I wrote poems in my corner of the Brooks Street station. I sent them to two editors who rejected them right off. I read those letters of rejection years later and I agreed with those editors.
People lie because they don’t remember clear what they saw. People lie because they can’t help making a story better than it was the way it happened.
The machine yes the machine never wastes anybody’s time never watches the foreman never talks back.
I have in later years taken to Euclid, Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, in an elemental way.
There are 10 men in me and I do not know or understand one of them.
Never will a time come when the most marvelous recent invention is as marvelous as a newborn child.
Who am I, where have I been, and where am I going?
Time is a sandpile we run our fingers in.
I asked the professors who teach the meaning of life to tell me what is happiness. And I went to famous executives who boss the work of thousands of men. They all shook their heads and gave me a smile as though I was trying to fool with them. And then one Sunday afternoon I wandered out along the Desplaines river and I saw a crowd of Hungarians under the trees with their women and children and a keg of beer and an accordion.
To know silence perfectly is to know music.
Man is born with rainbows in his heart and you’ll never read him unless you consider rainbows.
Here I saw a city rise and say to the peoples round world: Listen, I am strong, I know what I want.
Music is any sound you want to go on and on.
There are some people so lonely, they think God is lonely too-.
Poetry is the Path on the Rainbow by which the soul climbs; it lays hold on the Friend of the Soul of Man. Such exalted states are held to be protective and curative. Medicine men sing for their patients, and, in times of war, wives gather around the Chief’s woman and sing for the success of their warriors. “Calling on Zeus by the names of Victory” as Euripides puts it.
Let us go out in the fog, John, let us roll up our raincoat collars and go on the streets where men are sneering at the kings.
I know of no task so salutory to the poet who would, first of all, put himself in touch with the resident genius of his own land.
Death comes once, let it be easy.
I will be back soon if not sooner and when I come back I will return.
You must expect to be in several lost causes before you die.
Out of the whirling womb of time come millions of men and their feet crowd the earth and they cut one another’s throats for room to stand and among them all are not two thumbs alike.