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"Birds are a miracle because they prove to us there is a finer, simpler state of being which we may strive to attain."
Author Name
Personal Development
"One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often."
Author Name
Personal Development
"If you are not being bullied all I would say - cause I like to talk about the other side of it as well - is you know, be someone that nurtures, and if there's someone in your class that maybe doesn't have a lot of friends, be the person that sits with them in the cafeteria sometimes; be the bigger person."
Author Name
Personal Development
"It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad."
Author Name
Personal Development
"He not busy being born is busy dying."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Every human being you see in the course of a day has a problem that's sucking up at least 70 percent of his or her radar."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Initiative is doing the right thing without being told."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Being is more important than doing."
Author Name
Personal Development
"How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly normal human being."
Author Name
Personal Development
"You can watch any episode you want and have a compelling story being told."
Author Name
Personal Development
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"I don't know how to sit outside myself and test against a hypothetical self who stayed home."
Home
"There have been two popular subjects for poetry in the last few decades: the Vietnam War and AIDS, about both of which almost all of us have felt deeply."
Poetry
"It was difficult being a teacher and out of the closet in the '50s. By the time I retired, the English department was proud of having a gay poet of a certain minor fame. It was a very satisfactory change!"
Time
"When I first started to write, I was aware of being queer, but I didn't write about it. Queer poems would probably not have been accepted by the editors I sent them to."
Being
"I deliberately decided to write a kind of guide to leather bars for straight people, for people not into leather, so that people could see what it was all about."
People
"I was at a benefit for some imprisoned students in the '60s at San Francisco State, and there were lots of poets reading for the benefit: one was Elizabeth Bishop."
Reading
"My old teacher's definition of poetry is an attempt to understand."
Poetry
"Many of my poems are not sexual."
Poems
"When I was an undergraduate I had very badly annotated editions of Shakespeare's sonnets, all of which left out the important fact that will has a sexual sense in Shakespeare's sonnets."
Fact
"When I first started teaching at Berkeley in 1958, I could not announce that I was gay to anybody, though probably quite a few of my fellow teachers knew."
Childhood
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