All Quotes

"The grass so little has to do,— A sphere of simple green, With only butterflies to brood, And bees to entertain,And stir all day to pretty tunes The breezes fetch along, And hold the sunshine in its lap And bow to everything;And thread the dews all night, like pearls, And make itself so fine,— A duchess were too common For such a noticing.And even when it dies, to pass In odors so divine, As lowly spices gone to sleep, Or amulets of pine.And then to dwell in sovereign barns, And dream the days away,— The grass so little has to do, I wish I were a hay!"

"If Aims impel these Astral Ones The ones allowed to know Know that which makes them as forgot As Dawn forgets them – now"

"The pedigree of honey Does not concern the bee; A clover, any time, to him Is aristocracy."

"The Soul selects her own Society – Then – shuts the Door – To her divine Majority – Present no more –"

"The sweets of Pillage can be known To no one but the Thief, Compassion for Integrity Is his divinest Grief."

"There is a solitude of space, A solitude of sea, A solitude of death, but these Society shall be, Compared with that profounder site, That polar privacy, A Soul admitted to Itself: Finite Infinity."

"There is a word Which bears a sword Can pierce an armed man. It hurls its barbed syllables,— At once is mute again. But where it fell The saved will tell On patriotic day, Some epauletted brother Gave his breath away.Wherever runs the breathless sun, Wherever roams the day, There is its noiseless onset, There is its victory! Behold the keenest marksman! The most accomplished shot! Time's sublimest target Is a soul "forgot"!"

"There's a certain Slant of light, Winter Afternoons - That oppresses, like the Heft Of Cathedral Tunes -Heavenly Hurt, it gives us - We can find no scar, But internal difference - Where the Meanings, are -"

"They shut me up in Prose - As when a little Girl They put me in the Closet - Because they liked me "still" -Still! Could themself have peeped - And seen my Brain - go round - They might as wise have lodged a Bird For Treason - in the Pound -"

"This is my letter to the World That never wrote to Me – The simple News that Nature told – With tender Majesty Her Message is committed To Hands I cannot see – For love of Her – Sweet – countrymen – Judge tenderly – of Me"

"This quiet dust was gentlemen and ladies And lads and girls; Was laughter and ability and sighing, And frocks and curls."

"To Whom the Mornings stand for Nights, What must the Midnights – be!"

"Truth – is as old as God – His Twin identity And will endure as long as He A Co-Eternity –And perish on the Day Himself is borne away From Mansion of the Universe A lifeless Deity."

"Upon the gallows hung a wretch, Too sullied for the hell To which the law entitled him. As nature’s curtain fell The one who bore him tottered in, For this was woman’s son. "'Twas all I had," she stricken gasped; Oh, what a livid boon!"

"We outgrow love, like other things And put it in the Drawer – Till it an Antique fashion shows – Like Costumes Grandsires wore."

"What Soft – Cherubic Creatures – These Gentlewomen are – One would as soon assault a Plush – Or violate a Star –Such Dimity Convictions – A Horror so refined Of freckled Human Nature – Of Deity – ashamed –"

"Who has not found the Heaven – below – Will fail of it above – For Angels rent the House next ours, Wherever we remove –"

"Who has not found the heaven below Will fail of it above. God's residence is next to mine, His furniture is love."

"Wild nights - Wild nights! Were I with thee Wild nights should be Our luxury!Futile - the winds - To a Heart in port - Done with the Compass - Done with the Chart!Rowing in Eden - Ah - the Sea! Might I but moor - tonight - In thee!"

"Whenever a thing is done for the first time, it releases a little demon."

"In English, you know who I love, and have translated? Emily Dickinson...I translated Dickinson. It came out in the Nuevo Diario a long time ago, in the beginning of the 1980s. I love her very much."

"(What is it about Emily Dickinson that moves you?) Her use of language, certainly. Her solitude, as well, and the style of that solitude. There is something very moving and in the best sense funny. She isn't solemn."

"One who, as a child, knew Emily Dickinson well and loved her much recollects her most vividly as a white, ethereal vision, stepping from her cloistral solitude on to the verandah, daintily unrolling a great length of carpet before her with her foot, strolling down to where the carpet ended among her flowers, then turning back and shutting herself out of the world."

"Dickinson was a woman of privilege who never left her house, nor had to deal with issues beyond which white dress to wear on a given day."

"There is another thing about my childhood that is interesting now, in the light of later happenings. I might have said, with Emily Dickinson: "I never saw a moor,/I never saw the sea;/Yet know I how the heather looks,/And what a wave must be." For I never saw the ocean until I went from college to the marine laboratories at Woods Hole, on Cape Cod. Yet as a child I was fascinated by the thought of it. I dreamed about it and wondered what it would look like."

"Friends dislike being apart. Separation, says Emily Dickinson, is all the Hell we need. Each shared moment is precious. And the only ones who can remember the hour of loneliness are those who survive it."

"No great poet has written so much bad verse as Emily Dickinson...Her coy and oddly childish poems of nature and female friendship are products of a time when one of the careers open to women was perpetual childhood."

"I'm from the Emily Dickinson and Flannery O'Connor school of writing, where you write about your Amherst backyard or about a farm in Milledgevilk, and then you're actually writing about everything it means to be human."

"The complexity of women's undergarments in nineteenth-century America is not to be waved off, and I proceeded like a polar explorer through clips, clasps, and moorings, catches, straps, and whalebone stays, sailing toward the iceberg of her nakedness."

