June 2012
150 posts
3 tags
“Perhaps the whisper was born before lips,
And the leaves in treelessness...”
– Osip Mandelstam, from “Octaves”, translated from the Russian by Ian Probstein
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“The people need poetry that will be their own secret
to keep them awake...”
– Osip Mandelstam, from The Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam, translated by W. S. Merwin and Clarence Brown
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“… we are words on a journey
not the inscriptions of settled people”
– W. S. Merwin, from “An Encampment at Morning”
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“I have a faith in language. It’s the ultimate achievement that we as a species...”
– W. S. Merwin, The Paris Review, The Art of Poetry No. 38
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“It is really hard to be lonely very long in a world of words. Even if you...”
– Naomi Shihab Nye, I’ll Ask Three Times, Are You OK?
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“Wrong solitude vinegars the soul,
right solitude oils it.
How fragile we are,...”
– Jane Hirshfield, from “Vinegar and Oil” (thank you, A Poet Reflects)
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“In water, like in books—you can leave your life.”
– Lidia Yuknavitch, The Chronology of Water (thank you, awritersruminations)
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“Everybody who writes is engaged in the remarkable enterprise of making...”
– Ben Yagoda, The Sound on the Page (thank you, rimeswriting)
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“…On the soul’s journey. How it is whirled about
Wherever the orbit of the...”
– W. B. Yeats, from “All Souls’ Night”
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“Let faxes butter-curl on dusty shelves.
Let junkmail build its castles in the...”
– Ros Barber, “How to Leave the World that Worships Should” (with thanks to Blogut)
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“Everyone has experienced how, when punctuated by long silences, words weigh...”
– Susan Sontag, Styles of Radical Will
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“First, silence makes us pilgrims. Secondly, silence guards the fire within....”
– Henri Nouwen, The Way of the Heart
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“We listen too much to the telephone and we listen too little to nature. The wind...”
– Andre Kostelanetz, Journal-American, 1955
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“Now all my teachers are dead except silence…”
– W. S. Merwin, from “A Scale in May”
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“Elsewhere the world may be blustering or sleeping, wars are fought, people live...”
– Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog (with thanks to sunrec)
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“I dream of the silence
the day before Adam came
to name the animals,
The...”
– John Burnside, “Septuagesima” (with thanks to Blogut)
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“Talent is a matter of patience over time. It involves studying everything one...”
– Guy de Maupassant, Pierre et Jean
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“The poet must not only write the poem but must scrutinize the world intensely,...”
– Mary Oliver, A Poetry Handbook
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“Press close bare-bosom’d night – press close magnetic nourishing night!...”
– Walt Whitman, from “Song of Myself”
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“Rising from the past, my shadow
Is running in silence to meet me.”
– Anna Akhmatova, from “[The souls of those I love are on high stars]”, translated by A. S. Kline (with thanks to nthWord Magazine)
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“I never dreamed of being Shakespeare or Goethe, and I never expected to hold the...”
– Peter Altenberg, Evocations of Love (with thanks to clavicola)
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“If I write what I feel, it’s to reduce the fever of feeling.”
– Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet (with thanks to rimeswriting)
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“The problem is no longer getting people to express themselves, but providing...”
– Gilles Deleuze (with thanks to diariodeinviero and sunrec)
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“All the while we thought we were writing for the angels,
And find, after all...”
– Charles Wright, section “18” from Littlefoot: A Poem (thank you, A Poet Reflects)
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“If I must fall, may it be from a high place.”
– Paulo Coelho, By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept
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“He is quick, thinking in clear images;
I am slow, thinking in broken images.
...”
– Robert Graves, “In Broken Images”
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“Sleep seems to hammer out for me the logical conclusions of my vague days, and...”
– D. H. Lawrence, from a letter to Edward Garnett, 29 January 1912, in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, edited by James T. Boulton
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“Reflection must be reserved for solitary hours; whenever she was alone, she gave...”
– Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
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“Tell it no one but the wise,
The crowd will only jeer:
The living thing I...”
– Goethe, “Blissful Yearning”, translated by A. S. Kline
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“My soul is an empty carousel at sunset.”
– Pablo Neruda, “My Soul” from The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, translated by Ilan Stavans
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“Men who look on nature, and their fellow-men, and cry that all is dark and...”
– Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist
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“If you will stay close to nature, to its simplicity, to the small things hardly...”
– Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, translated by Joan. M. Burnham
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“(for A)
What sound was that?
I turn away, into the shaking room.
What was...”
– Harold Pinter, “It Is Here”
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“Forgive me that I lived in sorrow,
Rejoiced too little in the sun.
Forgive,...”
– Anna Akhmatova, from “[The evening light is broad and yellow]”, translated by A. S. Kline 