I want to work in revelations, not just spin silly tales for money. I want to fish as deep down as possible into my own subconscious in the belief that once that far down, everyone will understand because they are the same that far down.
-Jack Kerouac

Death steals everything except our stories.
-Jim Harrison

Fuimus fumus.
[We are smoke.]
-Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel

Sitting on the hill he felt young and stupid. And then sad that he had not until this afternoon found out that on very rare occasions life will offer up something as full and wonderful as anything the imagination can muster.
-Jim Harrison, Farmer

The man o the rock had pitched five outs in the losing game, and had given up two runs on a single. But he’d inherited loaded bases. The story of his life. The story of all our lives.
-David James Duncan, The Brothers K

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry.
-Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Everything I did in my life that was worthwhile I caught hell for.
-Earl Warren

Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.
-Sir Arthur Eddington

I scarcely recognized myself: the fanatical fisherman in me had died, and what remained was a stranger. I was someone I barely knew lying on my side, watching a star.
-David James Duncan, The River Why

Fingers more breathless than a tongue laid
upon the lips in the hour of sunlight;
before the mist rolls in from the sea,
and out there everything is turbulent
and green.
-Frank O’Hara

The air, though heavy, has a fathomlessness to it, as if the usual atmospheric barriers between city and sky had dissolved; the wastes of space seemed to be reaching, undiluted, all the way down to the asphalt and lawns.
-David James Duncan, River Teeth

It is only through the confining act of writing that the immensity of the nonwritten becomes legible.
-Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler

There are days when everything I see seems to me charged with meaning: messages it would be difficult for me to communicate to others, define, translate into words, but which for this very reason appear to me decisive.
-Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler

Love is the longing for the half of ourselves that we have lost.
-Milan Kundera

The truth is that only gold ore can be turned into gold; only poetry into poems.
-Robert Graves

Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.
-A.E. Housman

When I forget how to talk, I sing.
-Jeff Tweedy, “She’s a Jar”

I will spit until I learn how to speak.
-Jeff Magnum, “King of Carrot Flowers”

To lift, to fetch, to drive, to shed, to pen,
Are acts I recognize, with all they mean
Of shepherding the unruly, for a kind of
Controlled woolgathering is my work too.
-Cecil Day Lewis

Men like women who write. Even though they don’t say so. A writer is a foreign country.
-Marguerite Duras

Everything exists, everything is true, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet.
-W.B. Yeats

Poetry is, above all, a singing art of natural and magical connection because, though it is born out of one’s person’s solitude, it has the ability to reach out and touch in a humane and warmly illuminating way the solitude, even the loneliness, of others. That is why, to me, poetry is one of the most vital treasures that humanity possesses; it is a bridge between separated souls.
-Brendan Kennelly

Remember how long you’ve been putting this off, how many extensions the gods gave you, and you didn’t use them. At some point you have to recognize what world it is that you belong to; what power rules it and from what source you spring; that there is a limit to the time assigned to you, and if you don’t use it to free yourself it will be gone and will never return.
-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

When one tugs at a single thing in nature, one finds it attached to the rest of the world.
-John Muir

In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jungle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.
-Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

‘Not bad,’ he said, peeling the sloshy oysters from their pearly shells with a little silver fork and swallowing them one after another. ‘Not bad,’ he repeated, raising his moist and shining eyes now to Levin, now to the Tartar.
-Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up it’s own asshole, so to speak.
-Kurt Vonnegut, The Paris Review Interviews

What it comes down to is, I don’t want to ride the same horse in the same race tomorrow. I want to ride a different horse, or be in a different race.
-Poppa Neutrino, The Happiest Man in the World

Interviewer: In your Antologia Personal…
Borges: Look here, I want to say that that book is full of misprints. My eyesight is very dim and the proofreading had to be done by somebody else.
Interviewer: I see, but those are only minor errors, aren’t they?
Borges: Yes, I know, but they creep in, and they worry the writer, not the reader. The reader accepts everything, no? Even the starkest nonsense.
-Jorge Luis Borges, The Paris Review Interviews

Maybe the human animal has contributed really nothing to the universe but kissing and comedy–but by God that’s plenty.
-Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.
-Ranier Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unresolved in your heart and to try and love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given to you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now.
-Ranier Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

This is love, isn’t it? When you notice someone’s absence and hate that absence more than anything? More, even, than you love his presence?
-Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

From space, astronauts can see people making love as a tiny speck of light.
-Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

You were watching my fingers. Don’t watch my fingers. My fingers are liars. I have taught them to tell pretty lies.
-Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life–and hold it fixed so that 100 years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again.
-William Faulkner

The future has a valley and a shortcut around.
-Jeff Tweedy, “Spiders (Kidsmoke)”

What would we be without wishful thinking?
-Jeff Tweedy, “Wishful thinking”

Summer afternoon–summer afternoon–the two most beautiful words in the English language.
-Henry James, Portrait of a Lady

