Great Throughts Treasury

"In that November off Tehuantepec, the slopping of the sea grew still one night and in the morning summer hued the deck and made one think of rosy chocolate and gilt umbrellas."

"In the far south the sun of autumn is passing like Walt Whitman walking along a ruddy shore. He is singing and chanting the things that are part of him, the worlds that were and will be, death and day. Nothing is final, he chants. No man shall see the end. His beard is of fire and his staff is a leaping flame."

"In the land of turkeys in turkey weather at the base of the statue, we go round and round. What a beautiful history, beautiful surprise! Monsieur is on horseback. The horse is covered with mice."

"In the morning, the jack-rabbit sang to the arkansaw. He caroled in caracoles on the feat sandbars."

"Infant, it is enough in life to speak of what you see. But wait until sight wakens the sleepy eye and pierces the physical fix of things."

"Intolerance respecting other people's religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people's art."

"In the sea, Biscayne, there prinks the young emerald, evening star, good light for drunkards, poets, widows, and ladies soon to be married."

"In the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes the place of imagination."

"In the world of words, the imagination is one of the forces of nature."

"In what camera do you taste poison, in what darkness set glittering scales and point the tipping tongue?"

"Incapable master of all force, too vague idealist, overwhelmed by an afflatus that persists."

"It can never be satisfied, the mind, never."

"It comes about that the drifting of these curtains is full of long motions; as the ponderous deflations of distance; or as clouds inseparable from their afternoons."

"It had been cold since December. Snow fell, first, at New Year and, from then until April, lay on everything. Now it had melted, leaving the gray grass like a pallet, closely pressed; and dirt. The wind blew in the empty place."

"It is better that, as scholars, they should think hard in the dark cuffs of voluminous cloaks, and shave their heads and bodies."

"It is difficult to read. The page is dark. Yet he knows what it is that he expects. The page is blank or a frame without a glass or a glass that is empty when he looks."

"It is difficult even to choose the adjective for this blank cold, this sadness without cause. The great structure has become a minor house. No turban walks across the lessened floors. The greenhouse never so badly needed paint."

"It is as if being was to be observed, as if, among the possible purposes of what one sees, the purpose that comes first, the surface, is the purpose to be seen, the property of the moon, what it evokes."

"It is deep January. The sky is hard. The stalks are firmly rooted in ice."

"It is not every day that the world arranges itself into a poem."

"It is never the thing but the version of the thing: the fragrance of the woman not herself, herself in her manner not the solid block, the day in its color not perpending time, time in its weather, our most sovereign lord, the weather in words and words in sounds of sound."

"It is poverty's speech that seeks us out the most. It is older than the oldest speech of Rome. This is the tragic accent of the scene."

"It is the sea that whitens the roof. The sea drifts through the winter air. It is the sea that the north wind makes. The sea is in the falling snow. This gloom is the darkness of the sea."

"It is the mind that is woven, the mind that was jerked and tufted in straggling thunder and shattered sun."

"It is the sun that shares our works. The moon shares nothing. It is a sea."

"It is time that beats in the breast and it is time that batters against the mind, silent and proud, the mind that knows it is destroyed by time."

"It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom."

"It leaps through us, through all our heavens leaps, extinguishing our planets, one by one, leaving, of where we were and looked, of where we knew each other and of each other thought, a shivering residue, chilled and foregone, except for that crown and mystical cabala."

"It may be that the ignorant man, alone, has any chance to mate his life with life that is the sensual, pearly spouse, the life that is fluent in even the wintriest bronze."

"It makes so little difference, at so much more than seventy, where one looks, one has been there before. Wood-smoke rises through trees, is caught in an upper flow of air and whirled away. But it has been often so."

"It is true that the rivers went nosing like swine, tugging at banks, until they seemed bland belly-sounds in somnolent troughs, that the air was heavy with the breath of these swine, the breath of turgid summer, and heavy with thunder's rattapallax."

"It may be that the ignorant man, alone, has any chance to mate his life with life"

"It might become a wheel spoked red and white in alternate stripes converging at a point of flame on the line, with a second wheel below, just rising, accompanying, arranged to cross, through weltering illuminations, humps of billows, downward, toward the drift-fire shore."

"It must be the finding of a satisfaction, and may be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman combing. The poem of the act of the mind."

"It was a flourishing tropic he required for his refreshment, an abundant zone, prickly and obdurate, dense, harmonious, yet with a harmony not rarefied nor fined for the inhibited instruments of over-civil stops."

"It needed the heavy nights of drenching weather to make him return to people, to find among them whatever it was that he found in their absence, a pleasure, an indulgence, an infatuation."

"It was at the time, the place, of nougats. There the dogwoods, the white ones and the pink ones, bloomed in sheets, as they bloom, and the girl, a pink girl took a white dog walking."

"It was autumn and falling stars covered the shriveled forms crouched in the moonlight."

"It was evening all afternoon. It was snowing and it was going to snow. The blackbird sat in the cedar limbs."

"It was like passing a boundary to dive into the sun-filled water, brightly leafed and limbed and lighted out from bank to bank. That's how the stars shine during the day."

"It was his nature to suppose, to receive what others had supposed, without accepting. He received what he denied. But as truth to be accepted, he supposed a truth beyond all truths."

"It was soldiers went marching over the rocks and still the birds came, came in watery flocks, because it was spring and the birds had to come. No doubt that soldiers had to be marching and that drums had to be rolling, rolling, rolling."

"It was the custom for his rage against chaos to abate on the way to church, in regulations of his spirit. How good life is, on the basis of propriety, to be followed by a platter of capon!"

"It was not important that they survive. What mattered was that they should bear some lineament or character, some affluence, if only half-perceived, in the poverty of their words, of the planet of which they were part."

"It was when the trees were leafless first in November and their blackness became apparent, that one first knew the eccentric to be the base of design."

"It would be enough if we were ever, just once, at the middle, fixed in this beautiful world of ours and not as now, helplessly at the edge, enough to be complete, because at the middle, if only in sense, and in that enormous sense, merely enjoy."

"It's so fucking controlled. Poetry must not become a hospital."

"Just as my fingers on the keys make music, so the selfsame soul on my spirit make a music, too. Music is feeling, then, not sound."

"Lacustrine man had never been assailed by such long-rolling opulent cataracts, unless Racine or Bossuet held the like."

"Lantern without a bearer, you drift, you, too, are drifting, in spite of your course; unless in the darkness, brightly-crowned, you are the will, if there is a will, or the portent of a will that was, one of the portents of the will that was."