Quotes About Connection

A poem isn't selfish. It speaks to people.

Stegner shows us, again and again, that it is love and friendship, the sanctity and celebration of our relationships, that not only support a good life, but create one.

And I would not blame you if you still asked, Why bother to make contact with kindred spirits you never see and may never hear from, who perhaps do not even exist except in your hopes? Why spend ten years in an apprenticeship to fiction only to discover that this society so little values what you do that it won't pay you a living wage for it?

Westerners live outdoors more than people elsewhere because outdoors is mainly what they've got.

What I am sure of is that friendship—not love, friendship—is as possible between women as between men, and that in either case it is often stronger for not having to cross sexual picket lines. Sexuality and mistrust often go together, and both are incompatible with amicitia.

Mailbox scenes are the dramatic moments of our undramatic life.

Is that the basis of friendship? Is it as reactive as that? Do we respond only to people who seem to find us interesting?

By touch we are betrayed, and betray others.

We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.

For somehow, against probability, some sort of indigenous, recognizable culture has been growing on western ranches and in western towns and even in western cities. It is the product not of the boomers but of the stickers, not of those who pillage and run but of those who settle, and love the life they have made and the place they have made it in.

I am a native in this worldAnd think in it as a native thinks.

Just as my fingers on these keysMake music, so the self-same soundsOn my spirit make a music, too.

Twenty men crossing a bridge,Into a village,Are twenty men crossing twenty bridges,Into twenty villages,Or one manCrossing a single bridge into a village.

Next to love is the desire for love.

If sex were all, then every trembling hand Could make us squeak, like dolls, the wished-for words.

A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.

The partaker partakes of that which changes him. The child that touches takes character from the thing, the body, it touches.

Spring is umbilical or else it is not spring.

The dry eucalyptus seeks god in the rainy cloud. Professor Eucalyptus of New Haven seeks him In New Haven.

Poets are never lonely even when they pretend to be.

A man and a woman Are one. A man and a woman and a blackbird Are one.

One poem proves another and the whole, For the clairvoyant men that need no proof: The lover, the believer and the poet

The soul, he said, is composed Of the external world. There are men of the East, he said, Who are the East. There are men of a province Who are that province. There are men of a valley Who are that valley.

A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman.