Quotes About Perception

Freud thought that a psychosis was a waking dream, and that poets were daydreamers too, but I wonder if the reverse is not as often true, and that madness is a fiction lived in like a rented house

Poetry is not only a set of words which are chosen to relate to each other; it is something which goes much further than that to provide a glimpse of our vision of the world.

for what is the gift of the poet and the artist except to see the sights which others cannot see and to hear the sounds that others cannot hear?

I returned to poetry as a more precise way to describe the world, more precise than science.

We like to think we live in daylight, but half the world is always dark, and fantasy, like poetry, speaks the language of the night.

Poetry is what makes the invisible appear.

The poet is the one who breaks through our habits.

Whatever the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth -whether it existed before or not

The music is a vibration in the brain rather than the ear.

The poet doesn't invent. He listens.

And the second question, can poetry be taught? I didn't think so.

I like what Wallace Stevens said: "Poetry must almost successfully resist intelligence." I just change the word "poetry" to "my photographs".

Poems allow us not only to bear the tally and toll of our transience, but to perceive, within their continually surprising abundance, a path through the grief of that insult into joy.

Photography is an austere and blazing poetry of the real.

Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.

beauty' is related not to 'loveliness' but to a state in which reality plays a part.

Life is a poem most people never read.

Poetry is fact given over to imagery.

It is what man does not know of God Composes the visible poem of the world.

The truest poetry is the most feigning.

By poetry we mean the art of employing of words in such a manner as to produce an illusion on the imagination; the art of doing by means of words, what the painter does by means of colors.

Public toilets have a duty to be accessible, poetry does not.

Those who are not very concerned with art want poems or pictures to record for them something they already know - as one might want a picture of a place he loves.

I like poems you can tack all over with a hammer and there are no hollow places.