Quotes About Perception

One of the ridiculous aspects of being a poet is the huge gulf between how seriously we take ourselves and how generally we are ignored by everybody else.

I can't think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people's understanding of what's going on in the world.

Whatever is not stone is light

Silence is a sounding thing, To one who listens hungrily

To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.

What is that you express in your eyes? It seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life.

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

Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.

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.

Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.

We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars.

No one is a poet from eight to twelve and from two to six. Whoever is a poet is one always, and continually assaulted by poetry.

I always say that photography's closest cousin is poetry because of the way it sparks your imagination and leaves gaps for the viewer to fill in.

There is darkness in light, there is pain in joy, and there are thorns on the rose.

Painting is so poetic, while sculpture is more logical and scientific and makes you worry about gravity.

I don't want to turn any of this into poetry / but / you're so beautiful / flowers turn their heads to smell you

Gender is the poetry each of us makes out of the language we are taught.

If you love me, Henry, you don't love me in a way I understand.

What's poetry? It's not real but maybe it's more than real. It's dreaming while you're awake.

Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.

Poetry reveals that there is no empty space.

Poetry is not the record of an event: it is an event.

...if you do not even understand what words say, how can you expect to pass judgement on what words conceal?

It is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things.