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"The poems I have loved the most are those I have understood the least." - T.S. Eliot

 

"The only thing that separates the writer from others—and far from making him or her a better or wiser person, let alone a more amenable one, as it redoubles the force of solitude, 'one’s ultimate hard irreducible inorganic singleness'—is that the reading of a poem, or the pondering of a crucifixion, becomes an event. Not a diversion, a flight, or a release from chores, but an experience no less transformative than a day in bed with a lover." - Samuel Beckett

 

"The purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person."

- Czesław Miłosz

 

“I forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.”

- Marcel Duchamp

 

“There are some things one can only achieve by a deliberate leap in the opposite direction.” - Franz Kafka

 
"Wisdom is tolerance of cognitive dissonance." ~ Robert Thurman

 

“In the artist of all kinds, one can detect an inherent dilemma, which belongs to the co-existence of two trends, the urgent need to communicate and the still more urgent need not to be found.” - D. W. Winnicott

 
“My identifying features / are rapture and despair.” - Wisława Szymborska 

 

“Perhaps the greatest reading pleasure has an element of self-annihilation. To be so engrossed that you barely know you exist.” - Ian McEwan

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” - Simone Weil

“Poems do not endure as objects but as presences. When you read anything worth remembering, you liberate a human voice; you release into the world again a companion spirit.” - Louise Glück

 

"In poetry, you become infinitely small without disappearing." - Roberto Bolaño

 

"The most demanding part of living a lifetime as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one's own most intimate sensitivity." - Anne Truitt

 

"All poets adore explosions, thunderstorms, tornadoes, conflagrations, ruins, scenes of spectacular carnage. The poetic imagination is not at all a desirable quality in a statesman." - W.H. Auden

“Let's not forget that small emotions are the great captains of our lives.” - Vincent van Gogh