Quotes About Awareness

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.

Silence is a sounding thing, To one who listens hungrily

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

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.

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

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.

We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars.

All a poet can do today is warn.

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

There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.

Insofar as poetry has a social function it is to awaken sleepers by other means than shock.

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

Though I play at the edges of knowing, truly I know our part is not knowing, but looking, and touching, and loving

Eroticism is one of the basic means of self-knowledge, as indispensable as poetry.

You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you.

I write in order to comprehend, not to express myself.

Poetry is not a code to be broken but a way of seeing with the eyes shut.

It is only when we are aware of the earth and of the earth as poetry that we truly live.

Perhaps poetry will be the canary in the mine-shaft warning us of what's to come.

Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.

Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.

I discover myself on the verge of a usual mistake.

We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.