Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.
Human nature is like water. It takes the shape of its container.
I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendos The blackbird whistling Or just after.
Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.
Throw away the light, the definitions, and say what you see in the dark.
Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.
The exceeding brightness of this early sun Makes me conceive how dark I have become.
It is not everyday that the world arranges itself into a poem.
We live in an old chaos of the sun.
The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.
The reader became the book; and summer night Was like the conscious being of the book.
The imperfect is our paradise.
A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman.
The mind can never be satisfied.
One must read poetry with one's nerves.
I am what is around me.
For the listener, who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
The way through the world Is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.
I certainly do not exist from nine to six, when I am at the office.
In the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes the place of imagination.
The poem must resist the intelligence Almost successfully.
Poetry is an abstraction bloodied.
I was myself the compass of that sea: I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw Or heard or felt came not but from myself; And there I found myself more truly and more strange.
Out of this same light, out of the central mind, We make a dwelling in the evening air, In which being there together is enough.
Children picking up our bones Will never know that these were once As quick as foxes on the hill;
I am the truth, since I am part of what is real, but neither more nor less than those around me.
It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom.
I know noble accents And lucid, inescapable rhythms; But I know, too, That the blackbird is involved In what I know.
I still feel the need of some imperishable bliss.
The river is moving. The blackbird must be flying.
After the leaves have fallen, we return To a plain sense of things. It is as if We had come to an end of the imagination, Inanimate in an inert savoir.
God and the imagination are one.
Of the Surface of Things In my room, the world is beyond my understanding; But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four Hills and a cloud.
It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.
The yellow glistens. It glistens with various yellows, Citrons, oranges and greens Flowering over the skin.
It is never the thing but the version of the thing.
The great poems of heaven and hell have been written and the great poem of earth remains to be written.
A pear should come to the table popped with juice, Ripened in warmth and served in warmth. On terms Like these, autumn beguiles the fatalist.
People should like poetry the way a child likes snow, and they would if poets wrote it.
It is necessary to any originality to have the courage to be an amateur.
Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.
The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real.
A change of style is a change of meaning.
One must have a mind of winter.
We must endure our thoughts all night, until the bright obvious stands motionless in cold.
From this the poem springs: that we live in a place That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves And hard it is in spite of blazoned days.
A violent order is disorder; and a great disorder is an order. These two things are one.
Next to love is the desire for love.
Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams And our desires.
After the final no there comes a yes / And on that yes the future world depends.
There is nothing in life except what one thinks of it.
The fire burns as the novel taught it how.
Sigh for me, night-wind, in the noisy leaves of the oak. / I am tired. Sleep for me, heaven over the hill. / Shout for me, loudly and loudly, joyful sun, when you rise.
One cannot spend one's time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be.
Poetry is the scholar's art.
The imagination is man's power over nature.
The palm stands on the edge of space. The wind moves slowly in the branches. The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle down.
There will never be an end To this droning of the surf.
There is no wing like meaning
If sex were all, then every trembling hand Could make us squeak, like dolls, the wished-for words.
Thought tends to collect in pools.
... unreal things have a reality of their own, in poetry as elsewhere.
Let be be finale of seem. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
Reality Is an Activity of the Most August Imagination.
It is a world of words to the end of it, / In which nothing solid is its solid self.
Beneath every no lays a passion for yes that had never been broken.
The partaker partakes of that which changes him. The child that touches takes character from the thing, the body, it touches.
We say God and the imagination are one . . . How high that highest candle lights the dark.
I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling Or just after.
Eyes dripping blue, so much to learn.
Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
I like Rhine wine, blue grapes, good cheese, endive and lots of books, etc., etc., etc., as much as I like supreme fiction.
He brushed away the thunder, then the clouds, then the colossal illusion of heaven. Yet still the sky was blue.
I placed a jar in Tennessee and round it was upon a hill.
Poetry is a finikin thing of air That lives uncertainly and not for long Yet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs.
They said"You have a blue guitar You do not play things as they are". The man replied,"things as they are Are changed upon the blue guitar".
Thought is an infection. In the case of certain thoughts it becomes an epidemic. p901
The old seraph, parcel-gilded, among violets Inhaled the appointed odor, while the doves Rose up like phantoms from chronologies.
The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself.
Man is an eternal sophomore.
The lion sleeps in the sun. its nose on its paws. it can kill a man.
There is a perfect rout of characters in every man—and every man is like an actor’s trunk, full of strange creatures, new & old. But an actor and his trunk are two different things
From oriole to crow, note the decline In music. Crow is realist. But, then, Oriole, also, may be realist.
It is not in the premise that reality Is a solid. It may be a shade that traverses A dust, a force that traverses a shade.
After the final no there come a yes, and on that yes a future world depends.
Then the sea and heaven rolled as one and from the two came fresh transfigurings of freshest blue.
Desiring the exhilarations of changes: The motive for metaphor, shrinking from The weight of primary noon ...
The stars are putting on their glittering belts, They throw around their shoulders cloaks that flash Like a great shadow's last embellishment
Sentimentality is a failure of feeling. p.903
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.
Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.
Fromage and coffee and cognac and no gods.
Reality is the beginning not the end, Naked Alpha, not the hierophant Omega, Of dense investiture, with luminous vassals.
A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.
The wound kills that does not bleed.
They will get it straight one day at the Sorbonne. We shall return at twilight from the lecture Pleased that the irrational is rational
