32 quotes
Beauty without purpose is beauty without virtue.
But all beautiful things, inherently, have this function —
to excite the viewers toward sublime thought.
Glory to the world, that good teacher.
Evidence (2009)
I believe in kindness. Also in mischief. Also in singing, especially when singing is not necessarily prescribed.
Evidence (2009)
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
New and Selected Poems (1992)
Every day I see or hear something that more or less kills me with delight, that leaves me like a needle in the haystack of light.
Why I Wake Early (2004)
Death waits for me, I know it, around
one corner or another.
This doesn't amuse me.
Neither does it frighten me.
Red Bird (2008)
What countries, what visitations,
what pomp
would satisfy me as thoroughly as Blackwater Woods
on a sun-filled morning, or, equally, in the rain?
West Wind (1997)
Good poems are the best teachers. Perhaps they are the only teachers. I would go so far as to stay that, if one must make a choice between reading or taking part in a workshop, one should read.
Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.
Thirst (2006)
I am a performing artist; I perform admiration.
Come with me, I want my poems to say. And do the same.
Winter Hours (1999)
Am I not among the early risers
and the long-distance walkers? Have I not stood, amazed, as I consider
the perfection of the morning star
above the peaks of the houses, and the crowns of the trees
blue in the first light?
Do I not see how the trees tremble, as though
sheets of water flowed over them
though it is only wind, that common thing,
free to everyone, and everything?
West Wind (1997)
then you too are a dream which last night and the night before that
and the years before that
you were not.
Red Bird (2008)
Here is an amazement –– once I was twenty years old and in
every motion of my body there was a delicious ease,
and in every motion of the green earth there was
a hint of paradise,
and now I am sixty years old, and it is the same.
West Wind (1997)