Each poem is a miracle that has been invited to happen, and I must be willingly fallible in order to deserve a place in the realm where miracles happen. - William Stafford, poet
Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of faith is to see what you believe. - St. Augustine, philosopher
Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world. - Albert Einstein
I see skies of blue and clouds of white; The bright blessed sky, the dark sacred night; And I think to myself, "What a wonderful world." - Louis Armstrong
I like my money right where I can see it.. hanging in my closet. - Carrie Bradshaw
To learn of the pine tree, go to the pine. - Basho
Fortunately, Pooh's thoughtful spot was in a sheltered place. Now he sat down and tried hard to think of something. -- A A Milne, Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day
It follows that poems are not so important as the poetic process, the transforming power that spiritualizes the world, turning visibility into invisibility, the world into ourselves. -- Dennis Donoghue
I want to achieve a voice, a language in poetry, that is utterly child-like, utterly naked. A firstness. -- Li-Young Lee
I believe in the deep-set messiness of everything. -- Charles Simic
I like poems best when you hear the person in them. I think that's the only time they live, when you hear the person speaking them--someone else with whom you are able to sympathize so much that when you speak of his life you are speaking of your own. -- Galway Kinnell
Before you know what kindness really is,you must lose things,feel the future dissolve in a moment,like salt in a weakened broth.What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved,all this must go so you know how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness.-- Naomi Shihab Nye
When a poem rhymes, when a form generates itself, when a metre provokes consciousness into new postures, it is already on the side of life. When a rhyme surprises and extends the fixed relations between words, that in itself protests against necessity. When language does more than enough, as it does in all achieved poetry, it opts for the condition of overlife, and rebels at limit.--Seamus Heaney
Whatever satisfies the soul is truth. --Walt Whitman