Great Throughts Treasury

"Love me this first day of June. I'd rather sleep with ashes than priestly wisdom. Of all the lonely places in the world this is best where debris is human. I kiss the precious ashes that fall from fiery flesh. On these familiar shapes I lay my kisses down."

"Marita, Please find me, I am almost 30."

"Love is the only engine of survival."

"May everyone live, and may everyone die. Hello, my love, and my love, Goodbye."

"May you be surrounded by friends and family, and if this is not your lot, may the blessings find you in your solitude."

"Maybe there?s a God above but all I?ve ever learned from love was how to shoot at someone who outdrew you. It?s not a cry you can hear at night, it?s not somebody who has seen the light. It?s a cold and it?s a broken Hallelujah"

"Maybe there's a God above, as for me, all I've ever seemed to learn from love is how to shoot at someone who outdrew you. Yeah but it's not a complaint that you hear tonight, it's not the laughter of someone who claims to have seen the light. No it's a cold and it's a very lonely Hallelujah."

"Miss McTavish was a graduate of Bryn Mawr '21, tall and masculine, and was secretly convinced of being the only one in America to really understand the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. He was also convinced that the academic world was not worthy of the true Hopkins and was therefore reluctant to talk about their theories. The same sense of superiority kept her away from the university. Did not wish to take part in the academic conspiracy against Life and Art. The same sense of superiority, combined with a grotesque nose, he kept away from the marriage. He knew that the sufficiently passionate man, rebellious and playful for an intimate spiritual relationship with her was not available for domestic life, having probably already consecrated to the monastery or mountaineering."

"Music is the emotional life of the most people."

"Most of us from the middle-class, we have a kind of old, 19th-century idea of what democracy is, which is, more or less, to over-simplify it, that the masses are going to love Shakespeare and Beethoven. That?s more or less our idea of what democracy is. But that ain?t it. It?s going to come up in unexpected ways from the stuff that we think [is] junk: the people we think are junk, the ideas we think are junk, the television we think is junk."

"Most of the time one is discouraged by the work, but now and again by some grace something stands out and invites you to work on it, to elaborate it or animate it in some way. It's a mysterious process."

"My friends are gone and my hair is grey. I ache in places I used to play. And I?m crazy for love but I?m not coming on. I?m just paying my rent every day in the tower of song."

"My interest in this pack of failures betrays my character."

"My abandoned narcotics have abandoned me."

"My heart sings of your longing for me and my thoughts climb down to marvel at your mercy. I do not fear as you gather up my days. Your name is the sweetness of time, and you carry me close into the night, speaking consolations, drawing down lights from the sky, saying, See how the night has no terrors for one who remembers the name."

"My animal howls, my angel's upset, but I'm not allowed a trace of regret."

"My mind flies farther along this road narrow, driven by curiosity, shining acceptance, farther, as a feather hook, threw craftsmanship and thrust deep into the light above the creek. Somewhere where I cannot reach and where I have no control, and gets the hook spear heads, spear shortens and becomes needle and sews the world combined."

"My mind was always very cluttered, so I took great pains to simplify my environment, because if my environment were half as cluttered as my mind, I wouldn't be able to make it from room to room. This system has just worked for me, even though I've had to sweat over every word. It's just my style."

"My reputation as a ladies' man was a joke that caused me to laugh bitterly through the ten thousand nights I spent alone."

"My son and my daughter have both been an incredibly sustaining force, especially through this recent bad patch [of health]. So, I've been blessed and grateful for their company and for their assistance."

"Never make a decision when you need to pee."

"My sense of proprietorship has been so weak that actually I didn't pay attention and I lost the copyrights on a lot of the songs."

"My page was too white, my ink was too thin. The day wouldn't write what the night penciled in."

"My two great heroes are W. B. Yeats and Fernando Garcia Lorca."

"No one masters the heart."

"No penance serves to renew them, no massive transfusions of trust. Why not even revenge can undo them, so twisted these vows and so crushed."

"Nobody goes into a Zen monastery as a tourist."

"Now I've heard there was a secret chord That David played, and it pleased the Lord But you don't really care for music, do you? It goes like this the fourth, the fifth The minor fall, the major lift The baffled king composing Hallelujah."

"One eye filled with blueprints, one eye filled with night."

"Now Suzanne takes you hand And she leads you to the river She is wearing rags and feathers From salvation army counters And the sun pours down like honey On our lady of the harbor And she shows you where to look Among the garbage and the flowers There are heroes in the seaweed There are children in the morning They are leaning out for love And they will lean that way forever While Suzanne holds the mirror And you want to travel with her And you want to travel blind And you know that she will trust you For she?s touched your perfect body with her mind."

"One is distracted by this notion that there is such an thing as inspiration, that it comes fast and easy. And some people are graced by that style. I'm not. So I have to work as hard as any stiff to come up with my payload"

"One is given to self-dramatization from time to time. I intend to live forever."

"Now, I don't want to give you the impression that I'm a great musicologist, but I'm a lot better than what I was described as for a long, long time; you know, people said I only knew three chords when I knew five."

"Oh the sisters of mercy, they are not departed or gone. They were waiting for me when I thought that I just can't go on. And they brought me their comfort and later they brought me this song. Oh I hope you run into them, you who've been travelling so long."

"Only one thing made him happy and now that it was gone everything made him happy."

"Only in Canada could somebody with a voice like mine win 'Vocalist of the Year'."

"Out of the thousands who are known or who want to be known as poets, maybe one or two are genuine and the rest are fakes, hanging around the sacred precincts, trying to look like the real thing."

"Ordinary eternal machinery, like the grinding of the stars."

"Patrick Leonard is such a magnificent composer. I don't think there is anybody working today with those kind of skills that could translate one of my tunes into that really beautiful chamber music."

"Pay attention to the cracks, because that's where the light gets in."

"Please make me empty, if I'm empty then I can receive, if I can receive it means it comes from somewhere outside of me, if it comes from outside of me I'm not alone! I cannot bear this loneliness. Above all it is loneliness."

"Poetry is a verdict rather than an intention."

"People change and their bodies change and their hair grows gray and falls out and their bodies decay and die? but there is something that doesn?t change about love and about the feelings we have for people. Marianne, the woman of So Long, Marianne, when I hear her voice on the telephone, I know something is completely intact even though our lives have separated and we?ve gone our very different paths. I feel that love never dies, and that when there is an emotion strong enough to gather a song around it, that there is something about that emotion that is indestructible."

"People used to say my music was too difficult or too obscure, and I never set out to be difficult or obscure. I just set out to write what I felt as honestly as I could, and I am delighted when other people feel a part of themselves in the music."

"Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash."

"Prayer is translation. A man translates himself into a child asking for all there is in a language he has barely mastered."

"Raise a million filters and the rain will not be clean, until the longing for it be refined in deep confession. And still we hear, If only this nation had a soul, or, Let us change the way we trade, or, Let us be proud of our region."

"Poetry is a verdict, not an occupation."

"Reality is one of the possibilities I cannot afford to ignore."

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