"There’s no higher entitlement than thinking that you should live forever, when part of the beauty of nature is that even the stars die. That's what Emily Dickinson said: 'That it will never come again/is what makes life so sweet.' I believe that."

"My mother was the first songwriter I knew; Emily Dickinson was the first poet and my grandmother the first storyteller...From Emily I learned that the immense silences I found within me were navigable by words and metaphor."

"Her poetry is the diary or autobiography — though few diaries or autobiographies compare with it for intentional and, especially, unintentional truth — of an acute psychologist, a wonderful rhetorician, and one of the most individual writers who ever lived, one of those best able to express experience at its most nearly absolute."

"Emily Dickinson is nearly infinite in her expression. She wrote seventeen hundred and seventy-five poems, and they constitute a very rich literature certainly. And she was, God knows, highly imaginative, highly intelligent, highly perceptive, and she had a kind of regard for language that a great writer must have. It was a mystery, a miracle to her. I learned a little something about the mystery and miracle of language by reading her..."

"When I visited Emily Dickinson's house in Amherst, a lively plump robin was sitting on her step, right under the second-story window she would have stared out of."

"Anger has always played a role in poetry...There is much anger in Emily Dickinson, lightly disguised as mockery. "The Bible is an antique volume / Written by faded men," she proclaims."

"Even the best critical writing on Emily Dickinson underestimates her. She is frightening. To come to her directly from Dante, Spenser, Blake, and Baudelaire is to find her sadomasochism obvious and flagrant. Birds, bees, and amputated hands are the dizzy stuff of this poetry. Dickinson is like the homosexual cultist draping himself in black leather and chains to bring the idea of masculinity into aggressive visibility."

"Emily Dickinson is the female Sade, and her poems are the prison dreams of a self-incarcerated, sadmomasochistic imaginist. When she is rescued from American Studies departments and juxtaposed with Dante and Baudelaire, her barbarities and diabolical acts of will become glaringly apparent. Dickinson inherits through Blake the rape cycle of The Faerie Queene. Blake and Spenser are her allies in helping pagan Coleridge defeat Protestant Wordsworth."

"Dickinson's sentimental feminine poems remain neglected by embarrassed scholars. I would maintain, however, that her poetry is a closed system of sexual reference and that the mawkish poems are designed to dovetail with those of violence and suffering."

"I have a notion that genius knows itself; that Dickinson chose her seclusion, knowing she was exceptional and knowing what she needed. It was, moreover, no hermetic retreat, but a seclusion which included a wide range of people, of reading and correspondence. Her sister Vinnie said, "Emily is always looking for the rewarding person." And she found, at various periods, both women and men: her sister-in-law Susan Gilbert, Amherst visitors and family friends such as Benjamin Newton, Charles Wadsworth, Samuel Bowles, editor of the Springfield Republican, and his wife; her friends Kate Anthon and Helen Hunt Jackson, the distant but significant figures of Elizabeth Barrett, the Brontës, George Eliot. But she carefully selected her society and controlled the disposal of her time. Not only the "gentlewomen in plush" of Amherst were excluded; Emerson visited next door but she did not go to meet him; she did not travel or receive routine visits; she avoided strangers. Given her vocation, she was neither eccentric nor quaint; she was determined to survive, to use her powers, to practice necessary economies."

"Emily Dickinson — viewed by her bemused contemporary Thomas Higginson as "partially cracked," by the twentieth century as fey or pathological — has increasingly struck me as a practical woman, exercising her gift as she had to, making choices."

"She was always stirred by the existences of women like George Eliot or Elizabeth Barrett, who possessed strength of mind, articulateness, and energy. (She once characterized Elizabeth Fry and Florence Nightingale as "holy" — one suspects she merely meant, "great.")"

"Emily Dickinson's strictness, sometimes almost a slang of strictness, speaks with an intellectually active, stimulated quick music."

"Emily Dickinson, whose unappeasable thirst for fame was itself unknown for years after her death, had to fight through her family — "Vesuvius at home" — until a miserable lawsuit and the theft of a manure pile interrupted the posthumous publication of her work, and postponed for forty-nine years what may be her finest book."

"Farsighted theologians are now working to mine the eternal metal from the teachings of Jesus and to forge it for all time."

"We have no right to assume that any physical laws exist, or if they have existed up to now, that they will continue to exist in a similar manner in the future."

"I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness."

"Anybody who has been seriously engaged in scientific work of any kind realizes that over the entrance to the gates of the temple of science are written the words: Ye must have faith. It is a quality which the scientist cannot dispense with."

"Again and again the imaginary plan on which one attempts to build up that order breaks down and then we must try another. This imaginative vision and faith in the ultimate success are indispensable. The pure rationalist has no place here."

"I also knew the formula that expresses the energy distribution in the normal spectrum. A theoretical interpretation therefore had to be found at any cost, no matter how high. It was clear to me that classical physics could offer no solution to this problem, and would have meant that all energy would eventually transfer from matter to radiation. ...This approach was opened to me by maintaining the two . The two laws, it seems to me, must be upheld under all circumstances. For the rest, I was ready to sacrifice every one of my previous convictions about physical laws. ...[One] finds that the continuous loss of energy into radiation can be prevented by assuming that energy is forced at the outset to remain together in certain quanta. This was purely a formal assumption and I really did not give it much thought except that no matter what the cost, I must bring about a positive result."

"New scientific ideas never spring from a communal body, however organized, but rather from the head of an individually inspired researcher who struggles with his problems in lonely thought and unites all his thought on one single point which is his whole world for the moment."