Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.

Human nature is like water. It takes the shape of its container.

I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendos The blackbird whistling Or just after.

Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers.

The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.

Throw away the light, the definitions, and say what you see in the dark.

Reality is a clich from which we escape by metaphor.

The exceeding brightness of this early sun Makes me conceive how dark I have become.

It is not everyday that the world arranges itself into a poem.

We live in an old chaos of the sun.

The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.

The reader became the book; and summer night Was like the conscious being of the book.

The imperfect is our paradise.

A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman.

The mind can never be satisfied.

I am what is around me.

One must read poetry with one's nerves.

For the listener, who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

The way through the world Is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.

I certainly do not exist from nine to six, when I am at the office.

In the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes the place of imagination.

The poem must resist the intelligence Almost successfully.

Poetry is an abstraction bloodied.

I was myself the compass of that sea: I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw Or heard or felt came not but from myself; And there I found myself more truly and more strange.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind, We make a dwelling in the evening air, In which being there together is enough.

Children picking up our bones Will never know that these were once As quick as foxes on the hill;

I am the truth, since I am part of what is real, but neither more nor less than those around me.

It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom.

I know noble accents And lucid, inescapable rhythms; But I know, too, That the blackbird is involved In what I know.

I still feel the need of some imperishable bliss.

The river is moving. The blackbird must be flying.

After the leaves have fallen, we return To a plain sense of things. It is as if We had come to an end of the imagination, Inanimate in an inert savoir.

God and the imagination are one.

Of the Surface of Things In my room, the world is beyond my understanding; But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four Hills and a cloud.

It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.

The yellow glistens. It glistens with various yellows, Citrons, oranges and greens Flowering over the skin.

It is never the thing but the version of the thing.

The great poems of heaven and hell have been written and the great poem of earth remains to be written.

A pear should come to the table popped with juice, Ripened in warmth and served in warmth. On terms Like these, autumn beguiles the fatalist.

People should like poetry the way a child likes snow, and they would if poets wrote it.

It is necessary to any originality to have the courage to be an amateur.

Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.

The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real.

A change of style is a change of meaning.

One must have a mind of winter.

We must endure our thoughts all night, until the bright obvious stands motionless in cold.

From this the poem springs: that we live in a place That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves And hard it is in spite of blazoned days.

A violent order is disorder; and a great disorder is an order. These two things are one.

Next to love is the desire for love.

Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams And our desires.