James Wright Quotes

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota
Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year's horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life. ~ James Wright

Love is a cliff,
A clear, cold curve of stone, mottled by stars,
Smirched by the morning, carved by the dark sea
Till stars and dawn and waves can slash no more,
Till the rock's heart is found and shaped again. ~ James Wright

Good evening charlie, yes I know you rise, two lean grey spiders drifting through your eyes. ~ James Wright

And then, when noon comes,
Each stranger
Has no room left in the light
Except for only his hands.
Here are mine. They are kind of skinny. May I have your
lovely trees? ~ James Wright

I'll be damned, you're a poet. Welcome to hell. ~ James Wright

Most of the pollution in the water already is dead animal and plant matter and building debris, ... good stagnant nursery for mosquitoes. ~ James Wright

They can buy whatever brand they want. We will supply the finance. ~ James Wright

Someone like you makes the sun shine brighter. Someone like you makes a sigh half a smile. Someone like you makes my troubles much lighter. Someone like you make life seem worthwhile. ~ James Wright Foley

Across the road, tadpoles are dancing on the quarter thumbnail of the moon. They cant see, not yet. ~ James Wright

To speak in a flat voice
Is all that I can do.
I have gone every place
Asking for you.
Wondering where to turn
And how the search would end
And the last streetlight spin
Above me blind.

Then I returned rebuffed
And saw under the sun
The race not to the swift
Nor the battle won.
Liston dives in the tank,
Lord, in Lewiston, Maine,
And Ernie Doty's drunk
In hell again.

And Jenny, oh my Jenny
Whom I love, rhyme be damned,
Has broken her spare beauty
In a whorehouse old.
She left her new baby
In a bus-station can,
And sprightly danced away
Through Jacksontown.

Which is a place I know,
One where I got picked up
A few shrunk years ago
By a good cop.
Believe it, Lord, or not.
Don't ask me who he was.
I speak of flat defeat
In a flat voice.

I have gone forward with
Some, a few lonely some.
They have fallen to death.
I die with them.
Lord, I have loved Thy cursed,
The beauty of Thy house:
Come down. Come down. Why dost
Thou hide thy face? ~ James Wright

We choose exile as a vantage point; from exile we look back on the rejected ~ James Wright

I write abundantly. And then my next step is to struggle to reduce the ornament, to reduce the abundance-to prune the book, in other words, the way one prunes a tree-so it can grow. This is my idea of a book. ~ James Wright

In a pine tree,/ A few yards from my window sill,/ A brilliant blue jay is springing up and down, up and/ down./ On a branch./ I laugh, as I see him abandon himself/ To entire delight, for he knows as well as I do/ That the branch will not break. ~ James Wright

But I have burned already down to bone.
There is a fire that burns beyond the names
Of sludge and filth of which this world is made.
Agony sears the dark flesh of the body,
And lifts me higher than the smoke, to rise
Above the earth, above the sacrifice;
Until my soul flares outward like a blue
Blossom of gas fire dancing in mid-air:
Free of the body's work of twisted iron. ~ James Wright

Poetry can keep life itself alive. You can endure almost anything as long as you can sing about it. ~ James Wright

I would rather live my life than not live it. ~ James Wright

In life, you gotta do something. And the medical journals keep on saying if you've got a goal or some passion in life, you'll outlive all the other guys who - the bank manager that retired. They gave him a rocking chair and he rocked himself to death. So you gotta have a passion, whatever it happens to be. Whether it's this or something else, it doesn't matter, as long as it's a reason to get out of bed every morning, as my accountant of 50 years keeps on saying. ~ James Wright

Give winter nothing; hold; and let the flake
Poise or dissolve along your upheld arms.
All flawless hexagons may melt and break;
While you must feel the summer's rage of fire,
Beyond this frigid season's empty storms.
Banished to bloom, and bear the birds' desire. ~ James Wright

I close my eyes, and think of water. ~ James Wright

Look: I am nothing.
I do not even have ashes to rub into my eyes. ~ James Wright

A comparative study will lead to the conclusion that the Phoenician, Aramaic and Greek alphabets were developed from one original. ~ John Courtenay James

As I always said, if people wanted to know who James Brown is, all they have to do is listen to my music. ~ James Brown

The man who knows governments most completely is he who troubles himself least about a definition which shall give their essence. Enjoying an intimate acquaintance with all their particularities in turn, he would naturally regard an abstract conception in which these were unified as a thing more misleading than enlightening. ~ William James

One can give nothing whatever without giving oneself - that is to say, risking oneself.If one cannot risk oneself, then one is spimply incapable of giving ~ James Baldwin

The elder who is eliminating what time has done to the face, what life has done to the face, is making a statement for others to see: This is the way to be a good old person - it is to defeat this body that is doing things to you. Because you haven't changed. Your body's changing. ~ James Hillman

The germs of all truth lie in the soul, and when the ripe moment comes, the truth within answers to the fact without as the flower responds to the sun, giving it form for heat and color for light. ~ Hamilton Wright Mabie

Who cares?" I told him. "I'm already in trouble. Keep talking. ~ James Patterson

The dignity of man is vindicated as much by the thinker and poet as by the statesman and soldier. ~ James Bryant Conant

See to do good, and you will find that happiness will run after you. ~ James Freeman Clarke

I owe you a debt," he told Vader. "It took you to bring me back to the Force." "And you to firm my faith in the power of the dark side, Master Shryne. ~ James Luceno

