Poet Quotes

When I was in high school in the '50s you were supposed to be an Elvis Presley, a James Dean, a Marlon Brando or a Kingston Trio type in a button-down shirt headed for the fraternities at Stanford or Cal.

When I was in college, I lost my scholarship one year. I had enough money for tuition, but not room and board. So I camped in the hills.

There are moments when the body is as numinous as words, days that are the good flesh continuing. Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

The first book that really knocked me out was the 'Brothers Karamazov.' I read it when I was a senior in high school.

The Earth forgives the previous year every year.

Take the time to write. You can do your life's work in half an hour a day.

In California in the early Spring, There are pale yellow mornings, when the mist burns slowly into day, The air stings like Autumn, clarifies like pain - Well, I have dreamed this coast myself.

I think that the job of poetry, its political job, is to refresh the idea of justice, which is going dead in us all the time.

All the new thinking is about loss, In this it resembles all the old thinking.

You know that murder is wicked. If you saw your master kill a man, do you suppose this would be any excuse for you, if you should commit the same crime?

You have discovered so much kindness and good will to those you thought were oppressed, and had no helper, that I am sure you will not despise what I have wrote, if you judge it will be of any service to them.

When I was at Hartford in Connecticut, where I lived during the war, I published several pieces which were well received, not only by those of my own colour, but by a number of the white people, who thought they might do good among their servants.

We live so little time in this world that it is no matter how wretched and miserable we are, if it prepares us for heaven.

Those of you who can read I must beg you to read the Bible, and whenever you can get time, study the Bible, and if you can get no other time, spare some of your time from sleep, and learn what the mind and will of God is.

There are but two places where all go after death, white and black, rich and poor; those places are Heaven and Hell. Heaven is a place made for those, who are born again, and who love God, and it is a place where they will be happy for ever.

The next thing I would mention, and warn you against, is profaneness. This you know is forbidden by God.

That liberty is a great thing we may know from our own feelings, and we may likewise judge so from the conduct of the white-people, in the late war.

Now the Bible tells us that we are all by nature, sinners, that we are slaves to sin and Satan, and that unless we are converted, or born again, we must be miserable forever.

Let all the time you can get be spent in trying to learn to read.

It is very wicked for you not to take care of your masters goods, but how much worse is it to pilfer and steal from them, whenever you think you shall not be found out.

It is our duty to be faithful, not with eye service as men pleasers.

If you see most people neglect the Bible, and many that can read never look into it, let it not harden you and make you think lightly of it, and that it is a book of no worth.

If we should ever get to Heaven, we shall find nobody to reproach us for being black, or for being slaves.

If there was no Bible, it would be no matter whether you could read or not. Reading other books would do you no good.

If a servant strives to please his master and studies and takes pains to do it, I believe there are but few masters who would use such a servant cruelly.

I suppose I have had more advantages and privileges than most of you, who are slaves have ever known, and I believe more than many white people have enjoyed, for which I desire to bless God, and pray that he may bless those who have given them to me.

He will bring us all, rich and poor, white and black, to his judgment seat.

Good servants frequently make good masters.

Besides all this, if you are idle, and take to bad courses, you will hurt those of your brethren who are slaves, and do all in your power to prevent their being free.

As we depend upon our masters, for what we eat and drink and wear, and for all our comfortable things in this world, we cannot be happy, unless we please them.