United States

"Why are you telling me this?"
—Chautauqua Literary Journal

“A metaphor is not an ornament. It is an organ of perception.”
—Neil Postman, from The End of Education

"An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way."
—Bukowksi

"...I came to believe that poetry has a much stronger relation to the spoken word than prose has. Punctuation basically has to do with prose and the printed word. I came to feel that punctuation was like nailing the words onto the page. Since I wanted instead the movement and lightness of the spoken word, one step toward that was to do away with punctuation, make the movement of the words do the punctuating for themselves, as they do in ordinary speech."
—W. S. Merwin

“The poet lights the light and fades away. But the light goes on and on.”
―Emily Dickinson

"Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You've got to go so far, so fast, in such a small space that you've just got to turn away all the peripherals. And I miss them!"
―Sylvia Plath

"There's something wrong with me chemically
Something wrong with me inherently
The wrong mix in the wrong genes
I reached the wrong ends by the wrong means
It was the wrong plan
In the wrong hands
With the wrong theory for the wrong man
The wrong lies, on the wrong vibes
The wrong questions with the wrong replies."
—Depeche Mode