Why do you want to be on The Real World?
Because I want everyone to witness my youth.
Why?
Isn’t it gorgeous?
-Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Richie: Dad, you were never really dying.
Royal: But I’m gonna live!
-Wes Anderson, The Royal Tenenbaums

So now every blue has a brother
And every singing silver a sister.
-Carl Sandburg, “Lumber Yard Pools at Sunset”

Men’s curiosity searches past and future
And clings to that dimension. But to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint?
-T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”

All the lonely ship-lights in the bay showed where the patient hulls were berthed and anchored, where the loomed in enfolding shadows like kneeling nuns of the sea.
-Jack Kerouac, The Town and the City

I guess if I believe in anything, I believe in the inexplicable.
-Joyce Johnson, Door Wide Open

You define yourself by the people you love and that’s enough.
-Jeff Tweedy

Preacher says that when the master calls us, he’s gonna give us wings to fly; though my wings are made of hay and corn husks, so I can’t leave this world behind.
-Josh Ritter, “Lawrence, KS”

…dress stay crisp for him, button stay put, bloom narcissus – air stay still and sweet.
-F Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

It was an exquisite day. It was one of those days so clear, so still, so silent you almost feel the earth itself has stopped in astonishment at its own beauty.
-Katherine Mansfield

To laugh often and much, to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children, to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends, to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others, to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch? to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded!
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

O camerado close! O you and me at last, and us two only.
O a word to clear one’s path ahead endlessly!
O something ecstatic and undemonstrable! O music wild!
O now I triumph – and you shall also;
O hand in hand – O wholesome pleasure -
O one more desirer and lover!
O to haste firm holding – to haste, haste on with me.
-Walt Whitman, “Starting from Paumanok”

It’s just Halloween…I have my Bob Dylan mask on…
-Bob Dylan

“You’re the only girl I’ve seen for a long time that did actually look like something blooming.”
-F Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

Far below, the last exccursion boat from the Isles de Lerins floated across the bay like a Fourth-of-July balloon foot-loose in the heavens.
-F Scott Fitzgerald, the same

Good phrases are surely, and ever were, very commendable.
-Bill Shakespeare, “Henry IV”

In poetry everything which MUST be said is almost impossible to say well.
-Paul Valery

Go to the edge of the cliff and jump off. Build your wings on the way down.
-Ray Bradbury

I used to read a Faulkner novel every summer. But this last summer I couldn’t. That’s how tough life has been.
-Grandma Burrell

The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.
-Henry Miller

To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade or quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely ordered variety on the chords of emotion–a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashed back as a new organ of knowledge. One may have that condition by fits only.
-George Eliot, Middlemarch

The universe had not yet beckoned.
-George Eliot, Middlemarch

“He has got no good red blood in his body,” said Sir James.
“No. Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass and it was all semicolons and parentheses,” said Mrs Cadwallader.
-George Eliot, Middlemarch

My understanding of the meaning of a book is that the book itself disappears from sight, that it is chewed alive, digested, and incorporated into the system as flesh and blood which in turn creates new spirit and reshapes the world.
-Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn

I want to be able to carry on the leg language without attracting attention. It works beautifully.
-Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn

It’s a summer night and everything flung wide open.
-Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn

I saw the constellations wheeling about the huge hole in the ceiling of the universe; I saw the outer planets and the black star which was to deliver me.
-Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn

Gentle moon, find us soon.
-Mark Kozelek, “Gentle Moon”

She looked as pretty as if instead of showing her photographs I had been making love to her.
-Henry James, “Four Meetings”

“Isn’t life,” she stammered, “isn’t life–” But what life was she couldn’t explain.
-Katherine Mansfield, “The Garden-Party”

A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal youth.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley, “A Defence of Poetry”

After all, what is a fine lie? Simply that which is its own evidence.
-Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying”

The final revelation is that Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.
-Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying”

Who am I, but my own past?
-Katherine Mansfield, “A Married Man’s Story”

To stare down the years.
-Katharine Mansfield, “At the Bay”

Between melting and freezing
The soul’s sap quivers.
-T. S. Eliot, “Four Quartets”

I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
-T. S. Eliot, “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

When the evening is spread out against the sky.
-T. S. Eliot, “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

I wish then after this somnolence to sparkle, many-faceted under the light of my friends’ faces. I have been traversing the sunless territory of non-identity. A strange land. I have heard in my moment of appeasement, in my moment of obliterating satisfaction, the sigh, as it goes in, comes out, of the tide that draws beyond this circle of bright light, this drumming of innate fury.
-Virginia Woolf, The Waves

You were right about the stars;
Each one is a setting sun.
-Jeff Tweedy, “Jesus, etc.”

