Quotes About Reflection

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

I am no poet, but if you think for yourselves, as I proceed, the facts will form a poem in your minds.

When truth has no burning, then it is philosophy, when it gets burning from the heart, it becomes poetry.

And gentle winds and waters near, make music to the lonely ear.

Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.

Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes.

Silence is a sounding thing, To one who listens hungrily

Every poem should remind the reader that they are going to die.

On the other hand, if there's an underlying core of poetry that I go to, I go to the sea. I've lived on the sea all my life. I live on the sea in Cape Breton.

The joy of poetry is that it will wait for you. Novels don't wait for you. Characters change. But poetry will wait. I think it's the greatest art.

Let no-one say the past is dead, the past is all about us and within.

Conscience is no more than the dead speaking to us.

If you cannot be a poet, be the poem.

Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language.

People who read poetry have heard about the burning bush, but when you write poetry, you sit inside the burning bush.

Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.

The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation.

Poetry holds the knowledge that we are alive and that we know we're going to die.

Poetry calls us to pause. There is so much we overlook, while the abundance around us continues to shimmer, on its own.

What poetry can, must, and will always do for us: it complicates us, it doesn't 'soothe.'

Sometimes poetry--words--give us a small, lovely look at ourselves. And sometimes that is enough.

The people need poetry that will be their own secret To keep them awake forever, And bathe them in the bright-haired wave of its breathing.

Never let the mud puddle get lost in the poetry because, in many ways, the mud puddle is the poetry.

So much of my poetry begins with something that I can describe in visual terms, so thinking about distance, thinking about how life begins and what might be watching us.