trudges up to ignorance again

E. E. Cummings
My theory of technique, if I have one, is very far from original; nor is it complicated. I can express it in fifteen words, by quoting The Eternal Question And Immortal Answer of burlesk, viz. "Would you hit a woman with a child?— No, I'd hit her with a brick." Like the burlesk comedian, I am abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement.

E. E. Cummings
All which isn't singing is mere talking
…
and all talking's to oneself alone
but the very song of (as mountains
feel and lovers) singing is silence

E. E. Cummings
Who pays any attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you

E. E. Cummings
Let it go — the smashed word broken open vow or the oath cracked length wise — let it go it was sworn to go let them go — the truthful liars and the false fair friends and the boths and neithers — you must let them go they were born to go let all go — the big small middling tall bigger really the biggest and all things — let all go dear so comes love

E. E. Cummings
Well, write poetry, for God's sake, it's the only thing that matters.

E. E. Cummings
Who can tell truth from falsehood any more? I say it, and you feel it in your hearts: no man or woman on this big small earth. How should our sages miss the mark of life, and our most skillful players lose the game? your hearts will tell you, as my heart has told me: because all know, and no one understands.

E. E. Cummings
Pity this busy monster, manunkind, not. Progress is a comfortable disease:
your victim (death and life safely beyond) plays with the bigness of his littleness

E. E. Cummings
Unlove's the heavenless hell and the homeless home

E. E. Cummings
A great
man
is
gone. Tall as the truth was who; and
wore his
… life
like a …
sky.

E. E. Cummings
My advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world — unless you're not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die.
Does this sound dismal? It isn't.
It's the most wonderful life on earth.
Or so I feel.

E. E. Cummings
That which we die for lives as wholly as that which we live for dies.

E. E. Cummings
Seeming's enough for slaves of space and time
—ours is the now and here of freedom. Come

E. E. Cummings
Maybe god is a child 's hand)very carefully bring -ing to you and to me(and quite with out crushing)the papery weightless diminutive world with a hole in it out of which demons with wings would be streaming if something had(maybe they couldn't agree)not happened(and floating- ly int o

E. E. Cummings
—the great my darling happens to be
that love are in we, that love are in we

E. E. Cummings
A humbly poetic, gently clownlike, supremely innocent, and illimitably affectionate creature (slightly resembling a child's drawing of a cat, but gifted with the secret grace and obvious clumsiness of a penguin on terra firma) who is never so happy as when egoist-mouse, thwarting altruist-dog, hits her in the head with a brick. Dog hates mouse and worships "cat", mouse despises "cat" and hates dog, "cat" hates no one and loves mouse.

E. E. Cummings
Ye! the godless are the dull and the dull are the damned

E. E. Cummings