Gwendolyn Brooks

Live not for Battles Won.
Live not for The-End-of-the-Song. 
Live in the along.

We are each other's harvest; we are each other's business; we are each other's magnitude and bond.

Writing is a delicious agony.

One reason that cats are happier than people is that they have no newspapers.

I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker.

Poetry is life distilled.

Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies.
And be it gash or gold it will not come
Again in this identical disguise.

She was learning to love moments. To love moments for themselves. 

Books are meat and medicine
and flame and flight and flower
steel, stitch, cloud and clout,
and drumbeats on the air.

Saul Williams

Come, my love, we have oceans to sail.

Talk to strangers
when the family fails and friends lead you astray
when Buddha laughs and Jesus weeps and it turns out God is gay.
Cause angels and messiahs love can come in many forms:
in the hallways of your projects, or the fat girl in your dorm,
and when you finally take the time to see what they’re about
perhaps you find them lonely or their wisdom trips you out.

the greatest Americans
have not been born yet
they are waiting patiently
for the past to die

We are unraveling our navels so that we may ingest the sun. 
We are not afraid of the darkness. 
We trust that the moon shall guide us. 
We are determining the future at this very moment. 
We know that the heart is the philosopher's stone. 
Our music is our alchemy.

Have you ever lost yourself in a kiss? I mean pure psychedelic inebriation. Not just lustful petting but transcendental metamorphosis when you became aware that the greatness of this being was breathing into you. Licking the sides and corners of your mouth, like sealing a thousand fleshy envelopes filled with the essence of your passionate being and then opened by the same mouth and delivered back to you, over and over again - the first kiss of the rest of your life. A kiss that confirms that the universe is aligned, that the world's greatest resource is love, and maybe even that God is a woman. With or without a belief in God, all kisses are metaphors decipherable by allocations of time, circumstance, and understanding.

Kobayashi Issa

What a strange thing!
to be alive
beneath cherry blossoms

Summer night--
even the stars
are whispering to each other.

Never forget:
we walk on hell,
gazing at flowers.

Here
I'm here-
the snow falling.

O snail
Climb Mount Fuji
But slowly, slowly!

In the cherry blossom's shade
there's no such thing
as a stranger.

Where there are humans, 
You'll find flies,
And Buddhas.

Don't weep, insects --
Lovers, stars themselves,
Must part.

Even in warmest
glow 
how cold my shadow

Reflected
in the dragonfly's eye --
mountains

W. S. Merwin

Poetry is a way of looking at the world for the first time.

Separation 
Your absence has gone through me 
Like thread through a needle. 
Everything I do is stitched with its color.

We are asleep with compasses in our hands.

On the last day of the world
I would want to plant a tree

What you remember saves you.

The story of each stone leads back to a mountain.

Through all of youth I was looking for you
without knowing what I was looking for

Send me out into another life
lord because this one is growing faint
I do not think it goes all the way

Cassandra Clare

Have you fallen in love with the wrong person yet?'
Jace said, "Unfortunately, Lady of the Haven, my one true love remains myself."
..."At least," she said, "you don't have to worry about rejection, Jace Wayland."
"Not necessarily. I turn myself down occasionally, just to keep it interesting.

There is no pretending," Jace said with absolute clarity. "I love you, and I will love you until I die, and if there is life after that, I'll love you then.

One must always be careful of books," said Tessa, "and what is inside them, for words have the power to change us.

Is this the part where you start tearing off strips of your shirt to bind my wounds?
If you wanted me to rip my clothes off, you should have just asked.

Jesus!" Luke exclaimed.
"Actually, it's just me," said Simon. "Although I've been told the resemblance is startling.

Only the very weak-minded refuse to be influenced by literature and poetry.

I am a man" he told her, "and men do not consume pink beverages. Get thee gone woman, and bring me something brown.

Sarcasm is the last refuge of the imaginatively bankrupt.

Howard Thurman

Whatever may be the tensions and the stresses of a particular day, there is always lurking close at hand the trailing beauty of forgotten joy or unremembered peace.

Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.

There is something in every one of you that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself. It is the only true guide you will ever have. And if you cannot hear it, you will all of your life spend your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls.

