Favorite Quotes

[Marc Gilbert]

Here's one of mine to kick things off:

“A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it."

G.K. Chesterton

[Tracy Mitchell]

If there is such as thing as meant to be, this ain't it.  -- the Old Cowboy

[Tracy Mitchell]

One problem the (essentially) prose writer has when switching to poetry, is that they want to fill in the details the way prose-readers demand and like.  Detail is sometimes important in poetry also, but it is picturing detail, rather than progression detail.  -- Sparky Dashforth




 

[Marc Gilbert]

We are far from having exhausted the significance of the few symbols we use. We can come to use them yet with a terrible simplicity. It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem. Every new relation is a new word.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

[Tom]

“A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.” 
― Robert Frost

[Tracy Mitchell]

There are two sounds in the world which don't have to mean anything -- music, and laughter.  Immanuel Kant

[Tracy Mitchell]

Pick a piece of wood floating in the river and follow it down the current with your glance, keeping the eyes constantly on it, without getting ahead of the current. This is the way poetry should be read: at the pace of a line.

-- Vera Pavlova

[Colm Roe]

'I might be small, but I'm fucking dangerous'
A very small Irish friend facing up to a very tall German man by a swimming pool in Ibiza 1982.
Or any antigen you'd care to mention   

[Tracy Mitchell]

Nice attribution.

[Tracy Mitchell]

"Is it out of fashion to regard stones as sentient? Yes, no doubt. For all we know, it’s also out of fashion in the literature of stones to regard people as sentient. Perhaps a cottonwood tree doesn’t “sing” because it is like a man, but rather a man sings because he is like a cottonwood tree."

-- Connie Wanek, Poet