Pulitzer Prize Winners

"Oh, beauty, are you not enough? Why am I crying after love?"

"No one worth possessing Can be quite possessed."

"I am alone, as though I stood On the highest peak of the tired gray world, About me only swirling snow, Above me, endless space unfurled; With earth hidden and heaven hidden, And only my own spirit's pride To keep me from the peace of those Who are not lonely, having died."

"The window-lights, myriads and myriads, Bloom from the walls like climbing flowers."

"If I am peaceful, I shall see Beauty's face continually; Feeding on her wine and bread I shall be wholly comforted, For she can make one day for me Rich as my lost eternity."

"Oh Earth, you gave me all I have, I love you, I love you, — oh what have I That I can give you in return — Except my body after I die?"

"The appeal to heaven breaks off. The petals begin to fall, in self-forgiveness. It is a flower. On this mountainside it is dying."

"The sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them: the long, perfect loveliness of sow."

"I take a wolf's rib and whittle it sharp at both ends and coil it up and freeze it in blubber and place it out on the fairway of the bears."

"A boy's hunched body loved out of a stalk The first song of his happiness, and the song woke His heart to the darkness and into the sadness of joy."

"I feel like Galway Kinnell has been a teacher, even though I have never met him. I love his work. I think that what he has is a beautiful balance between technique and music. He is such a poet. He's a poet's poet with the music"

"Here is the real domino theory: Gay man to gay man, bisexual man to straight woman, addict mother to newborn baby, they all fall down and someday it will come to you."

"People always blame the girl; she should have said no. A monosyllable, but conventional wisdom has always been that boys can't manage it."

"Our love of lockstep is our greatest curse, the source of all that bedevils us. It is the source of homophobia, xenophobia, racism, sexism, terrorism, bigotry of every variety and hue, because it tells us there is one right way to do things, to look, to behave, to feel, when the only right way is to feel your heart hammering inside you and to listen to what its timpani is saying."

"If men got pregnant, there would be safe, reliable methods of birth control. They'd be inexpensive, too."

"Some of my best friends are men. It is simply that I think women are superior to men. There, I've said it. It's my dirty little secret. [...] The other day, a very wise friend of mine asked "Have you ever noticed that what passes as a terrific man would only be an adequate woman?" A Roman candle went off in my head; she was absolutely right. What I expect from my male friends is that there are polite and clean. What I expect from my female friends is unconditional love, the ability to finish my sentences for me when I am sobbing, and the ability to tell me why the meat thermometer isn't supposed to touch the bone."

"People who wish to salute the free and independent side of their evolutionary character acquire cats. People who wish to pay homage to their servile and salivating roots own dogs."

"Another poem that I loved first as music, later pondered for what it could tell me about women and men and marriage, was Edwin Arlington Robinson's "Eros Turannos":"

"We are young And we are friends of time."

"I shall have more to say when I am dead."

"Your Dollar is your only Word, The wrath of it your only fear. You build it altars tall enough To make you see, but your are blind; You cannot leave it long enough To look before you or behind."

"A thousand golden sheaves were lying there, Shining and still, but not for long to stay— As if a thousand girls with golden hair Might rise from where they slept and go away."

"Whenever Richard Cory went down town,We people on the pavement looked at him: He was a gentleman from sole to crown,Clean favored, and imperially slim.And he was always quietly arrayed,And he was always human when he talked;But still he fluttered pulses when he said,"Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked.And he was rich—yes, richer than a king— And admirably schooled in every grace:In fine, we thought that he was everythingTo make us wish that we were in his place.So on we worked, and waited for the light,And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,Went home and put a bullet through his head."

"Religion is at its best when it makes us ask hard questions of ourselves. It is at its worst when it deludes us into thinking we have all the answers for everybody else."

"No matter what we are, and what we sing, Time finds a withered leaf in every laurel"

"Are we no greater than the noise we make Along one blind atomic pilgrimage Whereon by crass chance billeted we go Because our brains and bones and cartilage Will have it so?"

"Oh for a poet - for a beacon bright"

"Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, there is no reason either in football or in poetry why the two should not meet in a man's life if he has the weight and cares about the words."

"The business of the law is to make sense of the confusion of what we call human life—to reduce it to order but at the same time to give it possibility, scope, even dignity."

"If God is God, he is not good. If God is good, he is not God."

"We are as great as our belief in human liberty — no greater. And our belief in human liberty is only ours when it is larger than ourselves."

"He was himself and he had lost the speed He started with, and he was left behind."

"It is not in the world of ideas that life is lived. Life is lived for better or worse in life, and to a man in life, his life can be no more absurd than it can be the opposite of absurd, whatever that opposite may be."

"What is more important in a library than anything else — is the fact that it exists."

"To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold — brothers who know now they are truly brothers."

"A poem should not mean But be."

"Races didn't bother the Americans. They were something a lot better than any race. They were a People. They were the first self-constituted, self-declared, self-created People in the history of the world. And their manners were their own business. And so were their politics. And so, but ten times so, were their souls."

"You have made The cement of your churches out of tears And ashes, and the fabric will not stand."

"The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself."

"The gods are growing old; The stars are singing Golden hair to gray Green leaf to yellow leaf,—or chlorophyl To xanthophyl, to be more scientific."

"I'm not going to throw my imagination away. I refuse to lie down to expectation. If I can just hold out till I'm thirty, I'll be incredible."

"Deep in the heart of both critical Christian and alienated Jew, there is … a feeling, not even a feeling, a shadow of a notion, nothing more substantial than the pointless but compelling impulse to knock on wood when one talks of the health of children—something that says there is more to Jews than meets the eye."

"There is a mystery about the Jews … and within this mystery lies the reason for the folk pride of the house of Abraham. This pride exists despite the disabilities that come from many centuries of ostracism."

"You can know almost anything about G-d, provided you put the right questions to Him. You have to learn how to put the questions, and they have to be accurate and airtight. [...] [M]y father, for instance, doesn't know that two atoms of hydrogen bind with one atom of oxygen to form a water molecule. Yet it's G-d's truth, and an important one. You don't know it [...] you believe it because you read it somewhere, or a teacher told you. I know it. I've put the question, and He answered, straight out. G-d will answer a high school boy. He asks only that you use common sense, pay very close attention to Him, not be sloppy, and count and measure correctly. G-d ignores sloppy questions. Sloppiness is the opposite of G-dliness. G-d is exact. He is marvelously, purely exact. Theology is all slop. Moses gave the best answers you could get, three thousand years ago, and he was no theologian."

"We are in the black theater of nonexistence. In an eye blink the curtain is up, the stage ablaze, for the vast drama of ourselves."

"This is an excellent martini—sort of tastes like it isn’t there at all, just a cold cloud."

"I felt there’s a wealth in Jewish tradition, a great inheritance. I’d be a jerk not to take advantage of it."

"The imaginative artist willy-nilly influences his time. If he understands his responsibility and acts on it—taking the art seriously always, himself never quite—he can make a contribution equal to, if different from, that of the scientist, the politician, and the jurist. The anarchic artist so much in vogue now—asserting with vehemence and violence that he writes only for himself, grubbing in the worst seams of life—can do damage. But he can also be so useful in breaking up obsolete molds, exposing shams, and crying out the truth, that the broadest freedom of art seems to me necessary to a country worth living in."

"I regard the writing of humor as a supreme artistic challenge."

"We are in the process of creating what deserves to be called the idiot culture. Not an idiot sub-culture, which every society has bubbling beneath the surface and which can provide harmless fun; but the culture itself. For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norm, even our cultural ideal."