In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.
Freedom lies in being bold.
Nothing gold can stay.
There are few sorrows, however poignant, in which a good income is of no avail.
Have I not walked without an upward look Of caution under stars that very well Might not have missed me when they shot and fell? It was a risk I had to take-and took.
It is absurd to think that the only way to tell if a poem is lasting is to wait and see if it lasts. The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken an immortal wound-that he will never get over it.
Any work of art must first of all tell a story.
Style is less the man than the way a man takes himself.
All there is to writing is having ideas. To learn to write is to learn to have ideas.
The first thing I do in the morning is to make my bed and while I am making up my bed I am making up my mind as to what kind of a day I am going to have.
Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, “grace” metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say, “Why don’t you say what you mean?” We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections – whether from diffidence or some other instinct.
Start with a big fat lump in your throat. Start with a profound sense of wrong, a deep homesickness, a crazy lovesickness, and run with it. If you imagine less, less will be what you undoubtedly deserve. Do what you love. And don’t stop until you get what you love.
I’m drunk-nonsensical tired out.
We saw the risk we took in doing good, But dared not spare to do the best we could.
Men work together,” I told him from the heart, “Whether they work together or apart.
He studied Latin like the violin, because he liked it.
We shall be known by the delicacy of where we stop short.
A man must partly give up being a man With women-folk.
The farm is a base of operations–a stronghold. You can withdraw into yourself there. Solitude for reflection is an essential ingredient in self-development. I think a person has to be withdrawn into himself to gather inspiration so that he is somebody when he comes out again among folks–when he “comes to market’ with himself. He learns that he’s got to be almost wastefully alone.
I had A Lover’s Quarrel With The World.