Great Throughts Treasury

"I don't consider myself a pessimist. I think of a pessimist as someone who is waiting for it to rain. And I feel soaked to the skin."

"I don't have any spiritual strategy."

"I don't even hate books anymore."

"I don't know which side is anybody on any more. I don't really care. There is a moment when we have to transcend the side we're on and understand that we are creatures of a higher order."

"I didn't want to write for pay. I wanted to be paid for what I write."

"I don't really understand that process called reincarnation but if there is such a thing I'd like to come back as my daughter's dog."

"I don't think you can write novels on the road. You need a certain stability."

"I don't trust my inner feelings, inner feelings come and go."

"I don't remember lighting this cigarette and I don't remember if I'm here alone or waiting for someone."

"I don't want to be a star, merely dying."

"I finally broke into the prison I found my place in the chain Even damnation is poisoned with rainbows."

"I dreamed about you baby. It was just the other night. Most of you was naked. Ah, but some of you was light."

"I feel that, you know, the enormous luck I've had in being able to make a living, and to never have had to have written one word that I didn't want to write, to be able to have satisfied that dictum I set for myself, which was not to work for pay, but to be paid for my work ? just to be able to satisfy those standards that I set for myself has been an enormous privilege."

"I feel that this is a vocabulary that I grew up with. This biblical landscape is very familiar to me, and it's natural that I use those landmarks as references. Once they were universal references and everybody understood and knew them and located them. That's no longer the case today, but it is still my landscape."

"I fought against the bottle, but I had to do it drunk. Took my diamond to the pawn shop, but that don't make it junk."

"I felt like if any two people had any kind of sexual affinity for each other they had to sleep with each other immediately, otherwise it was a terrible betrayal and waste...Fortunately, I'm relieved of those obsessions now. It's really wonderful. It's really wonderful not feeling you have to sleep with everybody."

"I guess that I miss you, I guess I forgive you, I?m glad you stood in my way."

"I found that things became a lot easier when I no longer expected to win. You abandon your masterpiece and sink into the real masterpiece."

"I followed the course from chaos to art. Desire the horse, depression the cart."

"I greet you from the other side of sorrow and despair, with a love so vast and shattered it will reach you everywhere."

"I had a good raincoat then, a Burberry I got in London in 1959. Elizabeth thought I looked like a spider in it. That was probably why she wouldn't go to Greece with me. It hung more heroically when I took out the lining, and achieved glory when the frayed sleeves were repaired with a little leather. Things were clear. I knew how to dress in those days. It was stolen from Marianne's loft in New York sometime during the early seventies. I wasn't wearing it very much toward the end."

"I had the title poet, and maybe I was one for a while. Also, the title singer was kindly accorded me, even though I could barely carry a tune."

"I guess you go for nothing, if you really want to go that far."

"I have no program, I have no five-year plan? It doesn?t mean that you shouldn't have one! I just move from hotel to hotel, and from bar to bar, and by the grace of the One above occasionally a song comes, and I remember sitting at this particularly obnoxious Polynesian restaurant where they served a kind of coconut drink that was particularly lethal and sinister which contained no alcohol but a certain chemical that demoralized you entirely. And I remember writing on one of their very badly designed napkins, I remember you well at the Chelsea Hotel... so I dedicate this song to one of the great singers, Janis Joplin."

"I have often prayed for you like this. Let me have her."

"I have nothing against the Queen of England. Even in my heart I never resented her for not being Jackie Kennedy. She is, to my mind, a very gallant lady, victimized by whoever it is who designs the tops of her uniforms."

"I have tried in my way to be free."

"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."

"I hope we [with Patrick Leonard] can come up with something orchestral with some spoken material. And I also, God willing, hope that perhaps another record of songs also might emerge, but one never knows."

"I have to finish it in order to know whether it deserves to survive."

"I never really liked poetry readings; I liked to read poetry by myself, but I liked singing, chanting my lyrics to this jazz group."

"I kind of limp along like so many of us do in these realms. Occasionally I've felt the grace of another presence in my life, but I can't build any kind of spiritual structure on that."

"I know she is coming. I know she will look. And that is the longing and this is the book."

"I listen to the radio and I like all kinds of music, you know, but I like to hear from people who have been there. Hank Williams has been there."

"I lit a thin green candle to make you jealous of me, but the room just filled up with mosquitoes."

"I know there is an eye that watches all of us. There is a judgment that weighs everything we do. And before this great force, which is greater than any government I stand in awe and I kneel in respect and it is to this great judgment that I dedicate this next song, Hallelujah."

"I loved you when you opened like a lily to the heat; you see I?m just another snowman standing in the rain and sleet who loved you with his frozen love, his second hand physique, with all he is and all he was a thousand kisses deep."

"I loved you for a long, long time I know this love is real. It don't matter how it all went wrong that don't change the way I feel. And I can't believe that time's gonna heal this wound I'm speaking of there ain't no cure for love."

"I loved you in the morning, our kisses deep and warm, your hair upon the pillow like a sleepy, golden storm, yes many loved before us, I know we are not new, in city and in forest they smiled like me and you, but now it's come to distances and both of us must try, your eyes are soft with sorrow, Hey, that's no way to say goodbye."

"I must go now. Stay up all night with me! We will go to the fish market! There are big monsters and nobles encased in ice. There are turtles, live turtles, for the famous restaurants. We will save a, write messages on his shell and put into the sea, Shell, like a shell. Or we'll go to the vegetable market. They have red mantles full of onions that look like huge pearls. Or we'll go in the Forty-second Street to see ten films, and will buy a mimeographed bulletin of the work that can be found in Pakistan.... Tomorrow work. This has nothing to do. But now you'd better go. I know that in America this is unheard of, but it'll take you home. I live in the Twenty-third Street. Just what I was hoping. Are more than a hundred blocks. Shell took his arm, he hugged himself her hand with his elbow and became part of a single movement, a kind of sweet Siamese animal that could take ten blocks."

"I speak of a clinical depression that is the background of your entire life, a background of anguish and anxiety, a sense that nothing goes well, that pleasure is unavailable and all your strategies collapse."

"I showed my heart to the doctor. He said I just had to quit"

"I remember when I moved in you and the holy dove she was moving too, and every single breath that we drew was Hallelujah."

"I read with some amusement my reputation as a ladies' man. My friends are amused by that, too, because they know my life."

"I spent many years that her mother began to exercise the inalienable rights of menopause. He began to wear in the house at any time a fur coat and sunglasses. Before you alluded only and then explicitly he stated that he had sacrificed a career as a concert pianist. When asked for the good of those who, she refused to answer and lowered the thermostat."

"I swear by this song and by all that I have done wrong, I will make it all up to thee."

"I said I was ready to die recently, and I think I was exaggerating. That declaration of readiness, no matter what the outcome, that's a part of everyone's soul."

"I smile when I'm angry, I cheat and I lie. I do what I have to do to get by. But I know what is wrong and I know what is right, and I'd die for the truth in my secret life."

"I raise my glass to the Awful Truth, which you can't reveal to the Ears of Youth, except to say it isn't worth a dime, and the whole damn place goes crazy twice, and it's once for the Devil and once for Christ."

"I see you standing on the other side. I don't know how the river got so wide. I loved you, baby, way back when. And all the bridges are burning that we might have crossed and I feel so close to everything that we've lost. We'll never, we'll never have to lose it again. Now I bid You farewell, I don't when I'll be back. They're moving us tomorrow to that tower down the track. But you'll be hearing from me, baby, long after I'm gone. I'll speaking to you sweetly from a window in the Tower Of Song."