There are two questions that we have to ask ourselves. The 1st is " Where am I going?" and the 2nd is "Who will go with me?"
If you ever get these questions in the wrong orderDuring times of war, hatred becomes quite respectable, even though it has to masquerade often under the guise of patriotism.

During times of war, hatred becomes quite respectable, even though it has to masquerade often under the guise of patriotism.

Often, to be free means the ability to deal with the realities of one's own situation so as not to be overcome by them.

The years, the months, the days, and the hours have flown by my open window. Here and there an incident, a towering moment, a naked memory, an etched countenance, a whisper in the dark, a golden glow these and much more are the woven fabric of the time I have lived.

And this is the strangest of all paradoxes of the human adventure; we live inside all experience, but we are permitted to bear witness only to the outside. Such is the riddle of life and the story of the passing of our days.

Naomi Wolf

Women who love themselves are threatening; but men who love real women, more so.

A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.

Beauty provokes harassment, the law says, but it looks through men's eyes when deciding what provokes it.

What becomes of a man who acquires a beautiful woman, with her "beauty" his sole target? He sabotages himself. He has gained no friend, no ally, no mutual trust: She knows quite well why she has been chosen. He has succeeded in buying something: the esteem of other men who find such an acquisition impressive.

For I conclude that the enemy is not lipstick, but guilt itself; that we deserve lipstick, if we want it, AND free speech; we deserve to be sexual AND serious--or whatever we please; we are entitled to wear cowboy boots to our own revolution.

Sadly, the signals that allow men and women to find the partners who most please them are scrambled by the sexual insecurity initiated by beauty thinking. A woman who is self-conscious can't relax to let her sensuality come into play. If she is hungry she will be tense. If she is "done up" she will be on the alert for her reflection in his eyes. If she is ashamed of her body, its movement will be stilled. If she does not feel entitled to claim attention, she will not demand that airspace to shine in. If his field of vision has been boxed in by "beauty"--a box continually shrinking--he simply will not see her, his real love, standing right before him.

Flannery O'Connor

The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.

She looked at nice young men as if she could smell their stupidity.

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.

I write to discover what I know.

I don't deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.

Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.

Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.

You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.

All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.

Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it.

If you don't hunt it down and kill it, it will hunt you down and kill you.

Only if we are secure in our beliefs can we see the comical side of the universe.

Hanya Yanagihara

You won’t understand what I mean now, but someday you will: the only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are—not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving—and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad—or good—it might be, and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well.

. . . things get broken, and sometimes they get repaired, and in most cases, you realize that no matter what gets damaged, life rearranges itself to compensate for your loss, sometimes wonderfully.

Why wasn’t friendship as good as a relationship? Why wasn’t it even better? It was two people who remained together, day after day, bound not by sex or physical attraction or money or children or property, but only by the shared agreement to keep going, the mutual dedication to a union that could never be codified.

Wasn’t friendship its own miracle, the finding of another person who made the entire lonely world seem somehow less lonely?

Fairness is for happy people, for people who have been lucky enough to have lived a life defined more by certainties than by ambiguities.
Right and wrong, however, are for—well, not unhappy people, maybe, but scarred people; scared people.

Peter Shaffer

The trouble is if you don’t spend your life yourself, other people spend it for you.

If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting.

Passion, you see, can be destroyed by a doctor. It cannot be created.

What the eye does not see, the heart does not grieve over, does it?

Look... to go through life and call it yours - your life - you first have to get your own pain. Pain that's unique to you. You can't just dip into the common bin and say 'That's enough!'...

You have your words, and I have mine.

I looked on astounded as from his ordinary life he made his art. We were both ordinary men, he and I. Yet from the ordinary he created Legends--and I from Legends created only the ordinary!

He'll be delivered from madness. What then? He'll feel himself acceptable! What then? Do you think feelings like his can be simply re-attached, like plasters? Stuck on to other objects we select? Look at him! ... My desire might be to make this boy an ardent husband - a caring citizen - a worshipper of abstract and unifying God. My achievement, however, is more likely to make a ghost!