Quotes About Life

I have tried to remember throughout that poetry is made by flesh-and-blood human beings. It is a bloody art. It lives on a human scale and thrives when it is passed from hand to hand.

The beauty of reality-based art - art underwritten by reality hunger - is that it's perfectly situated between life itself and (unattainable) "life as art".

Poetry is an enumeration of birds, bees, babies, butterflies, bugs, bambinos, babayagas, and bipeds, beating their way up bewildering bastions.

At McCormick Theological Seminary I had to take Hebrew, so I began to read prophetic poetry, and suddenly it became the life I wanted to spend.

It's a good thing to get poetry off the shelves and more into public life.

I think it's one of the things that drive lyric poetry, our sense of mortality.

To write at the same temperature at which I live I should write nothing but poetry.

Poetry and I fit together. I can't imagine being without it... It is food and drink, it is all seasons, it is the stuff of all existence.

I blessed the power which has filled my life with poetry.

I like the one about the little soulworms that fly out of the nest for the resurrection.

During the last years of Mayakovski's life, when all poetry had ceased to exist . . . literature had stopped.

I can find some way to make poetry out of my life's experiences.

Poetry is a series of explanations of life, fading off into horizons too swift for explanations.

Poetry gets to be the poetry of life by successfully becoming first the poetry of poetry.

The poetry of life must not be replaced with matter-of-fact prose.

Poetry is the art of understanding what it is to be alive.

think what you hope for is that at different times of your life you're able to write the poetry that reflects the moment that you're in on your own journey.

Poetry can't cure cancer, but it can save your life until you die.

I don't live for poetry. I live far more than anybody else does.

Haiku is an art that seems dedicated to making people pay attention to the preciousness and particularity of every moment of existence. I think that poetry can do that.

News isn't designed to talk about daily life in its nuances, but poetry is.

I knew I was in the vicinity of a serious lesson, if not about how to live life, then at least how to put some poetry into your craven retreat from it.

A poet must have died as a man before he is worth anything as a poet.

Birth is the start of loneliness and loneliness the start of poetry.