"I'm no teacher. Never wanted to teach and don't believe in teaching an art. Science yes, business of course..but an art cannot be taught. You can only inculcate it, you can be an exemplar, you can create an atmosphere in which it can grow. Well I suppose I, being an exemplar, could be called a teacher, in spite of myself. So go ahead, call me a teacher."

"So here I stand before you preaching organic architecture: declaring organic architecture to be the modern ideal."

"No house should ever be on a hill or on anything. It should be of the hill. Belonging to it. Hill and house should live together each the happier for the other."

"It is where life is fundamental and free that men develop the vision needed to reveal the human soul in the blossoms it puts forth. ... In a great workshop like Chicago this creative power germinates, even though the brutality and selfish preoccupation of the place drive it elsewhere for bread. Men of this type have loved Chicago, have worked for her, and believed in her. The hardest thing they have to bear is her shame. These men could live and work here when to live and work in New York would stifle their genius and fill their purse.... New York still believes that art should be imported; brought over in ships; and is a quite contented market place. So while New York has reproduced much and produced nothing, Chicago's achievements in architecture have gained world-wide recognition as a distinctively American architecture."

"Pictures deface walls oftener than they decorate them."

"If you would see how interwoven it is in the warp and woof of civilization ... go at night-fall to the top of one of the down-town steel giants and you may see how in the image of material man, at once his glory and his menace, is this thing we call a city. There beneath you is the monster, stretching acre upon acre into the far distance. High over head hangs the stagnant pall of its fetid breath, reddened with light from myriad eyes endlessly, everywhere blinking. Thousands of acres of cellular tissue, the city's flesh outspreads layer upon layer, enmeshed by an intricate network of veins and arteries radiating into the gloom, and in them, with muffled, persistent roar, circulating as the blood circulates in your veins, is the almost ceaseless beat of the activity to whose necessities it all conforms. The poisonous waste is drawn from the system of this gigantic creature by infinitely ramifying, thread-like ducts, gathering at their sensitive terminals matter destructive of its life, hurrying it to millions of small intestines to be collected in turn by larger, flowing to the great sewers, on to the drainage canal, and finally to the ocean."

"E. E. Cummings is not a writer; he is just a phase that other writers go through."

"the axis of the universe —love"

"now I lay me down to dream of(nothing i or any somebody or you can begin to begin to imagine) something which nobody may keep."

"hugest whole creation may be less incalculable than a single kiss"

"all which isn't singing is mere talking ... and all talking's to oneself alone but the very song of(as mountains feel and lovers)singing is silence"

"unbeingdead isn't beingalive"

"we sans love equals mob"

"Mostpeople have been heard screaming for international measures that render hell rational —i thank heaven somebody's crazy enough to give me a daisy"

"without any doubt he was whatever(first and last) most people fear most: a mystery for which iv'e no word except alive"

"they work and they pray and they bow to a must though the earth in her splendor says May"

"the cunning the craven ... they live for until though the sun in his heaven says Now"

"they flock and they flee through the thunder of seem though the stars in their silence say Be"

"a great man is gone.Tall as the truth was who; and wore his ... life like a ... sky."

"because it's Spring thingS dare to do people"

"it's so damn sweet when Anybody— ...makes you feel ...for once (imag -ine) You"

"I admire E.E. Cummings's musicality, less for his visual-only poems, not at all for his occasional anti-Semitism."

"cummings was doing the same thing: getting into words, rolling around in them. As a child, I used to charm myself with words."

"A humbly poetic, gently clownlike, supremely innocent, and illimitably affectionate creature (slightly resembling a child's drawing of a cat, but gifted with the secret grace and obvious clumsiness of a penguin on terra firma) who is never so happy as when egoist-mouse, thwarting altruist-dog, hits her in the head with a brick. Dog hates mouse and worships "cat", mouse despises "cat" and hates dog, "cat" hates no one and loves mouse."

"What concerns me fundamentaly is a meteoric burlesk melodrama, born of the immemorial adage love will find a way."

"nothing except the impossible shall occur"

"all ignorance toboggans into know and trudges up to ignorance again"

"—tommorow is our permanent address and there they'll scarcely find us(if they do, we'll move away still further:into now"

"yes is a pleasant country... love is a deeper season than reason"

"true lovers in each happening of their hearts live longer than all which and every who"

"nothing false and possible is love (who's imagined, therefore limitless) love's to giving as to keeping's give; as yes is to if, love is to yes"

"'and liars kill their kind but' her,my 'love creates love only' our"

"true wars are never won"

"no sunbeam ever lies"

"when god decided to invent everything he took one breath bigger than a circustent and everything beganwhen man determined to destroy himself he picked the was of shall and finding only why smashed it into because"

"what if a dawn of a doom of a dream bites this universe in two, peels forever out of it's grave and sprinkles nowhere with me and you?"

"—when skies are hanged and oceans drowned, the single secret will still be man"

"We doctors know a hopeless case if — listen: there's a hell of a good universe next door; let's go"

"pity this busy monster, manunkind, not. Progress is a comfortable disease: your victim (death and life safely beyond) plays with the bigness of his littleness"

"plato told him:he couldn't believe it(jesustold him;he wouldn't believe itlaotsze certainly told him,and general (yes mam) sherman; and even (believe it or not)you told him:i told him;we told him (he didn't believe it,no sir)"

"a politician is an arse upon which everyone has sat except a man"

"on forever's very now we stand"

"measureless our pure living complete love whose doom is beauty and its fate to grow"

"love is more thicker than forget ... it is more sane and sunly and more it cannot die than all the sky which only is higher than the sky"

"love is the every only god"

"and nothing quite so least as truth —i say though hate were why men breathe— because my father lived his soul love is the whole and more than all"

"my father moved through dooms of love through sames of am through haves of give singing each morning out of each night my father moved through depths of height"

"anyone lived in a pretty how town (with up so floating many bells down) spring summer autumn winter he sang his didn’t he danced his did."

"ye!the godless are the dull and the dull are the damned"

"King Christ, this world is all aleak; and lifepreservers there are none: and waves which only He may walk Who dares to call Himself a man."