Monica > Monica's Quotes

“The night is the hardest time to be alive and 4am knows all my secrets.”
― Poppy Z. Brite

“I knew this feeling, the 2 a.m. loneliness that I'd practically invented.”
― Sarah Dessen, This Lullaby

“I fix the cramped, lined pages
with my curious stare. How do you
come to exist?”
― Kiera Woodhull, Chaos of the Mind

“There are worse things than having behaved foolishly in public.
There are worse things than these miniature betrayals,
committed or endured or suspected; there are worse things
than not being able to sleep for thinking about them.
It is 5 a.m. All the worse things come stalking in
and stand icily about the bed looking worse and worse and worse.”
― Fleur Adcock

“The moment of change is the only poem.”
― Adrienne Rich

“...you look at me like an emergency”
― Adrienne Rich, Diving Into the Wreck

“Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.”
― Carl Sandburg

“Poetry makes life what lights and music do the stage.”
― Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers

“Nobody reads poetry, we are told at every inopportune moment. I read poetry. I am somebody. I am the people, too. It can be allowed that an industrious quantity of contemporary American poetry is consciously written for a hermetic constituency; the bulk is written for the bourgeoisie, leaving a lean cut for labor. Only the hermetically aimed has a snowball's chance in hell of reaching its intended ears. One proceeds from this realization. A staggering figure of vibrant, intelligent people can and do live without poetry, especially without the poetry of their time. This figure includes the unemployed, the rank and file, the union brass, banker, scientist, lawyer, doctor, architect, pilot, and priest. It also includes most academics, most of the faculty of the humanities, most allegedly literary editors and most allegedly literary critics. They do so--go forward in their lives, toward their great reward, in an engulfing absence of poetry--without being perceived or perceiving themselves as hobbled or deficient in any significant way. It is nearly true, though I am often reminded of a Transtromer broadside I saw in a crummy office building in San Francisco:



We got dressed and showed the house

You live well the visitor said

The slum must be inside you.



If I wanted to understand a culture, my own for instance, and if I thought such an understanding were the basis for a lifelong inquiry, I would turn to poetry first. For it is my confirmed bias that the poets remain the most 'stunned by existence,' the most determined to redeem the world in words..”
― C.D. Wright, Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil

“I know the place

I know the place.
It is true.
Everything we do
Corrects the space
Between death and me
And you.”
― Harold Pinter

“If I say your voice is an amber waterfall in which I yearn to burn each day, if you eat my mouth like a mystical rose with powers of healing and damnation, If I confess that your body is the only civilization I long to experience… would it mean that we are close to knowing something about love?”
― Aberjhani, Visions of a Skylark Dressed in Black

“I will love you forever" swears the poet. I find this easy to swear too. "I will love you at 4:15 pm next Tuesday" - Is that still as easy?”
― W.H. Auden

“Time will say nothing but I told you so,
Time only knows the price we have to pay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.”
― W.H. Auden, Selected Poems

“Poetry makes nothing happen.”
― W.H. Auden

“Without art, we should have no notion of the sacred; without science, we should always worship false gods.”
― W.H. Auden, Selected Essays

“Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society must take the place of the victim, and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness.”
― W.H. Auden

“What living occasion can,
Be just to the absent?”
― W.H. Auden, Collected Poems

“To read is to translate, for no two persons' experiences are the same. A bad reader is like a bad translator: he interprets literally when he ought to paraphrase and paraphrases when he ought to interpret literally.”
― Wystan Hugh Auden

“No one wants to read poetry. You have to make it impossible for them to put the poem down--impossible for them to stop reading it, word after word. You have to keep them from closing the book.”
― Muriel Rukeyser

“Staring Girl
I once knew a girl
who would just stand there and stare.
At anyone or anything,
she seemed not to care

She'd stare at the ground,
She'd stare at the sky.
She'd stare at you for hours,
and you'd never know why.
But after winning the local staring contest,
she finally gave her eyes
a well-deserved rest.”
― Tim Burton

“Free verse is like free love; it is a contradiction in terms.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“i don't want to hate the president

i don't want to go to harvard

i don't want to win the pulitzer prize

i just want to sit in my bathtub

and think about relationships i will never have

with people i will never meet

and then go lay in my bed

with a magnifying glass

and count all the stiches in my sheets

until i fall asleep

and wake up

to repeat again.”
― Ellen Kennedy

“A poet's mission is to make words do more work than they normally do, to make them work on more than one level.”
― Jay-Z, Decoded

“I touch you knowing we weren't born tomorrow,
and somehow, each of us will help the other live,
and somewhere, each of us must help the other die.”
― Adrienne Rich, Twenty-One Love Poems.

“and I ask myself and you, which of our visions will claim us
which will we claim
how will we go on living
how will we touch, what will we know
what will we say to each other.”
― Adrienne Rich

“I sang in my chains like the sea”
― Dylan Thomas

“When composing a verse let there not be a hair's breath separating your mind from what you write; composition of a poem must be done in an instant, like a woodcutter felling a huge tree or a swordsman leaping at a dangerous enemy.”
― Bashō

“I heard of a man
who says words so beautifully
that if he only speaks their name
women give themselves to him.

If I am dumb beside your body
while silence blossoms like tumors on our lips
it is because I hear a man climb stairs
and clear his throat outside our door.”
― Leonard Cohen

“Love came down at Christmas,
Love all lovely, Love Divine;
Love was born at Christmas;
Star and angels gave the sign.”
― Christina Rossetti

“What is the colour of Christmas?
Red?
The red of the toyshops on a dark winter’s afternoon,
Of Father Christmas and the robin’s breast?
Or green?
Green of holly and spruce and mistletoe in the house,
dark shadow of summer in leafless winter?
One might plainly add a romance of white,
fields of frost and snow;
thus white, green, red- reducing the event to the level of a Chianti bottle.
But many will say that the significant colour is gold,
gold of fire and treasure, of light in the winter dark; and this gets closer,
For the true colour of Christmas is Black.
Black of winter, black of night, black of frost and of the east wind,
black of dangerous shadows beyond the firelight.

I am not sure who wrote this. I got it from page nine of “A Book of Christmas” by William Sansom. Google didn’t help. It is rather true I think, that the true color of Christmas is black. For like the author said in succeeding sentences “The table yellow with electric light, the fire by which stories are told, the bright spangle of the tree- they all blazé out of shadow and out of a darkness of winter”
― William Sansom