Quotes About Experience

I lived in the world of poetry and ideas. I thought life was all about art and philosophy. In the military, I suddenly found out about the real world.

If we are moved by a poem, it has meant something, perhaps something important, to us; if we are not moved, then it is, as poetry, meaningless.

I have been eating poetry.

Poetry cannot take sides except with life.

The only people who have trouble with poetry are the people who link it with literature. It's much more akin to mountain-walking, and dancing by yourself at 2 A.M.

Poetry is such an ancient art, and I consider myself young within that art.

Poetry should be common in experience but uncommon in books.

I have defined poetry as a 'passionate pursuit of the Real.

As she laughed I was aware of becoming involved in her laughter and being part of it, until her teeth were only accidental stars with a talent for squad-drill.

One must read poetry with one's nerves.

I am a student of life, and don't want to miss any experience. There's poetry in this sort of thing, you know--or perhaps you don't know, but it's all the same.

All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking

Through everything I have passed but nowhere I have been.

Why poetry, you ask? Because of life, I answer.

I wanted to be a writer for a while. I was an excellent child writer. I won multiple poetry contests. I was published at age three - I think that was more about novelty than my immense talent.

Literature is always something - it is either story or poetry, ideally both. That is, you always know what it is and even if the interpretation is not available, the experience of language is.

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.

Most of us have been subjected to terrible political poetry at least once or twice in our lifetimes, and so we tend to shy away from it.

Poems are ways of saying you clearly remember the day of your death and your tomb. When I am writing poetry, I relive my days when a woman inside me dies many times.

Reading a piece of poetry with no beat in front of 20 people is way more challenging than rocking for 10,000 people.

Most of humanity gets by without reading novels or poetry, and no one would deny the richness of their thoughts.

I never had much education in English poetry as such.

A certain kind of poetry looks back at experience from an older perspective.

Fiction and poetry are the only way one can stop time and give an account of an experience and nail it down so that it lasts for ever.