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Quotes by Poet

"If only I could see myself from the same vantage point that I observe the world; I might judge my behavior and expressions more critically, and others less."


"I don't live for poetry. I live far more than anybody else does."

"I wish everyone had someone who never popped their balloons."

"You never step backwards when you're sure of where you're going."

"A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations."

"The jury consist of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer."

"The epic poet collaborates with the spirit of his time in the composition of his work. That is, if he is successful; the time may refuse to work with him, but he may not refuse to work with his time."

"So it is in poetry. All we ask is that the mood recorded shall impress us as having been of the kind that exhausts the imaginative capacity; if it fails to do this the failure will announce itself either in prose or in insignificant verse."

"Yet higher religion, which is only a search for a larger life, is essentially experience and recognized the necessity of experience as its foundation long before science learnt to do so."


"I'm not sure that the benefit - as a writer and as a citizen - that I would get from reading at least the front page of the Times every day or every other day would outweigh the depression."

"Re-examine all that you have been told... dismiss that which insults your soul."

"The only things that the United States has given to the world are skyscrapers, jazz, and cocktails. That is all. And in Cuba, in our America, they make much better cocktails."

"It took the whole of Creation To produce my foot, my each feather: Now I hold Creation in my foot."

"Great writers arrive among us like new diseases threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible."

"Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination."

"Let everyone sweep in front of his own door, and the whole world will be clean."

"He is only rich who owns the day. There is no king rich man fairy or demon who possesses such power as that."

"Get to know other worlds, if only for comparison. I am near, too near for him to dream of me."

"Happiness is the interval between periods of unhappiness."

"The men of action are, after all, only the unconscious instruments of the men of thought."

"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought."

"So in the dark we hide the heart that bleeds, And wait, and tend our agonizing seeds."
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