"One does not live half a life in Asia without return. When it would be I did not know, nor even where it would be, or to what cause. In our changing world nothing changes more than geography. The friendly country of China, the home of my childhood and youth, is for the time being forbidden country. I refuse to call it enemy country. The people in my memory are too kind and the land too beautiful."

"All things are possible until they are proved impossible — and even the impossible may only be so, as of now."

"I love people. I love my family, my children … but inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that's where you renew your springs that never dry up."

"Because psychologists have been able to discover, exactly as in a slow-motion picture, the way the human creature acquires knowledge and habits, the normal child has been vastly helped by what the retarded have taught us."

"Euthanasia is a long, smooth-sounding word, and it conceals its danger as long, smooth words do, but the danger is there, nevertheless."

"It is a shameful sign of our arrogance that our history departments have almost no Chinese history in them, our literature courses almost no Chinese literature, our philosophy departments almost none of the great Chinese systems of philosophy. And our religious schools have been the most arrogant of all. This ignorant arrogant mind has become fixed in its patterns. It is the pattern which considers anything not American to be inferior — unless it be English."

"Men and women should own the world as a mutual possession."

"Profound as race prejudice is against the Negro American, it is not practically as far-reaching as the prejudice against women. For stripping away the sentimentality which makes Mother’s Day and Best American Mother Contests, the truth is that women suffer all the effects of a minority."

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

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

"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"

"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."

"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"

"nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time — and whenever we do it, we are not poets."

"it's love by whom (my beautiful friend) the gift to live is without until: ...love was and shall be this only truth (a dream of a deed, born not to die)"

"seeker of truth follow no path all paths lead where truth is here"

"my advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world — unless you're not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die. Does this sound dismal? It isn't. It's the most wonderful life on earth. Or so I feel."

"Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel...the moment you feel, you're nobody-but-yourself.To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting."

"it's you are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing is you"

"The whole truth... sings only —and all lovers are the song"

"lovers alone wear sunlight"

"unlove's the heavenless hell and the homeless home"

"each ignorant gladness —unteaches what despair preaches"

"dreamtree,truthtree tree of jubilee:with aeons of (trivial merely)existence,all when may not measure a now of your treasure"

"exists no miracle mightier than this:to feel"

"a million thousand hundred nothings seem —we are himself's own self;his very him"

"Time's a strange fellow; more he gives than takes (and he takes all)"

"seeming's enough for slaves of space and time —ours is the now and here of freedom. Come"

"though mankind persuades itself that every weed's a rose,roses(you feel certain) will only smile"

"no evil is so worse than worst you fall in hate with love —human one mortally immortal i can turn immense all time's because to why"

"the courage to receive time's mightiest dream"

"Every artist's strictly illimitable country is himself.An artist who plays that country false has committed suicide;and even a good lawyer cannot kill the dead. But a human being who's true to himself — whoever himself may be — is immortal;and all the atomic bombs of all the antiartists in spacetime will never civilize immortality."

"An artist doesn't live in some geographical abstraction,superimposed on a part of this beautiful earth by the nonimagination of unanimals and dedicated to the proposition that massacre is a social virtue because murder is an individual vice. Nor does an artist live in some soi-disant world,nor does he live in some so-called universe,nor does he live in any number of "worlds" or in any number of "universes." As for a few trifling delusions like the "past" and "present" and "future" of quote mankind unquote,they may be big enough for a couple of billion supermechanized submorons but they're much too small for one human being."

"concerning this selfstyled world's greatest and most generous literary figure: who had just arrived in our nation's capitol, attired in half a GI uniform and ready to be hanged as a traitor by the only country which ever made even a pretense of fighting for freedom of speech Re Ezra Pound — poetry happens to be an art;and artists happen to be human beings."

"Writing, I feel, is an art; and artists, I feel, are human beings. As a human being stands, so a human being is: not that some human beings aren't acrobats, while others—but why anticipate Him and Santa Claus?"