quotes from classic

I have always been respectful, even reverential, in a room where you can look a human skeleton in the eye-sockets.

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After the one-hour lecture came a two-hour free-for-all of speeches from the floor-anarchists, single taxers, radical socialists, Criers for cooperative stores, for war to be outlawed by international agreement.

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I decided I would go to Chicago and try my luck as a writer after those eight months as a fireman.

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In the crying-out-loud of that year, my two slight books made the same commotion as a child's whisper in a Kansas cyclone.

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I have always felt that a woman has the right to treat the subject of her age with ambiguity until, perhaps, she passes into the realm of over ninety. Then it is better she be candid with herself and with the world.

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The basement had windows lighting the Old Man's workshop and plenty of room for the potatoes and cabbages we raised.

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I had been keeping an off eye on the advertising field, thinking I might become an idea man and a copywriter.

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Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.

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Let the gentle bush dig its root deep and spread upward to split the boulder.

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I'm either going to be a writer or a bum.

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Rouged was known as a fallen woman to the ministers, as a streetwalker to the police, as a chippy to the men on the hunt.

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Every blunder behind us is giving a cheer for us, and only for those who were willing to fail are the dangers and splendors of life.

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Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.

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From year to year the chapel exercises, a half-hour beginning at nine, never lost interest for me.

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In zero weather I wore a turtleneck sweater, coat, and overcoat and read and wrote lighted by a lamp.

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Here is the difference between Dante, Milton, and me. They wrote about hell and never saw the place. I wrote about Chicago after looking the town over for years and years.

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I am an idealist. I don't know where I'm going but I'm on my way.

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A man may be born, but in order to be born he must first die, and in order to die he must first awake.

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I wrote poems in my corner of the Brooks Street station. I sent them to two editors who rejected them right off. I read those letters of rejection years later and I agreed with those editors.

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I am an idealist. I believe in everything-I am only looking for proofs.

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