Animals praise a good day, a good hunt. They praise rain if they're thirsty. That's prayer. They don't live an unconscious life, they simply have no language to talk about these things. But they are g...
Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.
I feel the terror of idleness,like a red thirst.Death isn't just an idea.
To live in this world, you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go...
Imagination is better than a sharp instrument. To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.
When it's over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement.--from WHEN DEATH COMES
I believe you did not have a happy life.I believe you were cheated.I believe your best friends were loneliness and misery.I believe your busiest enemies were anger and depression.I believe joy was a g...
Things take the time they take.Don't worry.How many roads did St. Augustine follow before he became St. Augustine?
Sometimes breaking the rules is just extending the rules
LITTLE DOGS RHAPSODY IN THE NIGHT(PERCY THREE)He puts his cheek against mineand makes small, expressive sounds.And when I'm awake, or awake enoughhe turns upside down, his four pawsin the airand his e...
Maybe deathisn't darkness, after all,but so much lightwrapping itself around us
the stars began to burnthrough the sheets of clouds,and there was a new voicewhich you slowlyrecognized as your own
Still, what I want in my lifeis to be willingto be dazzled—to cast aside the weight of factsand maybe even
Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.
There was a new voicewhich you slowlyrecognized as your own,that kept you companyas you strode deeper and deeperinto the world,determined to dothe only thing you could do
One day you finally knewwhat you had to do, and began,though the voices around youkept shoutingtheir bad advice --though the whole housebegan to trembleand you felt the old tugat your ankles.Mend my l...
I want to think again of dangerous and noble things. I want to be light and frolicsome. I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing, as though I had wings.
I tell you thisto break your heart,by which I mean onlythat it break open and never close againto the rest of the world.
It is a serious thing // just to be alive / on this fresh morning / in this broken world.
If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be. We are not wise, and not very often kind. And much can nev...