Rod McKuen Quotes

Be gentle with me, new love. Treat me tenderly. I need the gentle touch, the soft voice, the candlelight after nine. There's been so many who didn't understand so give me all the love I see in your timid eyes but give it gently Please.

I was tired. I peaked. I left when I was on top. One year, I did 280 concerts.

I've been going a long time now
along the way I've learned some things.
You have to make the good times yourself
take the little times and make them into big times
and save the times that are all right
for the ones that aren't so good.

For many people, I was a phase, a part of the period of growing up. People ask me why I connected. It was presumptuous of me to say, but I'm Everyman. The difference is I put my thoughts into words.

Happy Christmas
and I love your ears
tomorrow we'll untie
the package of another year.
Twelve more months of summer
if you stay
winter if you go.

You know, in a way, I wish I could hate a little more. It would make me a more rounded personality.

Sometimes I think people were meant to be strangers.
Not to get to know one another,
not to get close enough to damage the heart
made older by each new encounter.

If you love somebody, tell them.

It happens just because we need
to want and to be wanted too,
when love is here or gone
to lie down in the darkness
and listen to the warm.

It seems to me that it's every man's obligation to make what contribution he can. You live each day as best you can. That, to me, is what makes life interesting.

We will all wake up semi-angels,
If we wake at all.

and if the world breaks down, I'll be around.

Extending your hand is extending yourself.

I felt that some of my work was OK. If I could do it over, I'd do better.

These long years later it is worse
for I remember what it was
as well as what it might have been.

I try not to put messages in my songs. My only message is man's communication with his fellow man. I want to narrow the gap of strangeness and alienation.

The world needs writers. We will always be necessary. There are few professions that can claim that distinction.

I cannot speculate on what our cluttered mind will save- sleepy Sundays, or a nosebleed after love. I know only the dying heart needs the nourishment of memory to live beyond too many winters.

If I could do it over, I'd do better.

People are not born bastards. They have to work at it.

Theres no misery in not being loved,
only in not loving

Watch the indolent butterfly playing on the tall flower in the yard and think about the sun going down. It always does you know.

The journey back is always longer than the forward run.

I can't understand people who give up and commit suicide. If I have a bad day, I figure tomorrow will be better. And even if it isn't, at least it isn't any worse.

This is the way it was while I was waiting for your eyes to find me.

Everybody has the answers or they'll make them up for you. Just once I'd like to hear a brand-new question.

Laws and machines are shaped to fit the classes.

Cats have it all - admiration, an endless sleep, and company only when they want it.

We come into the world alone. We go away the same. We're meant to spend the interlude between in closeness or so we tell ourselves. But it's a long way from the morning to the evening.

A poet can't afford to be aloof. The tools of his trade are the people he bumps up against.

We need sex education in schools, but we need it at home first. We need parents to learn the names of the teachers who are teaching their children. We need families to question day-care centers, to question other children and their own as to what goes on.

Sorry no one could see how beautifully happy we were.

Thank you for the sun you brought this morning
even though the sky was full of clouds.

Ideas are few
another might not come by soon.

I am not convinced the truth can make men free, but I believe it a beginning.

Even when you feel you've reached the end or edge of life, hold on. Life itself will ultimately take care of you.

I went back to look for you.
Not understanding the language of hello,
I thought I'd speak it just the same.

Now is next to nothing compared to where I've been.

Once I thought ideas were exceptions not the rule. That is not so. Ideas are so plentiful that they ride on air. You have only to reach out and snatch one.

May your hand be full for always if only with another hand. May your heart be empty only long enough to give you cause to fill it up again with love. May your soul be lost by you only to be found by God.