Poets From The United States

"The god of many cannot remain the true god."

"I’m surprised that multiple personalities are so much less common in reality than in fiction: what a little disorder it would take, a distraction, a sleep, for one of our minor characters to imagine he was the star, to speak out for everyone else. And that’s what it would be, a change of billing, not of authorship. For you do not write your play—you are just the character in it called The Playwright. The real writer, you never meet."

"Seizing on a piece of business, I become tiny, eager, efficient: roiled water I cannot see into."

"I sell my time to get enough money to buy it back."

"I am one of the endangered species: people who still write in meter and rime."

"Merry the green, the green hill shall be merry. Hungry, the owlet shall seek out the mouse And Jack his Joan, but they shall never marryAnd snow shall fly, the big flakes fat and furry. Lonely, the traveler shall seek out the house, And Jack his Joan, but they shall never marry.Weary the soldiers go, and come back weary, Up a green hill and down the withered hill, And Jack from Joan, but they shall never marry."

"Between the lines it must have hurt To see the neighborhood go down, Your neighbor in his undershirt At dusk come out to mow his lawn."

"This poem is not addressed to you. You may come into it briefly, But no one will find you here, no one. You will have changed before the poem will."

"You neither can nor should understand what it means. Listen, it comes without guitar, Neither in rags nor in any purple fashion. And there is nothing in it to comfort you."

"The lotos bowed above the tide and dreamed."

"Pain is no longer pain when it is past."

"White as the blossoms which the almond-tree, Above its bald and leafless branches bears."

"Gracious as sunshine, sweet as dew Shut in a lily's golden core."

"[T]he pure memories given To help our joy on earth, when earth is past, Shall help our joy in heaven!"

"With guilt's defilement stained without, within, How can I hope Thy cleansing grace to win? —Because Thou saidst, "I have forgiven thy sin.""

"She put snow on the mountain's / peak for me and took the Gallup Poll of my imagination. / She is both the V-Hold and popular fiction of my life. I write / her letters daily, which I'm then prompted to discard. She / engineered several corporate mergers until I couldn't resist / temptation."

"Woody Allen says at the end of Annie Hall that we’re always trying to get things to come out perfect in art because it’s so difficult in real life [...] if we can accept Allen’s as a definition of art, then sabermetrics is absolutely an art. And, just as Kalkman notes, it’s an art whose practitioners are bent on seeing justice done — in baseball, if nowhere else."

"Those activities at which you excel with no effort at all—those are the ones you ought to pursue to the detriment of others."

"Enthusiasm is achieved chiefly by means of provocations. In these cases, something inside of us resonates vibrantly with something outside. / The form of the provocation—be it book, music, sporting event, conversation—matters insofar as it might help to us find these sources of resonance."

"If a tree falls in the woods and no one’s around to hear it, it still very probably makes a sound. A baseball game that’s played with no one around to watch it, though — that’s a different proposition."

"Race ain’t nothing but a number."

"Many people say, “Who's my doppelganger?” when maybe / they should ask, “Whose doppelganger am I?”"

"I read a book not to find its meaning, but to find my happiness."

"Day 468—said the word ‘finger’ until it no longer made sense. Now, looking at my fingers I have no idea what they are, / except they’re wildly useful / for writing letters to my earliest ancestors"

"I've never met a very memorable cobbler."

"[G]overnments always need enemies, even when they're not at war. If you don't have a real enemy, you make one up and spread the word. It scares the population, and when the people are scared, they tend not to step out of line."

"For only the good doubt their own goodness, which is what makes them good in the first place. The bad know they are good, but the good know nothing. They spend their lives forgiving others, but they can't forgive themselves."

