Death tugs at my ear and says, ‘Live. I am coming.

I tell you this to break your heart, by which I mean only that it will break open and never close again to the rest of the world.

It is better for the heart to break, than not to break.

So every day I was surrounded by the beautiful crying forth of the ideas of God, one of which was you.

You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

Love, love, love, says Percy. And hurry as fast as you can along the shining beach, or the rubble, or the dust. Then, go to sleep. Give up your body heat, your beating heart. Then, trust.

There are a hundred paths through the world that are easier than loving. But, who wants easier?

As a child, what captivated me was reading the poems myself and realizing that there was a world without material substance which was nevertheless as alive as any other.

Almost anything is too much. I am trying in my poems to have the reader be the experiencer. I do not want to be there. It is not even a walk we take together.

I’d rather write about polar bears than people.

Writers sometimes give up what is most strange and wonderful about their writing – soften their roughest edges – to accommodate themselves toward a group response.

I have the feeling that a lot of poets writing now are – they sort of tap dance through it.

I went to India and was quite taken with it. There’s a feeling there that things are holy first and useful second.

You have to be in the world to understand what the spiritual is about, and you have to be spiritual in order to truly be able to accept what the world is about.

Though I play at the edges of knowing, truly I know our part is not knowing, but looking, and touching, and loving

It must be a great disappointment to God if we are not dazzled at least ten times a day.

If I have any lasting worth, it will be because I have tried to make people remember what the Earth is meant to look like.

You are young. So you know everything. You leap into the boat and begin rowing. But, listen to me. Without fanfare, without embarrassment, without doubt ,I talk directly to your soul. Listen to me

I have a notion that if you are going to be spiritually curious, you better not get cluttered up with too many material things.

Sometimes I really believe it, that I am going to save my life a little.

I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too.

Things take the time they take. Don’t worry. How many roads did St. Augustine follow before he became St. Augustine?

Poetry isn’t a profession, it’s a way of life. It’s an empty basket; you put your life into it and make something out of that.

Oh Lord of melons, of mercy, though I am not ready, nor worthy, I am climbing towards you.

I acknowledge my feeling and gratitude for life by praising the world and whoever made all these things.

It is the nature of stone to be satisfied. It is the nature of water to want to be somewhere else.

The resurrection of the morning. The mystery of the night. The hummingbird’s wings. The excitement of thunder. The rainbow in the waterfall. Wild mustard, that rough blaze of the fields.

There were times over the years when life was not easy, but if you’re working a few hours a day and you’ve got a good book to read, and you can go outside to the beach and dig for clams, you’re okay.

You can fool a lot of yourself but you can’t fool the soul.

I would rather write poems than prose, any day, any place. Yet each has its own force.

Because of the dog’s joyfulness, our own is increased. It is no small gift. It is not the least reason why we should honor as love the dog of our own life, and the dog down the street, and all the dogs not yet born.

I’d rather write about polar bears than people.

Joy is not made to be a crumb. (Don’t Hesitate)

To find a new word that is accurate and different, you have to be alert for it.

You too can be carved anew by the details of your devotion

What misery to be afraid of death. What wretchedness, to believe only in what can be proven.

The poem in which the reader does not feel himself or herself a participant is a lecture, listened to from an uncomfortable chair, in a stuffy room, inside a building.

My work is loving the world. Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird—equal seekers of sweetness.

I read Rumi, the 13th-century Persian poet, every day.

How shall I touch you unless it is everywhere?

We all have a hungry heart, and one of the things we hunger for is happiness. So as much as I possibly could, I stayed where I was happy.

Sing, if you can sing, and it not still be musical inside yourself.

My parents didn’t care very much what I did, and that was probably a blessing.

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.

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.

Also I wanted to be able to love. And we all know how that one goes, don’t we? Slowly.

He is exactly the poem I wanted to write.

The Uses Of Sorrow (In my sleep I dreamed this poem) Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.

Hello, sun in my face. Hello you who made the morning and spread it over the fields…Watch, now, how I start the day in happiness, in kindness.

The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.

Listen, whatever you see and love— that’s where you are.

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it is over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened, or full of argument.
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

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.

Come with me into the woods where spring is advancing, as it does, no matter what, not being singular or particular, but one of the forever gifts, and certainly visible.

Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell others.

Therefore, dark past, I’m about to do it. I’m about to forgive you for everything.

You’re like a little wild thing that was never sent to school.

Always there is something worth saying about glory, about gratitude.

After a cruel childhood, one must reinvent oneself. Then reimagine the world.

Every morning I walk like this around the pond, thinking: if the doors of my heart ever close, I am as good as dead.

What will you do with your one precious, wild life?

I feel the terror of idleness, like a red thirst. Death isn’t just an idea.

It’s not a competition, it’s a doorway.

I know many lives worth living.

Said the river: imagine everything you can imagine, then keep on going.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.

Knowledge has entertained me and it has shaped me and it has failed me. Something in me still starves.

Keep some room in your heart for the Unimaginable.

Still, what I want in my life is to be willing to be dazzled – to cast aside the weight of facts and maybe even to float a little above this difficult world.

I believe in kindness. Also in mischief. Also in singing, especially when singing is not necessarily prescribed.

Let me keep my distance, always, from those who think they have the answers. Let me keep company always with those who say “Look!” and laugh in astonishment, and bow their heads.

If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it…It could be anything, but very likely you notice it in the instant when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.

You must not ever stop being whimsical. And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.

But I also say this: that light is an invitation to happiness, and that happiness, when it’s done right, is a kind of holiness, palpable and redemptive.

Maybe the desire to make something beautiful is the piece of God that is inside each of us.

Most mornings I’m up to see the sun, and that rising of the light moves me very much, and I’m used to thinking and feeling in words, so it sort of just happens. I think one thing is that prayer has become more useful, interesting, fruitful, and … almost involuntary in my life,” she says. “And when I talk about prayer, I mean really … what Rumi says in that wonderful line, ‘there are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting – over and over announcing your place in the family of things.

And to tell the truth I don’t want to let go of the wrists of idleness, I don’t want to sell my life for money, I don’t even want to come in out of the rain.

Ten times a day something happens to me like this – some strengthening throb of amazement – some good sweet empathic ping and swell. This is the first, the wildest and the wisest thing I know: that the soul exists and is built entirely out of attentiveness.

You can have the other words – chance, luck, coincidence, serendipity. I’ll take grace. I don’t know what it is exactly, but I’ll take it.

Sometimes I need only to stand wherever I am to be blessed

For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple.

I simply do not distinguish between work and play.

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed. I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be.

Listen – are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?

To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.

It is a serious thing just to be alive on this fresh morning in this broken world.