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Quotes by Poet

"Life's greatest lessons were not shown to me, read to me, illustrated or explained to me; they happened to me."

"Thanks to impermanence, everything is possible. Life itself is possible. If a grain of corn is not impermanent, it can never be transformed into a stalk of corn. If the stalk were not impermanent, it could never provide us with the ear of corn we eat."

"Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul. Worry, fear, self-distrust bows the heart and turns the spirit back to dust."

"The truth about life and lie about life is not measured by others but by your intuition, which never lies."

"If you cannot be open-minded, then you do not possess your ideas, your ideas possess you."

"Be loved for who you are, for everything that constitutes you. Be loved for your core beliefs, your strengths and weaknesses, your admirable traits and troublesome baggage. Be loved for you, because anything less is not love at all."

"A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups."

"Stress is unnecessary and unnecessary stress is very unnecessary."

"I wonder what it means about American literary culture and its transmission when I consider the number of American poets who earn their living teaching creative writing in universities. I've ended up doing that myself."

"The best of friends fall out, and so his teeth had done some years ago."

"Another way of judging the value of a prophet's religious experience, therefore, would be to examine the type of manhood that he has created, and the cultural world that has sprung out of the spirit of his message."

"He was everything I needed because his entire character had been molded by my deepest wants and desires. He was my rock when I cried, my playmate when I laughed, and my hero when I needed to imagine that one existed for me."

"Under adversity, under oppression, the words begin to fail, the easy words begin to fail. In order to convey things accurately, the human being is almost forced to find the most precise words possible, which is a precondition for literature."

"Breathless, we flung us on a windy hill, Laughed in the sun, and kissed the lovely grass."

"An unsophisticated forecaster uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts - for support rather than for illumination."

"A real treasure becomes such only after it's been desperately sought after."

"Some minds improve by travel, others, rather, resemble copper wire, or brass, which get the narrower by going farther."

"Institutions have processes favoring efficiency over loss, and process over people."

"It is books that teach us to refine our pleasures when young, and to recall them with satisfaction when we are old."

"I would like people to come into my Dreamworld and then choose to stay."
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