"Every time my nose gushed blood, I felt like a little boy who'd wet his pants. I jumped out of the chair, pressed a handkerchief against my face, and hustled toward the nearest bathroom [...] How red the blood looked against the whiteness of the porcelain sink, I thought. How vividly imagined that color was, how aesthetically shocking. The other fluids that came out of us were dull in comparison, the palest of squirts. Whitish spittle, milky semen, yellow pee, green-brown mucus. We excreted autumn and winter colors, but running invisibly through our veins, the very stuff that kept us alive, was the crimson of a mad artist—a red as brilliant as fresh paint."

"April 1945. My unit was in Germany, and we were the ones who liberated Dachau. Thirty thousands breathing skeletons. You've seen the pictures, but the pictures don't tell you what it was like. You have to go there and smell it for yourself; you have to be there and touch it with your own hands. Human beings did it to human beings, and they did it with a clear conscience. That was the end of mankind [...] I'm sure you've read the stories about how some of them couldn't stop eating. The starved ones. They'd thought about food for so long, they couldn't help it. They ate until their stomachs burst, and they died. Hundreds of them."

"That's what makes his story so impossible, David. Because he's told me the truth. (Alma to David on Hector)"

"If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it fall, does it make a sound or not? Hector had read alot of books by then, he knew all the tricks and arguments of the philosophers. If someone makes a movie and no one sees it, does the movie exist or not?"

"I didn't say I was afraid of dying, I answered, I said that I was afraid to get on a plane. There is a difference. (David to Dr. Singh)"

"Men don't begin to live fully until their backs are against the wall."

"The story is not in the words; it's in the struggle."

"You Repocrat squires in the Farm Bureau,"

"History is a hermaphrodite with many distinguished lovers. We are neither mysteries nor strangers but the living breath of revelation made flesh by the unrestrained desires of a free and universal love. Universal me. Universal you."

"And now we step to the rhythm of miracles."

"Time to be the sun and send forth flesh to heal the bones of time."

"The image titled “The Homeless, Psalm 85:10,” featured on the cover of ELEMENTAL, can evoke multiple levels of response. They may include the spiritual in the form of a studied meditation upon the multidimensional qualities of the painting itself; or an extended contemplation of the scripture in the title, which in the King James Bible reads as follows: “Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other.” The painting can also inspire a physical response in the form of tears as it calls to mind its more earth-bound aspects; namely, the very serious plight of those who truly are homeless in this world, whether born into such a condition, or forced into it by poverty or war."

"The shape of something uncaring and perversely cold stands up inside a man and he finds himself completely deceived. This world’s anguish is no different from the love we insist on holding back."

"Evil is mostly confusion seeking to evolve itself into love."

"Only God singing this song of you... makes true light... somehow possible."

"As goes love so goes life."

"Silence brings us new names new feelings and new knowledge. Dreams dress us carefully in the colors of power and faith."

"A river is nearly the ultimate symbol for the very essence of change itself. It flows unceasing from one point of being to another, yet continuously occupies the same bed or pathway, and accommodates life’s endings with the same musical grace with which it accommodates life’s beginnings, along with all the muted and explosive moments that surface between the two extremes."

"While the enslavement of African Americans was an unavoidable historical fact, so was the historical record of their courage in the face of mortal danger, their strength before seemingly insurmountable odds, their faith when confronted with conditions that had driven others to faithless despair, and their evocation of beauty and genius under oppressive circumstances that did not encourage either."

"Without access to the varied forms of education suitable for every individual temperament and every class of worker, the potential for continued growth and securing an authentically functional democracy in the United States decreased considerably. More than a means to a substantial paycheck, both education and satisfying work were the means to a substantial character."

"In the face of a world where economic hardships often ground the best of the human spirit into the worst, love provided a pathway into hidden chambers of the spirit where nobility and compassion might be salvaged, resurrected, and made stronger."

"The way out of the maze of whiteness and blackness that led inevitably, repeatedly, to violent conflict was through the simple recognition of and respect for blacks and whites as not two races but one: the human race."

"The ultimate test on the way to establishing an ideal civilization encouraging ideal human behavior was to look bravely beyond gender, color, ethnic origin, religious difference, and class distinctions to discover and honor the value of each unique individual."