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"You will never be able to escape from your heart. So it's better to listen to what it has to say."

Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

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"The summer demands and takes away too much, But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takes."

John Ashbery, from "As One Put Drunk Into the Packet-Boat"

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"I dance, for the joy of surviving, on the edge of the road."

Stanley Kunitz, from "An Old Cracked Tune"

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"What have those lonely mountains worth revealing? More glory and more grief than I can tell: The earth that wakes one human heart to feeling Can centre both the worlds of Heaven and Hell."

Emily Brontë, from "Stanzas"

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"Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language."

Paul Celan, Poetry Foundation

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"He weighs his words carefully. Every moment he evaluates the word. I should add: every moment he evaluates silence."

Jean Daive, speaking of Paul Celan, Under the Dome, trans. Rosmarie Waldrop

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"A poem . . . begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion finds the thought and the thought finds the words."

Robert Frost, The Letters of Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer

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"When I walk I part the air and always the air moves in    to fill the spaces where my body’s been. We all have reasons for moving. I move to keep things whole."

Mark Strand, from "Keeping Things Whole"

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"Will you ever bring a better gift for the world than the breathing respect that you carry wherever you go right now? Are you waiting for time to show you some better thoughts?"

William Stafford, from "You Reading This, Be Ready"

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"We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?"

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

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"We shelter an angel within us. We must be the guardians of that angel."

Jean Cocteau, Diary of an Unknown, trans. Jesse Browne