"A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh. "
— Leonard Cohen

"i would like to remind
the management
that the drinks are watered
and the hat-check girl
has syphilis
and the band is composed
of former ss monsters
However since it is
new year's eve
and i have lip cancer
i will place my
paper hat on my
concussion and dance"
— Leonard Cohen

"The one you love and the one who loves you are never, ever the same person."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will."
— Chuck Palahniuk

"Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I've ever known."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"No matter how careful you are, there's going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn't experience it all. There's that fallen heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should've been paying attention.
Well, get used to that feeling. That's how your whole life will feel some day.
This is all practice."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"Talk to strangers
when the family fails and friends lead you astray
when Buddha laughs and Jesus weeps and it turns out God is gay.
'Cause angels and messiahs love can come in many forms:
in the hallways of your projects, or the fat girl in your dorm,
and when you finally take the time to see what they’re about
perhaps you find them lonely or their wisdom trips you out."
— Saul Williams

"They say that I am a poet
I wonder what they would say if they saw me from the inside I bottle
emotions and place them into the sea for others to unbottle on
distant shores I am unsure as to whether they ever reach and for
that matter as to whether I ever get my point across
or my love"
— Saul Williams

"You can get used to eating breakfast with a man in a fedora. You can get used to anything, my mother was in the habit of saying."
— Anne Carson (Plainwater: Essays and Poetry)

"Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief."
— Anne Carson (Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides)

"This is what happened in love. One of you cried a lot and then both of you grew sarcastic."
— Lorrie Moore (Like Life)

""The thing to remember about love affairs," says Simone, "is that they are all like having raccoons in your chimney."
...

"We have raccoons sometimes in our chimney," explains Simone.
"And once we tried to smoke them out. We lit a fire, knowing they were there, but we hoped the smoke would cause them to scurry out the top and never come back. Instead, they caught on fire and came crashing down into our living room, all charred and in flames and running madly around until they dropped dead." Simone swallows some wine. "Love affairs are like that," she says. "They are all like that.""
— Lorrie Moore

"When you were six you thought mistress meant to put your shoes on the wrong feet. Now you are older and know it can mean many things, but essentially it means to put your shoes on the wrong feet. "
— Lorrie Moore

"Make a list of all the lovers you've ever had.

Warren Lasher
Ed "Rubberhead" Catapano
Charles Deats or Keats
Alfonse

Tuck it in your pocket. Leave it lying around, conspicuously. Somehow you lose it. Make "mislaid" jokes to yourself. Make another list."
— Lorrie Moore

"I don’t go back and look at my early work, because the last time I did, many years ago, it left me cringing. If one publishes, then one is creating a public record of Learning to Write."
— Lorrie Moore

"Are you angry? Punch a pillow. Was it satisfying? Not hardly. These days people are too angry for punching. What you might try is stabbing. Take an old pillow and lay it on the front lawn. Stab it with a big pointy knife. Again and again and again. Stab hard enough for the point of the knife to go into the ground. Stab until the pillow is gone and you are just stabbing the earth again and again, as if you want to kill it for continuing to spin, as if you are getting revenge for having to live on this planet day after day, alone."
— Miranda July (No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories)

"Look at the sky: that is for you. Look at each person's face as you pass on the street: those faces are for you. And the street itself, and the ground under the street, and the ball of fire underneath the ground: all these things are for you. There are as much for you as they are for other people. Remember this when you wake up in the morning and think you have nothing."
— Miranda July (No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories)

"Some part of me knew he would show up, that if I stood in one place long enough he would find me, like you're taught to do when you're lost. But they never taught us what to do if both of you are lost, and you both end up in the same place, waiting."
— Nick Flynn (Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir)

"There are many ways to drown, only the most obvious wave their arms as they're going under."
— Nick Flynn (Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir)

"I meet a person, and in my mind I'm saying three minutes; I give you three minutes to show me the spark."
— Amy Hempel (The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel)

"The other day I was playing Scrabble. I saw that I could close the space in D-E- -Y. I had an N and an F. Which do you think I chose? What was the word I made?"
— Amy Hempel (The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel)

"I think you would like Warren. He drinks Courvoisier in a Coke can, and has a laugh like you'd find in a cartoon bubble."
— Amy Hempel (The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel)

"And so it goes..."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college."
— Kurt Vonnegut (A Man Without a Country)

"Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse-Five)

"How nice--to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.
So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse-Five)

"When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"Ting-a-ling mother fucker."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Timequake)

"There is no God and we are his prophets."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

"Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said. You might want to think about that.
You forget some things, dont you?
Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

"How does a man decide in what order to abandon his life?"
— Cormac McCarthy (No Country for Old Men)

"I don't know why I started writing. I don't know why anybody does it. Maybe they're bored, or failures at something else."
— Cormac McCarthy

"Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

"...the trouble with poetry is
that it encourages the writing of more poetry...
"
— Billy Collins (The Trouble with Poetry: And Other Poems)

"This is freedom. This is the force of faith. Nobody gets what they want. Never again are you the same. The longing
is to be pure. What you get is to be changed."
— Jorie Graham

"Them lady poets must not marry, pal."
— John Berryman (The Dream Songs)

"Sonnet XVII

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way than this:

where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep. "
— Pablo Neruda

"After the first glass of vodka
you can accept just about anything
of life even your own mysteriousness
you think it is nice that a box
of matches is purple and brown and is called La Petite and comes from Sweden
for they are words that you know and that is all you know words not their feelings or what they mean and you write because you know them not because you understand them because you don't you are stupid and lazy and will never be great but you do what you know because what else is there?"
— Frank O'Hara (The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara)

"Kerouac: You're ruining American poetry, O'Hara.
O'Hara: That's more than you ever did for it, Kerouac"
— Frank O'Hara

"That's not a run in your stocking, it's a hand on your leg."
— Frank O'Hara

"I am this space my body believes in."
— Yusef Komunyakaa (Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems)

"I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,
but because it never forgot what it could do.
"
— Naomi Shihab Nye

"To raise the veil.
To see what you're saying goodbye to."
— Louise Glück

""Intense love always leads to mourning.""
— Louise Glück (The Triumph of Achilles)

"You were. You are
The brightest thing in the shop window
And the most beautiful seldom I ever saw"
— Mary Jo Bang

"T. S. Eliot taught us you can write about your nervous breakdown, but call it 'The Wasteland' and make it big and crazy enough to hide behind."
— Mary Jo Bang

"The poet's job is to put into words those feelings we all have that are so deep, so important, and yet so difficult to name, to tell the truth in such a beautiful way, that people cannot live without it."
— Jane Kenyon

"Let it come, as it will, and don't
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.
"
— Jane Kenyon (Let Evening Come)

"There is always something to do. There are hungry people to feed, naked people to clothe, sick people to comfort and make well. And while I don't expect you to save the world I do think it's not asking too much for you to love those with whom you sleep, share the happiness of those whom you call friend, engage those among you who are visionary and remove from your life those who offer you depression, despair and disrespect."
— Nikki Giovanni