Poets From The United States

"Love is almost never simple."

"There can be no forced inspiration."

"Too often, feelings arrive too soon, waiting for thoughts that often come too late."

"Accidents are not accidents but precise arrivals at the wrong right time."

"Great poets are great copy editors."

"There is no born lover, there is no born Don Juan, for we are all lovers."

"Perfection seems sterile; it is final, no mystery in it; it's a product of an assembly line."

"Although all days are equally long regardless of the season, some days are long not only seasonally but by rewards they offer."

"There is a moonlight note in the Moonlight Sonata; there is a thunder note in an angry sky."

"When all is lost, there is still a memory."

"Before the first before and after the last after, there is night waiting."

"In trying to be perfect, he perfected the art of anonymity."

"There is another alphabet, whispering from every leaf, singing from every river, shimmering from every sky."

"I believe my poetry reflects an intense relationship to the music of the spoken word. Writing plays involves not only language, but the interplay of various languages-different characters' varying speech patterns and inflections, personalities-as well as the visible rhythms of bodies relating to each other. A domestic scene in a play is like a string quartet."

"The library is an arena of possibility, opening both a window into the soul and a door onto the world."

"I am deeply grateful to the women who really blazed the way-poets like Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath and Maxine Kumin."

"There are poets I return to again and again for sustenance: I read them, shake my head and wonder, How did they do that? I go back to figures like Emily Dickinson and Thomas Hardy, for example, and Langston Hughes and Shakespeare, and some prose writers as well - James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Gabriel Garcia Marquez."

"I am Rita Dove, the beautiful dove. See my black neck, see my speck. My ass is not so much cracked but i want to get out now. The poet, am I. Am me."

"I discovered that poetry and drama have more in common than Aristotle, with his "classic dramatic unities," may have cared to admit. Alfred Hitchcock once said that drama was "life the with the dull bits cut out," and Gwendolyn Brooks defines poetry as "life distilled"-where's the big difference? For if a poet planes away unnecessary matter so that we can see clearly to the very core of the soul, a playwright commits the same sacred enterprise by training her spotlight on some select souls and then summoning the audience to listen, to bear witness in the dark."

"Give me the love that leads the way, The faith that nothing can dismay, The hope no disappointments tire, The passion that will burn like fire; Let me not sink to be a clod: Make me Thy fuel, Flame of God"

"One can give without loving, but one cannot love without giving"

"They dont know the terrors that go through your mind as you lie there in the pit waiting for a hint of light to tell you that the night is over."

"And their love life got better with time. Familiarity bred excitement. They loved discovering those little things, the touch, that made the other respond with a quiver or a sigh, and, in turn, having the discovery made."

"And the goddamn subway reeked like a sewer. All those goddamn animals jammed into the train like the ark . . . yeah, thats what they are, a bunch of stinking animals."

"He replaced the gray of the walls with a darker shade by closing his eyes. It felt good to shut out some of the light. Not all, but just some. Just enough so there was a gray without images or threatening corners. Not the blackness that gives birth to those sudden flashes of stinging light that slashes your eyes, or the velvety darkness that thickens and become animated and flows and somehow moves around and over you. Just a soothing gray. Nothing to see."

"He fought despairingly to go deeper into the blackness of a sleep, any sleep, even the sleep of death or some form of non-existence, but even with the loss of consciousness he dreamt he was awake, lying on the bed trying desperately to sleep. If he could find some way to prove that time had passed, no matter how short that time, he could tell himself that he had slept and perhaps then, just perhaps, he would feel rested."

"Time seemed stationary, yet the painful pressure of time was constantly felt. If only the pressure would crush the life out of him and allow him simply to sink into the inviting movement of clock hands or feel the passing of time he could then feel he was getting closer to something or at least further away from something, it didnt really matter which. Nothing really mattered. If only there were some kind of movement. But everything remained motionless, the body not even moving on the bed, while feeling the tearing pressures from all sides in all directions. Feeling deep within him in that pit where there lived the violent and contorting pain of maggots crawling through your guts between the rusty cans and broken bottles and the screaming urgency to get time to move, to just move before every FUCKING GODDAMN PART OF YOUR BODY SCREWS UP INTO A FUCKING BALL AND YOUR WHOLE FUCKING BODY DISINTEGRATES, JUST SHATTERS and there was no escape, even with the lack consciousness, for with it came dreams of wakefulness. There was no escape from the past. The struggle against it only entangled him deeper in the fear of the future. There was no place for him to go. No place he could hide. No place where his enemy didnt exist. No escape from unconscious wakefulness. There was no rest."