“I mean,” continued Richard Caramel gravely, “that on paper your first paragraph contains the idea you’re going to damn or enlarge one. In conversation you’ve got your vis-à-vis statement–but when you simply ponder, why, your ideas succeed each other like magic lantern pictures and each one forces out the last.”
-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and the Damned

She had given up dealing with her figure and thus gained freedom.
-Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts

But words have been used too often; touched and turned, and left exposed to the dust of the street. The words we seek hang close to the tree. We come at dawn and find them sweet beneath the leaf.
-Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room

Never are voices so beautiful as on a winter’s evening, when dusk almost hides the body, and they seem to issue from nothingness with a note of intimacy seldom heard by day.
-Virginia Woolf, Night and Day

About her seemed to hang the mist of the winter hedges, and the clear red of the bramble leaves.
-Virginia Woolf, Night and Day

What a life this mess can be.
-Jay Farrar

What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain til you see their speck dispersing?–it’s the too huge world vaulting us, and it’s goodbye. But we lean forward to the next crazy adventure beneath the skies.
-Jack Kerouac, On The Road

And let the misty mountain winds be free
To blow against thee
-Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey”

Inaudible dreams!
-Coleridge, “Frost at Midnight”

Tu materia es el tiempo, el incesante
Tiempo. Eres cada solitario instante.
(Your matter is time, unending
Time. You are each solitary second.)
-Jorge Louis Borges

I bequeath nothingness to no one.
-Jorge Louis Borges

I bequeath thee this wreath of unsprung tears.
-Jack Kerouac

And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.
-Walt Whitman, “A child said, What is the grass?”

I want to hold you in the bible black predawn
You’re quite a quiet domino bury me now
Take off your band-aid cuz I don’t believe in touchdowns
What was I thinking when we said hello
-Jeff Tweedy, “I am trying to break your heart”

But: light glistens off my teary face.
-Phil Elvrum, “What Wonder?”

He flows through his ocean of ideas into a microphone and around the mic into the room of ears and glued eyes. What comes out his mouth is a voice speed-reading the scared texts of depth, only getting a few of the words out while all million others pour past our ears undetected, (he spouts them inaudibly.)
-Phil Elvrum, “What Wonder?”

A winning wave, deserving note,
In the tempestuous petticoat;
A careless shoe-string, in whose tie
I see a wild civility,–
Do more bewitch me than when art
Is too precise in every part.
-Robert Herrick, “Delight in Disorder”

A dream does not take account of size. A puddle can contain a continent, and a clump of trees stretch in sleep to the world’s edge.
-Graham Greene, “Under the Garden”

I used to be with “it.” Then they changed what “it” was. Now what I’m with isn’t “it” and what’s “it” seems weird and scary to me. It’ll happen to you.
-Abe Simpson, “The Simpsons”

I sit upon this old grey stone
and dream my time away.
-Wordsworth, “Expostulation and Reply”

Enough of science and art
close up these barren leaves
come forth, and bring with you a heart
that watches and receives.
-Wordsworth, “The Tables Turned”

Those who restrain desire do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.
-William Blake

To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.
-Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Is there ever really need to close my heart?
-Allen Ginsberg, in a letter to Jack Kerouac

Wind makes sound
in tree tops
like express trains like city
machinery
slow dances high up, huge
branches wave back
forth sensitive
needlechairs bob their heads
–it’s too human, it’s not human
it’s treetops, whatever they think
it’s me, whatever I think,
it’s the wind talking.
-Allen Ginsberg

“There is no use in trying,” said Alice; “One cannot believe impossible things.” “I dare say you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
-Lewis Carroll

I am unable to distinguish between the feeling I have for life and my way of expressing it.
-Henri Matisse

Life was good. He could hardly wait to see what would happen next.
-Kurt Vonnegut

So it goes.
-Kurt Vonnegut

My heart is like the autumn moon.
-Han Shan

Every time I turn around another year on earth is over.
-Han Shan

–Force, hatred, history, all that. That’s not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it?s the opposite of hatred that is really life.
–What? Says Alf.
–Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred.
-James Joyce, Ulysses

On his wise shoulders through the checkerwork of leaves, the sun flung spangles, dancing coins.
-James Joyce, Ulysses

Don?t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.
-J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

I like too many things and get all confused and hung up running from one falling star to another till I drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.
-Jack Kerouac, On the Road

Jadis! Jadis! Jadis, on etait ensemble, non? Ensemble! Ce grand môt d?amour?
A long time, a very long, long time ago, we were together, right? Together! This great name for love?
-Jack Kerouac, in a letter to friend Sebastian Sampas

The stars were the same then as they are tonight.
-Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

My witness is the empty sky.
-Jack Kerouac

It loved to happen.
-Marcus Aurelius

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars…
-Jack Kerouac, On the Road

Everything passes, everything changes.
Just do what you think you should do.
-Bob Dylan, “To Ramona”

Take it easy, but take it.
-Woody Guthrie