Underlying James's career crisis was a psychological crisis. He had to confront what was really true about himself. Faced with the competing job offer, James had been asking people, "What should I do?" instead of, "What do I really want? What gives me a sense of self-worth? ~ Barbara Moses

It is the empty seats that listen most raptly. ~ James Richardson

One key to successful group decisions is getting people to pay much less attention to what everyone else is saying. ~ James Surowiecki

Don't be interesting - be interested. ~ James C. Collins

Many today operate with two quite different types of "truth." If we asked, "Is it true that Jesus died on a cross?" we normally would mean, "Did it really happen?" But if we asked, "Is the parable of the Prodigal Son true?" we would quickly dismiss the idea that "it really happened"; that is simply not the sort of thing parables are. We would insist that, in quite another sense, the parable is indeed "true" in that we discover within the narrative a picture of ~ N. T. Wright

Power: The ability to force or coerce someone to do your will, even if they would choose not to, because of your position or your might. ~ James Hunter

She was twenty and had come to realize that, though she had a voice, she wasn't a singer; that to endure and embrace the life of a singer demands a whole lot more than a voice. ~ James A. Baldwin

To have peace and not war, the drift toward a war economy, as facilitated by the moves and the demands of the sophisticated conservatives, must be stopped; to have peace without slump, the tactics and policies of the practical right must be overcome. The political and economic power of both must be broken. The power of these giants of main drift is both economically and politically anchored; both unions and an independent labor party are needed to struggle effective. ~ C. Wright Mills

The air, the water, and the ground are free gifts to man, and no one has the power to portion them out in parcels. Man must drink, breath, and walk - and therefore each has a right to his share of earth. ~ James Fenimore Cooper

I came along at a time when the industry was eating its young. ~ Chely Wright

All of us started normal. All of us started out as functioning human beings with the potential to do almost anything we wanted, but somewhere along the paths of our lives, we got lost. ~ James Frey

Good, I thought, relieved. At least I'd actually gotten the flight right. Getting her schedule had turned out to be a challenge. It had taken over a week of calling in favors, in fact, and that was with me knowing the CEO of her airline personally. The comings and goings of airline employees were well-guarded, I had learned. ~ R.K. Lilley

The fucked thing," Doc Bryan says, "is the men we've been fighting probably came here for the same reasons we did, to test themselves, to feel what war is like. In my view it doesn't matter if you oppose or support war. The machine goes on." ~ Evan Wright

KISS hammered home the importance of high drama ... I decided to design my show with the same goal; I wanted my fans to remember my show for the rest of their lives. ~ Rick James

The whole culture is under terrible pressure and fraught with worry. It's hard to get out of that box. That's the dominant situation all over the world. ~ James Hillman

The man of science appears to be the only man who has something to say just now, and the only man who does not know how to say it. ~ James M. Barrie

A day of dappled seaborne clouds.
The phrase and the day and the scene harmonised in a chord. Words. Was it their colours? He allowed them to glow and fade, hue after hue: sunrise gold, the russet and green of apple orchards, azure of waves, the greyfringed fleece of clouds. No, it was not their colours: it was the poise and balance of the period itself. Did he then love the rhythmic rise and fall of words better than their associations of legend and colour? Or was it that, being as weak of sight as he was shy of mind, he drew less pleasure from the reflection of the glowing sensible world through the prism of a language manycoloured and richly storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose? ~ James Joyce

Damn you, Captain Black!" she yelled into the twilight. "This isn't over yet! From hell's heart, I stab at thee! ~ James L. Cambias

It is the high privilege and sacred duty of those now living to educate their successors and fit them, by intelligence and virtue, for the inheritance which awaits them. ~ James A. Garfield

My work in government has flowed from the fundamental idea of personal empowerment. It's about giving people the tools they need to pave their own way. ~ James Langevin

I first became familiar with Dave Eggers's work when I was living in San Francisco and enrolled at USF's MFA Program. ~ James Bernard Frost

I sometimes have the feeling you've been here a long time, more than one lifetime, and that you've dwelt in private places none of the rest of us has even dreamed about. ~ Robert James Waller

I dare say you marvel sometimes at my independent way of walking through the world just as if nature had made me of your sex instead of poor Eve's. Trust me, my beloved friend, the mind has no sex but what habit and education give it, and I who was thrown in infancy upon the world like a wreck upon the waters have learned, as well to struggle with the elements as any male child of Adam. ~ Frances Wright

It was in this year, 1828, that the standard of "the Christian Party in Politics" was openly unfurled ... This was an evident attempt, through the influence of the clergy over the female mind - until this hour lamentably neglected in the United States - to effect a union of Church and State. ~ Frances Wright

I loved her as much as ever and I still did not know how much that was. ~ James Baldwin

The United States is now relearning an ancient lesson, dating back to the Roman Empire. Brutalizing an enemy only serves to brutalize the army ordered to do it. Torture corrodes the mind of the torturer. ~ James Risen

i'm smooth,but not a criminal. ~ Michael James Jackson

I feel like because I've done more gay characters, gay scenes, or gay projects than most straight actors, people see it as some sort of mission. It's more of a case-by-case basis, and just trying to capture figures that I love. I guess that a lot of the figures that I love were gay. ~ James Franco

Americans have always been able to handle austerity and even adversity. Prosperity is what is doing us in. ~ James Reston