"Theres always somebody bugging you. They just wont leave you alone. No matter how simple things are there always some sonofabitch complicating things and fucking with your life. Jesus, this fucking world stinks. People are nothing but a bunch of shits. A rotten bunch of shits. They always want to screw you."

"There is nothing worse than a cultural barbarian with pretensions."

"Yet the harder he fought to find this the more distant it became. The more he struggled against the pressures the more imprisoned he became. The more enmeshed he became in their conflicting directions. the further he was tugged in opposite directions that kept him immobile. And the harder he fought for movement, any movement, the more stationary became his position, the more painful his existence."

"I guess I had fun. But not enough to stay."

"They had all they needed. They had the madness of pain."

"There was a sense of security in old, familiar feelings in spite of their discomfort."

"Time has to pass. But sometimes its so goddamn long. Sometimes it just seems to drag and drag and weigh a ton. And hang on you like a monkey. Like its going to suck the blood out of you. Or squeeze your guts out. And sometimes it flies. And is gone somewhere, somehow, before you know it was even here. As if time is only here to make you miserable. That's the only reason for time. To squeeze you. Crush you. To tie you up in knots and make you fucking miserable."

"A dark yet shallow sleep. A submission to exhaustion. A loss of consciousness and an avoidance of light, Yet not deep enough to avoid the turbulence on the surface while deep enough to feel the pressure from the bottom. Whatever or whoever he was sought to find the finite area where all pressures are equal and constant. To find that small pocket of weightlessness where no pressure is felt, where there is no tugging in opposite directions, no straining for a painless balance, where all of him was suspended and cushioned between the 2 crushing and yanking pressures where no pressures existed. Where no light existed. Where no time existed. Where no need or desire existed. Where there existed no blackness. There, where there existed nothing, not even a void."

"Obviously, I believe that to pursue the American Dream is not only futile but self-destructive because ultimately it destroys everything and everyone involved with it. By definition it must, because it nurtures everything except those things that are important: integrity, ethics, truth, our very heart and soul. Why? The reason is simple: because Life/life is giving, not getting."

"Sometimes we have the absolute certainty there's something inside us that's so hideous and monstrous that if we ever search it out we won't be able to stand looking at it. But it's when we're willing to come face to face with that demon that we face the angel."

"A cigarette only takes a certain amount of time to smoke and though this takes time it seems to take less and less with each one and you can only smoke so many, there comes a time when you have to stop, when you just cant light the next one . . . at least not for a while."

"Its quite an experience to be locked up all by yourself in any size room, no less a little cell."

"A little sleep and then a little wakefulness. Then a slipping to some soothing place in between."

"He flowed deeper and deeper into himself, wrapped in the comforting strength of hate."

"The miracle is this The more we share... The more We have"

"Whatever we are We belong together Wherever we are We will find each other Whoever we are We are Forever one."

"In the same book (I Am Not Spock), I said if I was given a chance to identify with any character on television, I would choose Spock. I admire him, I like him and I respect him. I would rather be identified with Spock than any other character on television. But the mistake I made was in using that title, 'I Am Not Spock,' as the title of the book. People assumed I was rejecting Spock and Star Trek but they didn't read the book. If you read the book, you'll find quite the opposite."

"A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP"

"I believe in goodness Mercy and charity I believe in a universal spirit I believe in casting bread Upon the waters"

"I am very troubled by this horrible issue of "who is a Jew?" I'm very simplistic about it. I ask, if Hitler were here, would he consider me a Jew? And of course he'd say yes, and that's the end of that. If we were all in line to go to Auschwitz, would the Orthodox pull us out of line and say, "You're not a Jew"?"

"Live long and prosper!"

"I'm much more emotional than Mr. Spock. Spock rarely betrays what he is thinking or feeling. He's fun to portray. But I hope I won't explode one of these days."

"I considered acting an opportunity to express emotions—and I took advantage of every opportunity l got. It took me a long time to discover that restraint can be admirable. Restraint, however, does not mean lack of emotion. The thing that irks me is lack of emotion trying to pass for restraint. Lack of emotion is pathological; restraint is civilized."