"I think of the poetry of René Char and all he must have seen and suffered that has brought him to speak only of sedgy rivers, of daffodils and tulips whose roots they water, even to the free-flowing river that laves the rootlets of those sweet-scented flowers that people the milky way"

"The cries of a dying dog are to be blotted out as best I can. René Char you are a poet who believes in the power of beauty to right all wrongs. I believe it also. With invention and courage we shall surpass the pitiful dumb beasts, let all men believe it, as you have taught me also to believe it."

"When I speak"

"Of asphodel, that greeny flower,"

"When a man makes a poem, makes it, mind you, he takes words as he finds them interrelated about him and composes them — without distortion which would mar their exact significances — into an intense expression of his perceptions and ardors that they may constitute a revelation in the speech that he uses. It isn’t what he says that counts as a work of art, it’s what he makes, with such intensity of perception that it lives with an intrinsic movement of its own to verify its authenticity."

"There is no poetry of distinction without formal invention, for it is in the intimate form that works of art achieve their exact meaning, in which they most resemble the machine, to give language its highest dignity, its illumination in the environment to which it is native. Such war, as the arts live and breathe by, is continuous. It may be that my interests as expressed here are pre-art. If so I look for a development along these lines and will be satisfied with nothing else."

"Let the snake wait under his weed and the writing be of words, slow and quick, sharp to strike, quiet to wait, sleepless. — through metaphor to reconcile the people and the stones. Compose. (No ideas but in things) Invent! Saxifrage is my flower that splits the rocks."

"Each speech having its own character, the poetry it engenders will be peculiar to that speech also in its own intrinsic form. The effect is beauty, what in a single object resolves our complex feelings of propriety."

"The storm bursts"

"There’s nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words."

"Prose may carry a load of ill-defined matters like a ship. But poetry is the machine which drives it, pruned to a perfect economy."

"Not now. Love itself a flower with roots in a parched ground. Empty pockets make empty heads. Cure it if you can but do not believe that we can live today in the country for the country will bring us no peace."

"Among of green stiff old bright broken branch come white sweet May again"

"These are the desolate, dark weeks when nature in its barrenness equals the stupidity of man. The year plunges into night and the heart plunges lower than night"

"The War is the first and only thing in the world today. The arts generally are not, nor is this writing a diversion from that for relief, a turning away. It is the war or part of it, merely a different sector of the field."

"It's all you deserve. You've got the cash, what the hell do you care? You've got nothing to lose. You are inheritors of a great tradition. My country right or wrong! You do what you're told to do. You don't answer back the way Tommy Jeff did or Ben Frank or Georgie Washing. I'll say you don't. You're civilized. You let your betters tell you where you get off. Go ahead —"

"I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold"

"He's come out of the man and he's let the man go —"

"Who isn’t frustrated and does not prove it by his actions — if you want to say so? But through art the psychologically maimed may become the most distinguished man of his age. Take Freud for instance."

"I come, my sweet,"

"Your case has been reviewed by high-minded and unprejudiced observers (like hell they were!) the president of a great university, the president of a noteworthy technical school and a judge too old to sit on the bench, men already rewarded for their services to pedagogy and the enforcement of arbitrary statutes. In other words pimps to tradition —"

"Lifeless in appearance, sluggish dazed spring approaches — They enter the new world naked, cold, uncertain of all save that they enter. All about them The cold, familiar wind — Now the grass, tomorrow the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf One by one objects are defined — It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf But now the stark dignity of entrance — Still, the profound change has come upon them: rooted, they grip down and begin to awaken."

"The pure products of America go crazy —"

"A man isn’t a block that remains stationary though the psychologists treat him so — and most take an insane pride in believing it. Consistency! He varies; Hamlet today, Caesar tomorrow; here, there, somewhere — if he is to retain his sanity, and why not? The arts have a complex relation to society. The poet isn’t a fixed phenomenon, no more is his work."

"Among the rain and lights I saw the figure 5 in gold on a red firetruck moving tense unheeded to gong clangs siren howls and wheels rumbling through the dark city."

"By the road to the contagious hospital under the surge of the blue mottled clouds driven from the northeast — a cold wind."

"Old age is a flight of small cheeping birds skimming bare trees above a snow glaze. Gaining and failing they are buffeted by a dark wind — But what? On harsh weedstalks the flock has rested — the snow is covered with broken seed husks and the wind tempered with a shrill piping of plenty."

"so much depends upona red wheel barrowglazed with rain waterbeside the white chickens"

"Why do I write today?The beauty of the terrible faces of our nonentities stirs me to it: colored women day workers— old and experienced— returning home at dusk, in cast off clothing faces like old Florentine oak."

"the set pieces of your faces stir me — leading citizens — but not in the same way."

"I lie here thinking of you:—the stain of love is upon the world!"

"The earth cracks and is shriveled up; the wind moans piteously; the sky goes out if you should fail."

"Being an art form, verse cannot be "free" in the sense of having no limitations or guiding principle."

"So different, this man And this woman: A stream flowing In a field."

"It's a strange courage you give me ancient star:Shine alone in the sunrise toward which you lend no part!"

"Lift your flowers on bitter stems chickory! Lift them up out of the scorched ground! Bear no foliage but give yourself wholly to that! Strain under them you bitter stems that no beast eats — and scorn greyness!"

"I liked this because of the elimination of the essential in the composition. I cut it down and down, and down. This squeezed up to make it vivid."

"I thought my friends were damn fools, because they didn't know any better way of conducting their lives. Still they conformed better than I to a code. I wanted to conform but I couldn't so I wrote my poetry."

"Brother! — if we were rich we'd stick our chests out and hold our heads high! It is dreams that have destroyed us.There is no more pride in horses or in rein holding. We sit hunched together brooding our fate. Well — all things turn bitter in the end whether you choose the right or the left way and — dreams are not a bad thing."

"The art of the poem nowadays is something unstable; but at least the construction of the poem should make sense; you should know where you stand. Many questions haven't been answered as yet. Our poets may be wrong; but what can any of us do with his talent but try to develop his vision, so that through frequent failures we may learn better what we have missed in the past."

"Who shall say I am not the happy genius of my household?"

"It is difficult to get the news from poems"

"I agree that you might clone some people who would look amazingly like their parental cell donors, but the odds are that they’d be almost as different as you or me, and certainly more different than any of today’s identical twins."

"I have always had a bad memory, as far back as I can remember."

"It is my belief, based partly on personal experience but partly also arrived at by looking around at others, that childhood lasts considerably longer in the males of our species than in the females."

"Maybe there is a single spot, just one, where living organisms are holed up. Maybe so, but if so this would be the strangest thing of all, absolutely incomprehensible. For we are not familiar with this kind of living. We do not have solitary, isolated creatures. It is beyond our imagination to conceive of a single form of life that exists alone and independent, unattached to other forms."

"Everything here is alive thanks to the living of everything else."

"As a people we have become obsessed with Health. There is something fundamentally, radically unhealthy about all this. We do not seem to be seeking more exuberance in living as much as staving off failure, putting off dying. We have lost all confidence in the human body."