Such perfect incompleteness, suggestion and ambiguity are among the most valuable devices of the skilled poet, means by which the poem opens to let us in.
Nothing goes further toward a man’s liberation than the act of surviving his need for character.
The public library is the most dangerous place in town.
I’m smiled out, talked out, quipped out, socialized so far from any being, I need the weight of mortal silences to get realized back into myself.
I have one head that wants to be good, And one that wants to be bad. And always, as soon as I get up, One of my heads is sad.
Boys are the cash of war. Whoever said: we’re not free spenders- doesn’t know our like.
It is easy enough to praise men for the courage of their conviction. I wish I could teach the sad young of this mealy generation the courage of their convictions.
The thing about cats as you might find, is that no one knows what they have in mind.
General rules have been legislated into being by past masters.
To read a poem with no thought in mind but to paraphrase it into a single, simple and usually high-minded prose statement is the destruction of poetry.
Patience is the art of caring slowly.
What has any poet to trust more than the feel of the thing? Theory concerns him only until he picks up his pen, and it begins to concern him again as soon as he lays it down.
The success of the poem is determined not by how much the poet felt in writing it, but by how much the reader feels in reading it.
Tell me how much a nation knows about its own language, and I will tell you how much that nation knows about its own identity.
Honesty: The ability to resist small temptations.
The fact that a good poem will never wholly submit to explanation is not its deficiency but its very life. One lives every day what he cannot define. It is feeling that is first. What one cannot help but sense in good poetry is a sense of the whole language stirring toward richer possibilities than one could have foreseen.
Translator’s Note: When the violin repeats what the piano has just played, it cannot make the same sounds and it can only approximate the same chords. It can, however, make recognizably the same “music”, the same air. But it can do so only when it is as faithful to the self-logic of the violin as it is to the self-logic of the piano.
A man is what he does with his attention.
Good writing tends to present evidence rather than judgments. When the evidence is well presented, the reader’s judgments will agree with those implicit in the writing. But nothing is more disastrous to the communication between writer and reader than a series of implicit judgments with which the reader cannot agree or which he finds to be simply silly or for which he is given no evidence he can respect.
Every word has a history. Every word has an image locked into its roots.
I hope the next time the young go out for an intellectual rebellion, they will think to try the library. It’s still the most subversive building in town, and it’s still human headquarters.