A Poet Reflects

And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter—they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long.

—Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (via larmoyante)

(via merlinaminervamerlot)

I think there is a general misconception that you write poems because you ‘have something to say.’ I think, actually, that you write poems because you have something echoing around in the bone-dome of your skull that you cannot say. Poetry allows us to hold many related tangential notions in very close orbit around each other at the same time. The ‘unsayable’ thing at the center of the poem becomes visible to the poet and reader in the same way that dark matter becomes visible to the astrophysicist. You can’t see it, but by measure of its effect on the visible, it can become so precise a silhouette you can almost know it.

—Rebecca Lindenberg (via leopoldgursky)

(Source: mcsweeneys.net, via spazolot)

Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish.

—Hermann Hesse (via libraryland)

Sometimes your nearness takes my breath away; and all the things I want to say can find no voice. Then, in silence, I can only hope my eyes will speak my heart.

—Robert Sexton (via myquotelibrary)

(via myquotelibrary)

Beyond the borders of expression, beyond the lines of fear, the soul is a spirit untamed, the vessel an Artist’s creed.

—Paul Cézanne (via montanablackart)