59 quotes found
“He would get up and go out into a world which seemed very unfamiliar, but with a tantalizing unfamiliarity like the world of boyhood to which an old man returns.”
“You meet somebody at the seashore on a vacation and have a wonderful time together. Or in a corner at a party, while the glasses clink and somebody beats on a piano, you talk with a stranger whose ...”
“A man goes away from his home and it is in him to do it. He lies in strange beds in the dark, and the wind is different in the trees. He walks in the street and there are the faces in front of his ...”
“There ain't anything worth doing a man can do and keep his dignity. Can you figure out a single thing you really please-God like to do you can do and keep your dignity? The human frame just ain't b...”
“For what blessing may a man hope for butAn immortality inThe loving vigilance of death.”
“And though history sadly doesn't credit the man who first thought of tilting a bicycle's steering axis, it is more likely to be because of feet striking the wheel than an understanding of stability.”
“So there are two you's, the one you create by loving and the one the beloved creates by loving you. The farther those two you's are apart the more the world grinds and grudges on its axis. But if y...”
“How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.”
“But I don't know, in the end, what deserts, chasms, achievements, virtues, and beauties have to do with love. We can love for so many different, and paradoxical, qualities in the object of our love...”
“You are dehydrated," I said. "The result of alcohol taken in excess. But that is the only way to take it. It is the only way to do a man any good.”
“So I pulled the sun screen down and squinted and put the throttle to the floor. And kept on moving west. For West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and...”
“In the last analysis, be always of whatever truth you would live.For fire flames but in the heart of a colder fire.All voice is but echo caught from a soundless voice.Height is not deprivation of v...”
“But for the present I would lie there and know I didn't have to get up, and feel the holy emptiness and blessed fatigue of a saint after the dark night of the soul. For God and Nothing have a lot i...”
“What is man but his passion?”
“For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.”
“It is hard to remember.”“Remember what?”“All that goes into the making of any one moment we live. There are things one must try to remember. Do you know what is the hardest thing to remember?”“No,”...”
“I know nothing I’m doing is important,' he said. 'Sure, I’m just a waste product of history. Maybe nothing I’m doing is even real, after all. But I was born right here, in this old house, and I loo...”
“The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making his life meaningful. And in the end the poem is not a thing we see - it is rather a light by which we may see - and what we see is life.”
“The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see-it is, rather, a light by which we may see-and what we see is life.”
