My Poets

It's only humans as far as we know who can use words to get bodies together. 

~Maureen McLane

Elements of Style

Language is a physical act--something that 

involves yr whole bod. 

Write with yr whole bod. 

Read with yr whole bod. 

Wake up. 

~Suzan-Lori Parks

The Site of Memory

"Floods" is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All the water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that.

~Toni Morrison

--

On dead branches crowd remain perched at autumn's end

~Matsuo Bashō

Frankenstein

What did this mean? Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination?

~Mary Shelley

Frankenstein

Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow. 

~Mary Shelley

Warming Her Pearls

...And I lie here awake,
knowing the pearls are cooling even now
in the room where my mistress sleeps. All night
I feel their absence and I burn.

~Carol Ann Duffy

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

~Robert Hayden

Song of the Son

Pour O pour that parting soul in song,
O pour it in the sawdust glow of night,
Into the velvet pine-smoke air to-night
And let the valley carry it along.
And let the valley carry it along.

~Jean Toomer

Not Waving but Drowning

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.

~Stevie Smith

À Quoi Bon Dire

And one fine morning in a sunny lane
Some boy and girl will meet and kiss and swear
That nobody can love their way again
While over there
You will have smiled, I shall have tossed your hair.

~Charlotte Mew

I died for Beauty—but was scarce

And so, as Kinsmen, met a Night—
We talked between the Rooms—
Until the Moss had reached our lips—
And covered up—our names—

~Emily Dickinson

The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao

And then the big moment, the one every daughter dreads. My mother looking me over.

~Junot Diaz

The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao

Nothing more exhilarating (he wrote) than saving yourself by the simple act of waking. 

~Junot Diaz

The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao

Yes, the wilderness was in me, yes it kept my heart beating fast all day long, yes it danced around me while I walked down the street, yes it let me look boys straight in the face when they stared at me, yes it turned my laugh from a cough into a long wild fever, but I was still scared. How could I not be? I was my mother's daughter. Her hold on me stronger than love.

~Junot Diaz

From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler

"I didn't run away to come home the same."

~E.L. Konigsburg, as said by Claudia

Peaky Blinders

"All religion is a foolish answer to a foolish question."

~Thomas Shelby, played by Cillian Murphy

Candide

"You see," said Candide to Martin, "crime is sometimes punished; that blackguard of a Dutch owner got the fate he deserved."

"Yes," said Martin, "but did the passengers on board have to perish too? God punished the thief, the devil drowned the rest."

~Voltaire

King Lear

LEAR

When we are born, we cry that we are come 

To this great stage of fools. 

~Shakespeare 

Approaching Eye Level

Now the city is violent, everything costs the earth, and we are all visible. 

~Vivian Gornick

Approaching Eye Level

There are two categories of friendship: those in which people are enlivened by each other and those in which people must be enlivened to be with each other. 

~Vivian Gornick

Tuesdays with Morrie

He grew up the way many youngest children grow up, pampered, adored, and inwardly tortured. 

~Mitch Albom

The Ascent of Mont Ventoux

What I used to love, I love no longer. But I lie: I love it still, but less passionately. Again have I lied: I love it, but more timidly, more sadly. 

~Petrarca

The Divine Comedy: Inferno

I was from the city that took the Baptist

in exchange for her first patron, who, for this,

swears by his art she will have endless sorrow;

and were it not that on the Arno's bridge

some vestige of his image still remains,

those citizens who built anew the city

on the ashes that Attila left behind

would have accomplished such a task in vain;

I turned my home into my hanging place.

~Dante

11

Let everyone watch out,

for with such art

I play at living and dying. 

I am the bird

that gets the starlings

to feed my little ones. 

~Marcabru

The House on Mango Street

I put it down on paper and then the ghost does not ache so much. I write it down and Mango says goodbye sometimes. She does not hold me with both arms. She sets me free. 

One day I will pack my bags of books and paper. One day I will say goodbye to Mango. I am too strong for her to keep me here forever. One day I will go away.

~Sandra Cisneros 

The House on Mango Street

My mother says when I get older my dusty hair will settle and my blouse will learn to stay clean, but I have decided not to grow up tame like the others who lay their necks on the threshold waiting for the ball and chain. 

I have begun my own quiet war. Simple. Sure. I am one who leaves the table like a man, without putting back the chair or picking up the plate. 

~Sandra Cisneros 

The House on Mango Street

She looked out the window her whole life, the way so many women sit their sadness on an elbow. 

~Sandra Cisneros

Instructions to the Double

If anyone calls you a witch,

burn for him; if anyone calls you

less or more than you are

let him burn for you. 

~Tess Gallagher

The Story of Layla and Majnun

Man is as lightening, born to die, not to seek permanence in the house of suffering...The echo shouts your secret from the mountain-tops, revealing only what you confided yourself. 

~Nizami 

The Story of Layla and Majnun

Believe me, you can run all your life without arriving anywhere. 

~Nizami (said by the character Sayyid)

The Story of Layla and Majnun

What a giant raven this night was. 

~Nizami

Pleasure & Understanding

All is suffering is a bad modernist translation. 

What the Buddha really said is: It's all a mixed bag. Shit 

is complicated. Everything's fucked up. Everything's gorgeous. Even 

Death contains pleasure--six feet below understanding. 

~Robin Coste Lewis

Art & Craft

During Arts and Crafts, when Miss Larson allowed

the scissors out, I'd sneak a pair, then cut

my hair to stop me from growing too long. 

~Robin Coste Lewis

Goodbye to All That

Some years passed, but I still did not lose that sense of wonder about New York. I began to cherish the loneliness of it, the sense that at any given time no one need know where I was or what I was doing. 

~Joan Didion

Quietness

Inside this new love, die. 

Your way begins on the other side. 

Become the sky. 

~Rumi

--

The drop that left its homeland,

the sea, and then returned? 

It found an oyster waiting

and grew into a pearl. 

~Rumi

Beauty's Nest

It hurts

the heart to see

something so vast and deep

can also be made of dirt. 

And if it can be

of the earth, the body

ponders, might

such a landscape

exist also within me?

~Robin Coste Lewis

The Wilde Woman of Aiken

You

cannot

prevent me. 

~Robin Coste Lewis

On the Road to Sri Bhuvaneshwari

Out of habit, the students pull out their American sympathy,

but then the driver says all the women sitting there

on the ground, dusty, with children in their laps, dangling

their ankles over the mountains, adorned--all--

wear enough gold, own enough 

buffalo to buy your whole house--cash. 

The night holds. Life is giving birth

in the middle of a warm dark road. 

~Robin Coste Lewis