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Quotes by Poet

"Hold those things that tell your history and protect them. During slavery, who was able to read or write or keep anything? The ability to have somebody to tell your story to is so important. It says: 'I was here. I may be sold tomorrow. But you know I was here.'"

"Lovers may be and indeed generally are enemies, but they never can be friends, because there must always be a spice of jealousy and a something of Self in all their speculations."

"Poetry should be common in experience but uncommon in books."

"Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again."

"It would be difficult for me not to conclude that the most perfect type of masculine beauty is Satan, as portrayed by Milton."

"The SolitaryAs one who has sailed across an unknown sea,among this rooted folk I am alone;the full days on their tables are their own,to me the distant is reality.A new world reaches to my very eyes,a place perhaps unpeopled as the moon;their slightest feelings they must analyze,and all their words have got the common tune.The things I brought with me from far away,compared with theirs, look strangely not the same:in their great country they were living things,but here they hold their breath, as if for shame."

"Malt does more than Milton can to justify God's ways to man."

"Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things."

"Whether you come from heaven or hell, what does it matter, O Beauty!"

"Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed."

"I think hearts are very much like glasses. If they do not break with the first ring, they usually last a considerable time."

"That money talks, I'll not deny, I heard it once: It said, 'Goodbye'."

"A bad neighbor is as great a calamity as a good one is a great advantage."


"The most pitiful among men is he who turns his dreams into silver and gold."

"Better have failed in the high aim, as I, Than vulgarly in the low aim succeed As, God be thanked! I do not."

"A lost road will remember your footsteps because someday you may want to return, tracing the way."

"There is only one way to get ready for immortality, and that is to love this life and live it as bravely and faithfully and cheerfully as we can."
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