Quotes About Experience

What's the function of poetry? It's to express general truths, to connect with the reader and make him think: 'Wow, I've experienced that, but you've expressed it so much better.'

Grandfather / advised me: / Learn a trade / I learned / to sit at desk / and condense / No layoff / from this / condensery.

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

Fiction and poetry expose intimate things from a person's life every bit as much as memoir does, and sometimes more. I don't quite see or live the distinction you are making about the forms.

Each man has his own batch of poems.

Everybody can write poetry, just like everybody knows how to make love.

When I read poetry, I read it aloud. It's so much better that way.

History after all is the true poetry.

Memory and poetry go together, absolutely. It is a matter of preserving and of remembering things.

Poetry comes out of an elite experience, the experience of people whose ears are opened to the song of the universe.

Poetry makes sense of the parts of human experience that are confusing and not decodable in any other way. It makes accessible the inaccessible.

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

I got married to Chris Sarandon, who was a graduate student, and he knew everything at that point, I thought, because he was older. He introduced me to poetry and black-and-white movies.

I was so used to doing art that my fingers were like albino spiders. So it was just natural for me to go to a typewriter and write poetry.

My poetry doesn't change from place to place - it changes with the years. It's very important to be one's age. You get ideas you have to turn down - 'I'm sorry, no longer'; 'I'm sorry, not yet.

the impossibility of being humanall too humanthis breathingin and outout and inthese punksthese cowardsthese championsthese mad dogs of glorymoving this little bit of light towardusimpossibly.

We are all just humans trying to survive in this crazy world, in the spaces between birth and death.

The first year was like icing. Then the cake started to show through …

We live longerbut less preciselyand in shorter sentences.

From key signature to coda, from downbeat to the sound of life's final fermata, our pasts set the tone for all that was, that is, and that ever would be.

It could have been so beautiful.The way I learned and got free and swore to never love another person ever againand it could have been so beautiful, the way I actually did.

Poetry is alive because it is a medium of vision and experience. It is not necessarily comfortable.It is not necessarily safe.

Impassionate gods have never seen the red that is the Tatsuta River. /????? ?????? ??? ??????? ??????

poetry is the tombstone of experience, nothing i write is my own.~from "the damned