Stanzas Quotes

“I found an empty chairand sat on itto find myself even emptier.I found a broken glassand looked at itto see my dissolved facea little prettierI found a steep doorwayand enteredin order to close my exit.From the poem 'Blue Stanzas”

“the poem doesn’t have stanzas, it has a body, the poem doesn’t have lines,/ it has blood, the poem is not written with letters, it’s written/ with grains of sand and kisses, petals and moments, shouts and/ uncertainties.”

“By noon, silence arrives one last time, flowing into every space of her room. And before long, silence swallows sound and color and seconds and equations and entire stanzas of old poetry, leaving new words. The sheets are breathless. The room is bruised.My mother is still warm.”

“Words do not come back to me easily,so I pull out my heart and wrap itin a thin sheet of paper, let the bloodseep across in stanzas of honestyand hand it to anyone who will take itso that the still-beating heart can tell themall my secrets, all my weaknesses,because if they are not hiddenthey cannot be taken and used against me.”

“I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in. As I walked, my mind was busy fitting what I saw with appropriate words; when I sat by the roadside, I would either read or a pencil and a penny version-book would be in my hand, to note the features of the scene or commemorate some halting stanzas. Thus I lived with words.”

“Here bhikkhus, some misguided men learn the Dhamma–discourses, stanzas, expositions, verses, exclamations, sayings, birth stories, marvels, and answers to questions–but having learned the Dhamma, they do not examine the meaning of those teachings with wisdom. Not examining the meaning of those teachings with wisdom, they do not gain a reflective acceptance of them. Instead they learn the Dhamma only for the sake of criticising others and for winning in debates, and they do not experience the good for the sake of which they learned the Dhamma.”

“The Song of the Winged Ones is a song of celebration, written as though the singer were standing on the Dragon Isle watching the dragons flying in the sun. The words are full of wonder at the beauty of the creatures; and there is a curious pause in the middle of one of the stanzas near the end, where the singer waits a full four measures in silence for those who listen to hear the music of distant dragon wings. It seldom fails to bring echoes of something beyond the silence, and is almost never performed because many bards fear it.I love it.”

“You think it’s a game?Unintelligible? Ha!Envision no spoons.This is serious.It is a matter of joyversus emptiness.”