"Some years ago I met a gentleman who was introduced to me as Mr. McKelway, editor of the Brooklyn Eagle ... At the time the compliments that he paid me were so generous that I blush to remember them. But now that I have come out for Socialism he reminds me and the public that I am deaf and blind and especially liable to error.... The Eagle and I are at war. When it fights back, let it fight fair.... It is not fair fighting or good argument to remind me and others that I cannot see or hear."

"Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? It means that we choose between two bodies of real, though not avowed, autocrats. We choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee.... You ask for votes for women. What good can votes do when ten-elevenths of the land of Great Britain belongs to 200,000 and only one-eleventh to the rest of the 40,000,000? Have your men with their millions of votes freed themselves from this injustice?"

"The problems of deafness are deeper and more complex, if not more important, than those of blindness. Deafness is a much worse misfortune. For it means the loss of the most vital stimulus — the sound of the voice that brings language, sets thoughts astir and keeps us in the intellectual company of man."

"We differ, blind and seeing, one from another, not in our senses, but in the use we make of them, in the imagination and courage with which we seek wisdom beyond the senses."

"The bulk of the world's knowledge is an imaginary construction."

"The only real blind person at Christmas-time is he who has not Christmas in his heart. We sightless children had the best of eyes that day in our hearts and in our finger-tips. We were glad from the child's necessity of being happy. The blind who have outgrown the child's perpetual joy can be children again on Christmas Day and celebrate in the midst of them who pipe and dance and sing a new song!"

"I want to say to those who are trying to learn to speak and those who are teaching them: Be of good cheer. Do not think of to-day's failures, but of the success that may come to-morrow. You have set yourselves a difficult task, but you will succeed if you persevere, and you will find a joy in overcoming obstacles — a delight in climbing rugged paths, which you would perhaps never know if you did not sometime slip backward — if the road was always smooth and pleasant. Remember, no effort that we make to attain something beautiful is ever lost. Sometime, somewhere, somehow we shall find that which we seek. We shall speak, yes, and sing, too, as God intended we should speak and sing."

"One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar."

"If the light were not in your eyes, dear Mr. Brooks, you would understand better how happy your little Helen was when her teacher explained to her that the best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen nor even touched but just felt in the heart."

"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"

"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"

"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"

"true wars are never won"

"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."

"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."

"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?"

"The one...thing which mattered about any poem (so ran my second poetic period's credo) was what the poem said; it's socalled meaning ... Thus it will be seen that, by the year 1900, one growing American boy had reached exactly that stage of "intellectual development" beyond which every ungrowing Marxist adult of today is strictly forbidden ... ever to pass."