Quotes About Reflection

And yet, far off, I can hear something whispering that this compulsion to do, to intrude ourselves, to improve on what is--even when wholly well intentioned, particularly when wholly well intentioned--is the source of all our troubles.

I distrust the perpetually busy, always have. The frenetic ones spinning in tight little circles like poisoned rats. The slower ones, grinding away their fourscore and ten in righteousness and pain. They are the soul-eaters.

a moment in the past, like a bone in the throat, that needed his attention.

Generally speaking, writers who have been at it for a while, and who are any good at it, suffer from an acute kind of self-knowledge. The unexamined life is not a risk for them.

There are times in every life when the past acquires a particular resonance, when we grow sensitive to sounds and voices normally beyond the range of hearing. The past shades into present always and everywhere, but only rarely do we acknowledge the process; only rarely does some trigger force us to recognize ourselves as citizens of that frontier.

You think the dead really care about our lives? -Yeah, I think they do. I think they forgive us our sins. -I even think it's easy for them.

An old man who's happy not to have cowshit on his neck.

I pursued Christian success instead of pursuing Christ.

One of the best things about paintings is their silence — which prompts reflection and random reverie.

The past is another country, but the Seventies is another planet.

when you hit the expressway to Declinistan there are few exit ramps. That America's animating principles should require a defense at all is a melancholy reflection on how far we've already gone. Live free--or die from a thousand soothing caresses of nanny-state sirens.

The past is the past. That's all it'll ever be, and it's certainly not worth feeling bad in the present over.

If a man finishes a poem,he shall bathe in the blank wake of his passionand be kissed by white paper.

Now you invent the boat of your flesh and set it upon the watersand drift in the gradual swell, in the laboring salt.Now you look down. The waters of childhood are there.

And yet, in a culture like ours, which is given to material comforts, and addicted to forms of entertainment that offer immediate gratification, it is surprising that so much poetry is written.

We're only here for a short while. And I think it's such a lucky accident, having been born, that we're almost obliged to pay attention.

You want to get a good look at yourself. You stand before a mirror, you take off your jacket, unbutton your shirt, open your belt, unzip your fly. The outer clothing falls from you. You take off your shoes and socks, baring your feet. You remove your underwear. At a loss, you examine the mirror. There you are. You are not there.

A poem is a place where the conditions of beyondness and withinness are made palpable, where to imagine is to feel what it is like to be. It allows us to have the life we are denied because we are too busy living. Even more paradoxically, a poem permits us to live in ourselves as if we were just out of reach of ourselves.

I would go out under the stars and enter the smallness of being that was mine, and I would disappear into the emptiness within, and it seemed enormous.

For soon the leaves, Having gone black, would fall, and the annulling snow Would pillow the walk, and we, with shovels in hand, would meet, Bow, and scrape the sidewalk clean. What else would there be This late in the day for us but desire to make amends And start again, the sun's compassion as it disappears.

Tell me, you people out there, what is poetry anyway? Can anyone die without even a little?

You don't read a poem to find the meaning of life. The opposite. I mean, you'd be foolish to. Now, some American poets present the reader with a slice of life, saying, I went to the store today, and I saw a man, and he looked at me, and I looked at him, and we both knew we were … thieves. And aren't we all thieves? You know, this is extracting from everyday experience a statement about life, or a moral.

this is the mirror in which pain is asleep this is the country nobody visits

Will the same day ever come back, and with it Our amazement at having been in it, or will only a dark haze Spread at the back of the mind, erasing events, one after The other, so brief they may have been lost to begin with?