"There's a lot more going on in your brain and your body than you can ever be aware of. And yet, most people identify themselves with this little flash-lit area of consciousness."

~ Rae Armantrout 

"After you read a poem just knowing you can hold it, you can be in that space of the poem. And it can hold you in its space."

~ Naomi Shihab Nye

"Half of what’s about to occur is unknown, both inside you and outside you."

~ David Whyte

"Poetry is a lot more important than poets."

~ Ted Kooser

"A lot of the poetic discipline boils down to getting tired of yourself, and I really believe that. When you get tired of yourself, then you change." 

~ David Whyte

"That's the paradox: the only time most people feel alive is when they're suffering, when something overwhelms their ordinary, careful armour, and the naked child is flung out onto the world. That's why the things that are worst to undergo are best to remember."

~ Ted Hughes

Smell the air. That is the smell of the white pine,
most intense when the wind blows through it
and the sound it makes equally strange,
like the sound of the wind in a movie—

Louise Glück

"I don’t like when precious things slip through people’s fingers—especially things that seem defenseless or undercelebrated, like old newspapers, but also unheralded people who may have said sensible things at a certain time in history, but who were completely drowned out by other people. Or minor poets whose lives were instructive."

~ Nicholson Baker

"You think you will never forget any of this, you will remember it always just the way it was. But you can't remember it the way it was. To know it, you have to be living in the presence of it right as it is happening. It can return only by surprise."

~ Wendell Berry