All Quotes By Tag: Poetry

“Where is my oasis? Too far fromhere for me to crawl with thesedead legs, refusing to co-operateHands and fingers clawing uselesslythrough the grains of sand…”

“Think neither fear nor courage saves us.Unnatural vices are fathered by our heroism. Virtues are forced upon us by our impudent crimes. These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.”

“Where to start?Everything cracks and shakes,The air trembles with similes,No one world’s better than another;the earth moans with metaphors.”

“If onlyyou could have witnessed howmuch I have changed: sit alonein a disused theatre and feel whatI have felt, see how the world hastransformed me, like the metamorphosisof a caterpillar.”

“I do strongly feel that among the greatest pieces of luck for high achievement is ordeal. Certain great artists can make out without it, Titian and others, but mostly you need ordeal. My idea is this: the artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he’s in business: Beethoven’s deafness, Goya’s deafness, Milton’s blindness, that kind of thing.”

“Life is unbearable pain.”

“August is dust here. Droughtstuns the road,but juice gathers in the berries.”

“I am not obsessing.I am just sitting hereperforating this post-itwith a push-pin.”

“… unfools of unbeing … means quite clearly people who are too stereotyped to be eccentric – people who are too dead spiritually to exist at all and who call alive individual fools”

“I can speak of you now to anyone because I’ve stopped wanting anything like what I once wanted from you.”

“If we knew how to find the lost, we would know how to rediscover the parts of our mindsleft behindin battle.”

“I was compared to Charles Bukowski yesterday. It was the best and worst compliment I’ve ever gotten.”

“bad breath and butt smell; that is prison, in a nutshell.”

“Living is the opposite of poetry. Poetry is the recollection of living, or, more often than not, the lament of having not lived. Or worse yet, merely the contemplation of living. My advice to you, Ms. Harper, is this: Live. And keep living. And never stop to look back to write about what you have lived and observed and overcome, lest you turn into a pillar of salt. This desert life is already full of such monoliths.”

“The secret to life is to live as though you know the secret.” Barbara Botch”