“I never heard sound and thrill of my painful heart until that very day she touched it.”

“This poem has been called obscure. I refuse to believe that it is obscurer than pity, violence, or suffering. But being a poem, not a lifetime, it is more compressed.”

“If you heard your lover scream in the next roomand you ran in and saw his pinkie on the floor, in a small puddle of blood.You wouldn’t rush to the pinkie and say, ‘Darling, are you OK? ‘No, you’d wrap your arms around his shoulders and worry about the pinkie later.The same holds true if you heard the scream, ran in and saw his hand or -god forbid- his whole arm.But suppose you hear your lover scream in the next room, and you run in and his head is on the floor next to his body.Which do you rush to and comfort first?”

“Hate flows from a broken spirit.”

“…be awake to the Life that is loving you andsing your prayer, laugh your prayer, dance your prayer, runand weep and sweat your prayer,sleep your prayer, eat your prayer, paint, sculpt, hammer, and read your prayer, sweep, dig, rake, drive and hoe your prayer,garden and farm and build and clean your prayer,wash, iron, vacuum, sew, embroider and pickle your prayer,compute, touch, bend and fold but never deleteor mutilate your prayer.Learn and play your prayer, work and rest your prayer,fast and feast your prayer, argue, talk, whisper, listen and shout your prayer,groan and moan and spit and sneeze your prayer,swim and hunt and cook your prayer,digest and become your prayer,release and recover your prayer,breathe your prayer, be your prayer”

“Moonlight and high wind.Dark poplars toss, insinuate the sea.”

“I’ll be writing as long as I can hold a pen in my curled, crimped arthritic hands and then I’ll dictate it, if it comes to that. They’ll have to pry my pen out of my cold, dead fingers – and even then, I’ll fight ’em for it. Guaranteed.”

“Calla, calla, princesa —dice el hada madrina—;en caballo, con alas, hacia acá se encamina,en el cinto la espada y en la mano el azor,el feliz caballero que te adora sin verte,y que llega de lejos, vencedor de la Muerte,a encenderte los labios con un beso de amor”

“J’ai cueilli ce brin de bruyèreL’automne est morte souviens-t’enNous ne nous verrons plus sur terreOdeur du temps brin de bruyèreEt souviens-toi que je t’attends”

“ليس من أجلهمولا من أجليأجلسُ كلَّ مساءأفكرُ كيفَ أنَّ أحزانَ الآخرين،دموعَهُم وخذلاناتهِم المُرّةَ لا تُعير اكتراثاً لأحدترقُدُ منسيةً ومُهملةً، كإطارٍ على الطريقِ السريع.”

“ليسَ من أجلي أنهضُ كلَّ صباحٍ بصوتٍ يتكسرُوحلمٍ يصدأُ.ليسَ من أجلي أجولُ كلَّ يومٍ الأرصفةَ ذاتَها.ضاحكاً من كتابةِ ذكرى، مؤجلاً غَدِي برعبِ يومي.متوثِّبٌ للنسيان. مخلصٌ للسهوأسهو عن مخاذلِ العيشعن الأصدقاءِ وهم يكذبونعن جثةٍ -هي الحقيقةُ- تبلغُها فتموتُ بين يديكَعن رِعدَةٍ تجيءُ وتنسلُّ دونَ اكتراثِ أحدعن ظلٍّ زائفٍ وشعوبٍ بآجالٍ ورقيةعن الخياناتعن أطفالٍ يموتونَ قبلَ أن يُدركوا الرمقوعن شتلةِ المطاطِ تموتُ في الزاويةِ رغماً عني”

“Blackadder was fifty-four and had come to editing Ash out of pique. He was the son and grandson of Scottish schoolmasters. His grandfather recited poetry on firelight evenings: Marmion, Childe Harold, Ragnarok. His father sent him to Downing College in Cambridge to study under F. R. Leavis. Leavis did to Blackadder what he did to serious students; he showed him the terrible, the magnificent importance and urgency of English literature and simultaneously deprived him of any confidence in his own capacity to contribute to, or change it. The young Blackadder wrote poems, imagined Dr Leavis’s comments on them, and burned them.”

“لا تحاول أن تقلص أوراق الشجر المتساقطة، لأن عمرك الخريف كله.”

“In fiction, the characters have their own lives. They may start as a gloss on the author’s life, but they move on from there. In poetry, especially confessional poetry but in other poetry as well, the poet is not writing characters so much as emotional truth wrapped in metaphor. Bam! Pow! A shot to the gut.”

“You cannot devote your life to an abstraction. Indeed, life shatters all abstractions in one way or another, including words such as “faith” or “belief”. If God is not in the very fabric of existence for you, if you do not find Him (or miss Him!) in the details of your daily life, then religion is just one more way to commit spiritual suicide.”