Quotes

• "Always be a poet, even in prose."  Charles Baudelaire
• "Always write in the wilderness."  William Stafford
• “The author of haiku should be absent, and only the haiku present.”  Anne Bancroft
• "The best haiku are barefoot; next, the sandaled; and least, those with shoes."  Robert Spiess
• “Breathe in experience, breathe out poetry.”  Muriel Rukeyser​
• "The crown of literature is poetry."  W. Somerset Maugham
• “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter - 'tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”​  Mark Twain
• ​“A drop of ink may make a million think.”  George Gordon Byron
• ​“Every word is a prejudice.”  Friedrich Nietzsche
• "Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.”  William Wordsworth
• “Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.”  T.S. Eliot​
• “Grasping a now-moment of awareness is like trying to grasp  a handful of rushing water —and yet, this is what haiku is all about.”  Robert Spiess
• “Haiku is a way of culling things from the stream of things that rush past the senses.”  Michael J. Rosen
• “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s there are few.”  Shunryu Suzuki
• ​“If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all.”  John Keats
• "It is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things."  Stephane Mallarme
•  “Let the readers do some of the work themselves.”   Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• “No sound is neutral.”  Mary Oliver
• “Of all the achievements of the human mind, the birth of the alphabet is the most momentous.”  Frederic Goudy
• "Of your unspoken words, you are the master; of your spoken words, the servant; of your written words, the slave."  Quaker Proverb
• "The old pines are full of poems."  Ryokan Taigu
• "The only real measure of a haiku, is upon hearing one, your mind experiences a small sensation of space, which is nothing less than God.”  Allen Ginsberg
• “Pare down to the essence, but don't remove the poetry.”  Leonard Koren
• "Poems are never finished - just abandoned."  Paul Valery
• "Poetry: the best words in the best order."  Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• “Poetry cannot breathe in the scholar’s atmosphere.”  Henry David Thoreau
• ​“Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.”  Robert Frost
• ​“Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.”  Percy Bysshe Shelley
• "Poetry must be as new as foam and as old as the rock."  Ralph Waldo Emerson
• “The purpose of poetry is to return that which is familiar to its​ original strangeness.”  Charles Simic
• “A single poem alone can turn tides, scatter galaxies, and burst forth with rivers from paradise.”​  Sanober Khan
• "The sound must seem an echo to the sense​."  Alexander Pope
• ​"The stars are like letters that inscribe themselves at every moment in the sky."  Plotinus
• "The strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry."  Matthew Arnold
• “There is another alphabet, whispering from every leaf, singing from every river, shimmering from every sky.”  Dejan Stojanovic​
• “Think of this – that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.”  A.S. Byatt
• "To be quiet, even wordless, in a good place is a better gift than poetry."  Wendell Berry
• "Words create worlds."  Pierre du Plessis
• “Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking.”  John Maynard Keynes
• "A writer is a world trapped in a person.”  Victor Hugo
• “Writers begin with a grain of sand, and then create a beach.”  Robert Black
• "Writers live twice."  Natalie Goldberg
• "Writing and rewriting is a constant search for what one is saying."  John Updike​