"Everything has already been said"
- FRITHJOF SCHUON
"Remember and remember and remember, until a voice proclaims 'what did we forget again?' "
- REEDBED DIASPORA
“The path trodden by wayfarers and pilgrims ... was dearer to her than her kin, better than a lover, wiser than a book. For a moment she rediscovered the meaning of her life. She was here on earth to make sense of its wild enchantment and to call each thing by its right name, or, if this were not within her power, then, out of love of life, to give birth to heirs who would do it in her place.”
- BORIS PASTERNAK
“I saw the gooseflesh on my skin. I did not know what made it. I was not cold. Had a ghost passed over? No, it was the poetry.”
- SYLVIA PLATH
"And I guess that the tightness in the throat
and the tiny cascading sensation
somewhere inside us are both part of that
sense of something else. That feeling, I mean."
- SIMON ARMITAGE
"I fear for my nephew... Men see the world too clearly from the mountains"
- ABU TALIB IBN ABDUL MUTALLIB
"There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy"
- HAMLET
To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.
The poet doesn't invent. He listens. We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry. There is not a particular life which does not bear poetry within it.
Poetry is a language in which man explores his own amazement. The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads to madness. The true poem rests between the words. Poetry is frosted fire.
Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful. Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.
The poet is the priest of the invisible. Poetry is just evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash. If you can't be a poet, be the poem.