Quotes About Inspiration

bottom half of the card. 'Whoever

I remember saying goodbye to my father the night he left to join the Navy. He didn't have to. He was older than other servicemen and had a family to support but he wanted to be a part of the fight against fascism, not just make movies about it. I admired this about him.

On the whole I think poems don't crawl out of dreams. They are knocked out of rocks.

When I look back over my life it's almost as if there was a plan laid out for me - from the little girl who was so passionate about animals who longed to go to Africa and whose family couldn't afford to put her through college. Everyone laughed at my dreams. I was supposed to be a secretary in Bournemouth.

I think the best evenings are when we have messages, things that make us think, but we can also laugh and enjoy each other's company.

And always I have this feeling--which may not be true at all--that I am being used as a messenger.

Even before the sun lights the day, fireflies illuminate the path.

Iwatch from where I sit on the craggy cliffs of Ballyhock to the waves crashing on the beach. Strong.

From my hand,

One breath taken completely; one poem, fully written, fully read - in such a moment, anything can happen.

Do not follow the ancient masters, seek what they sought.

The nourishment of Cezanne's awkward apples is in the tenderness and alertness they awaken inside us.

Good art is a truing of vision, in the way a saw is trued in the saw shop, to cut more cleanly. It is also a changing of vision. Entering a good poem, a person feels, tastes, hears, thinks, and sees in altered ways. Why ask art into a life at all, if not to be transformed and enlarged by its presence and mysterious means?

All writers recognize this surge of striking; in its energies the objects of the world are made new, alchemized by their passage through the imaginal, musical, world-foraging and word-forging mind. This altered vision is the secret happiness of poems, of poets. It is as if the poem encounters the world and finds in it a hidden language, a Braille unreadable except when raised by the awakened imaginative mind.

Art can be defined as beauty able to transcend the circumstances of its making.

In poetry's words, life calls to life —Jane Hirshfield

Free verse follows 'the breath of a thought where it leads'.

No matter how difficult the subject, while writing, a poet is unchained from sadness, and free —Jane Hirshfield

Only words that enlarge the realm of the possible merit borrowing our attention from the world of the actual and the living.

The poet's job is to put into words those feelings we all have that are so deep, so important, and yet so difficult to name, to tell the truth in such a beautiful way, that people cannot live without it.

It's like being in the ballpark with Jesus.

Asked once what he was doing to keep busy in retirement, Hank Aaron replied, "I'm being Hank Aaron.

Imparting knowledge is only lighting other men's candles at our lamp without depriving ourselves of any flame.

Taylor had been a book lover her entire life and, even at twenty-six, loved nothing more than curling up and getting lost in a great story, reading until the early hours of the morning. So what if it meant she never got enough sleep? Books were her life, her passion.