Quotes About Beauty

the black fox that lies down to sleep beneath you, the moon staring with her bone-white eye

and easily she adored every blossom, not in the serious, careful way that we choose this blossom or that blossom— the way we praise or don't praise— the way we love or don't love— but the way we long to be— that happy in the heaven of earth— that wild, that loving.

And then the stars stepped forth and help up their appointed fires- that hot, hard watchman of the night.

the faint-pink roses that have never been improved, but come to bud then open like little soft sighs

Off they go, hundreds of them, like the black fingerprints of the rain.

Oh, mother earth, your comfort is great, your arms never withhold. It has saved my life to know this. Your rivers flowing, your roses opening in the morning.

Certainly imagery can be gleaned from the industrial world — what do Blake's dark Satanic Mills, for example, owe to the natural world? The city can be, and has been, the source of firm poetic description, and imagery too. But the natural world is the old river that runs through everything, and I think poets will forever fish along its shores.

What we love, shapely and pure, is not to be held, but to be believed in.

I too have known loneliness. I too have known what it is to feel misunderstood, rejected, and suddenly not at all beautiful. Oh, mother earth, your comfort is great, your arms never withhold. It has saved my life to know this. Your rivers flowing, your roses opening in the morning. Oh, motions of tenderness!

As music is present yet you can't touch it.

Is the tree as it rises delighted with its many branches, each one like a poem? Are the clouds glad to unburden their bundles of rain? Most of the world says no, no, it's not possible. I refuse to think to such a conclusion. Too terrible it would be, to be wrong.

Anyway, this was my delicious walk in the rain. What was it actually about? Think about what it is that music is trying to say. It was something like that.

What good does it do to lie all day in the sun loving what is easy?

who would cry out to the petals on the ground to stay, knowing as we must, how the vivacity of what was is married to the vivacity of what will be?

Give them the fields and the woods and the possibility of the world salvaged from the lords of profit. Stand them in the stream, head them upstream, rejoice as they learn to love this green space they live in, its sticks and leaves and then the silent, beautiful blossoms.

What does barbed wire feel like when you grip it, as though it were a plate and a fork, or a handful of flowers?

May I be the tiniest nail in the house of the universe, tiny but useful. May I stay forever in the stream. May I look down upon the windflower and the bull thistle and the coreopsis with the greatest respect.

Whatever else my life is with its poems and its music and its glass cities, it is also this dazzling darkness coming down the mountain

Have you stood, staring out over the swamps, the swirling rivers where the birds like tossing fires flash through the trees, their bodies exchanging a certain happiness in the sleek, amazing humdrum of nature's design — blood's heaven, spirit's haven, to which you cannot belong?

Whatever else my life is with its poems and its music and its glass cities, it is also this dazzling darkness coming down the mountain, breathing and tasting; all day I think of her— her white teeth, her wordlessness, her perfect love.

Surely the sea is the most beautiful fact in our universe, but you won't find a fisherman who will say so; what they say is, See you later.

I think this is / the prettiest world—so long as you don't mind / a little dying

When I wake, and you are already wiping the stars away

And there is the thing that one does, the needle one plies, the work, and within that work a chance to take thoughts that are hot and formless and to place them slowly and with meticulous effort into some shapely heat-retaining form, even as the gods, or nature, or the soundless wheels of time have made forms all across the soft, curved universe—that is to say, having chosen to claim my life, I have made for myself, out of work and love, a handsome life.