Quotes About Perception

Men were created to have facial hair like women were created to be smooth-faced. Well, not all women. I've seen pockets where that's not the case, and that's not good.

Being from New York, living in L.A., being in Chicago, you kind of get more of the big-city, melting-pot sort of thing. But when you drive through the country, there's so many small pockets of people that don't experience people of different backgrounds. So what they've seen on television is their baseline.

I've always found it funny in life when you meet people who are incredibly stupid and incredibly confident at the same time. Actually, there is nothing funnier. I mean, Donald Trump is a perfect example: he's essentially a seven-year-old on a podium.

The difference between 'lighght' and another type of poem with more words is that it doesn't have a reading process. Even a five-word poem has a beginning, middle, and end. A one-word poem doesn't. You can see it all at once. It's instant.

What inspires a poem for me is usually a moment.

In a Transtromer poem, you inhabit space differently; a body becomes a thing, a mind floats, things have lives, and even non-things, even concepts, are alive.

The paintings may communicate even better because people are lazy and they can look at a painting with less effort than they can read a poem.

Often people, when they're confronted with a poem, it's like someone who keep saying 'what is the meaning of this? What is the meaning of this?' And that dulls us to the other pleasures poetry offers.

When I'm writing the poem, I feel like I have to close my eyes. I don't mean literally, but you invite a kind of blindness, and that's the birth of the poem.

Your response to literature is to do with maturity; if you don't respond to a book or a poem when you are 12, you might when you are 13.

One does not read a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks with hopes that it will grant him a career in engineering; he does so because poetry helps him see something in the world that he might not have seen before.

Poems are not read: they are reread. Reread the poem, then read between the lines, then look at it, then watch it, then peek at it: handle it like an object. Contemplate its shadows, angles and dimensions.

The idea is to take the most ordinary things and make them extraordinary, as Gerard Manley Hopkins does in his poems.

I learn a lot about my poems when I read them by the way people respond to them.

Many of my poems are not sexual.

The great poems are not about experience, but are the experience itself, felt in the body.

I do think that all of us think in poems.

The poet is someone, I think, who's interested in registering experience immediately or giving you the sense of immediacy and directness.

When Robert Frost was alive, I was known as the other new England poet, which is to be barely known at all.

There is something about a poet which leads us to believe that he died, in many cases, as long as 20 years before his birth.

As a public poet, people often don't see the reality of my life.

The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.

A poet in history is divine, but a poet in the next room is a joke.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.