Richard Wilbur Quotes

Outside the open window The morning air is all awash with angels.

What is the opposite of two? A lonely me, a lonely you.

All that we do is touched with ocean, and yet we remain on the shore of what we know

Teach me, like you, to drink creation whole/ And casting out myself, become a soul.

The eye is pleased when nature stoops to art.

There is a poignancy in all things clear, In the stare of the deer, in the ring of a hammer in the morning. Seeing a bucket of perfectly lucid water We fall to imagining prodigious honesties.

Step off assuredly into the blank of your mind. Something will come to you.

The strength of the genie comes from being in a bottle.

Whatever pains disease may bring Are but the tangy seasoning To Loves delicious fare.

Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry, Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.

Happy in all that ragged, loose collapse of water, the fountain, its effortless descent and flatteries of spray.

Odd that a thing is most itself when likened

Writing is?waiting for the word that may not be there until next Tuesday.

It is not tricks of sense But the time's fright within me which distracts Least fancies into violence

Composition for me is, externally at least, scarcely distinguishable from catatonia.

Writing poetry is talking to oneself; yet it is a mode of talking to oneself in which the self disappears; and the product's something that, though it may not be for everybody, is about everybody.

That's the main business of the poem!-to see if you can't make up a language that sets all your selves talking at once-all of them being fair to each other.

What's lightly hid is deepest understood.

A thrush, because I'd been wrong, Burst rightly into song In a world not vague, not lonely, Not governed by me only.

To claim, at a dead party, to have spotted a grackle, When in fact you haven't of late, can do no harm.