Emily Dickinson Quotes

“Oh phosphorescence. Now there’s a word to lift your hat to... To find that phosphorescence, that light within — is the genius behind poetry.”
― William Luce, The Belle of Amherst

“She died--this was the way she died;
And when her breath was done,
Took up her simple wardrobe
And started for the sun.
Her little figure at the gate
The angels must have spied,
Since I could never find her
Upon the mortal side.”
― Emily Dickinson, Selected Poems

“I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading – treading – till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through –

And when they all were seated,
A Service, like a Drum –
Kept beating – beating – till I thought
My Mind was going numb –

And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again,
Then Space – began to toll,

As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race
Wrecked, solitary, here –

And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down –
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing – then –”
― Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

“All is as if the world did cease to exist. The city's monuments go unseen, its past unheard, and its culture slowly fading in the dismal sea.”
― Nathan Reese Maher

“open me carefully”
― Emily Dickinson, Selected Letters

“Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.

We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labour, and my leisure too,
For his civility.

We passed the school where children played,
Their lessons scarcely done;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.

We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.

Since then 'tis centuries; but each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses' heads
Were toward eternity.”
― Emily Dickinson

“How wrong Emily Dickinson was! Hope is not "the thing with feathers." The thing with feathers has turned out to be my nephew. I must take him to a specialist in Zurich.”
― Woody Allen, Without Feathers

“I miss you, mourn for you, and walk the streets alone- often at night, beside, I fall asleep in tears, for your dear face, yet not one word comes back to me. If it is finished, tell me, and I will raise the lid to my box of Phantoms, and lay one more love in; but if it lives and beats still, still lives and beats for me, then say so, and I will strike the strings to one more strain of happiness before I die.”
― Emily Dickinson, Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson

“Le monde est oval. On apprend l’eau par la soif, et la terre par le voyage en mer; la passion par les affres, et la paix par les récits de guerre; l’amour par la mort, et les oiseaux par l’hiver.”
― Emily Dickinson

“Emily Dickinson , in my opinion, is the perfect (although admittedly slightly cliche) poet for lonely fat girls.”
― Suzanne Supplee, Artichoke's Heart

“Oh Susie, I often think that I will try to tell you how very dear you are, and how I'm watching for you, but the words won't come, though the tears will, and I sit down disappointed. Yet, darling, you know it all-- then why do I seek to tell you? I do not know. In thinking of those I love, my reason is all gone from me, and I do fear sometimes that I must make a hospital for the hopelessly insane, and chain myself up there so I won't injure you.”
― Emily Dickinson, Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson

“Sweet hour, blessed hour, to carry me to you, and to bring you back to me, long enough to snatch one kiss, and whisper goodbye again.”
― Emily Dickinson, Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson

“Why else do we write and write except to move our readers?”
― Jerome Charyn, The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson

“After all, when a thought takes one's breath away, a lesson on grammar seems an impertinence.”
― Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Poems By Emily Dickinson Third Series

“And somebody has lost the face
That made existence home!”
― Emily Dickinson, Dickinson: Poems

“Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes"

First, her tippet made of tulle,
easily lifted off her shoulders and laid
on the back of a wooden chair.

And her bonnet,
the bow undone with a light forward pull.

Then the long white dress, a more
complicated matter with mother-of-pearl
buttons down the back,
so tiny and numerous that it takes forever
before my hands can part the fabric,
like a swimmer’s dividing water,
and slip inside.

You will want to know
that she was standing
by an open window in an upstairs bedroom,
motionless, a little wide-eyed,
looking out at the orchard below,
the white dress puddled at her feet
on the wide-board, hardwood floor.

The complexity of women’s undergarments
in nineteenth-century America
is not to be waved off,
and I proceeded like a polar explorer
through clips, clasps, and moorings,
catches, straps, and whalebone stays,
sailing toward the iceberg of her nakedness.

Later, I wrote in a notebook
it was like riding a swan into the night,
but, of course, I cannot tell you everything—
the way she closed her eyes to the orchard,
how her hair tumbled free of its pins,
how there were sudden dashes
whenever we spoke.

What I can tell you is
it was terribly quiet in Amherst
that Sabbath afternoon,
nothing but a carriage passing the house,
a fly buzzing in a windowpane.

So I could plainly hear her inhale
when I undid the very top
hook-and-eye fastener of her corset

and I could hear her sigh when finally it was unloosed,
the way some readers sigh when they realize
that Hope has feathers,
that Reason is a plank,
that Life is a loaded gun
that looks right at you with a yellow eye.”
― Billy Collins, Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes: Selected Poems

“All she needs is to lay down a few sentences, sometimes just a few words, on paper to feel soothed, for a moment delivered from this nameless, pointless urgency that consumes her. Even saved. What is the catastrophe from which she tries to rip these lines? Oblivion, death, the inferno of the world? She couldn't say.”
― Dominique Fortier, Les villes de papier

“Dickinson had no voice in her own time, as a woman, so she stuffed her silent screams, more than eight hundred of them, in a drawer and waited for eternity hear. And eternity did hear.”
― David Duchovny, Miss Subways

“Because of Emily Dickinson's frequent use of common meter (four lines with 8, 6, 8 and 6 syllables), it is possible to sing most of her poems to the tune of "Amazing Grace", "The Yellow Rose of Texas", or even the Gilligan's Island theme song...”
― Christopher Kovacs

“Housekeeping, to her, was a way to cultivate a woman’s submission and steal time, and she wanted nothing of it.”
― Martha Ackmann, These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson

“She wanted to think through the questions of faith herself, and she held fast to the belief that heaven on Earth would always outweigh heaven above.”
― Martha Ackmann, These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson

“. . . she also shed her youthful need to exaggerate, flaunt her wit, and trot out erudition. She still sent poems to mark an event or nudge someone to write, but her poems became less about what happened and more about what she was thinking. Poems sent in letters . . . rose above daily concerns to larger contemplations on nature, faith, and loss. Images of boats, sailors, and the view from shore appeared frequently.”
― Martha Ackmann, These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson

“She wanted her poems to translate all she saw and heard and felt, and not be any earthly thing. What she aimed for was evanescence like the brilliance of lightning, the flash of truth, or a transport so swift it felt like flight.”
― Martha Ackmann, These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson

“Emily always turned to language to soothe or lessen her distress. The letters could have served as a reminder of the pain she had experienced, but survived. Whatever purpose she had in writing remained a secret known only to her. She never shied away from looking anguish in the eye or contemplating its aftermath. To do so was an act of dominion over misery and resistance to inertia.”
― Martha Ackmann, These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson

“While Emily’s verse always drew from more than the literal details of her life, impaired vision made her rely on her imagination even more. If she could not see distinctly or at all, she would have to tap into her metaphorical reserve. She may have found that imagination gave her a richer sense of perception than what she could discern from her eyes.”
― Martha Ackmann, These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson

“Home to her was much more. It was the wild terrain of her mind. A world of hummingbirds and crickets and alabaster and dots on a disc of snow. To Emily Dickinson, home was consciousness itself—a continent of language where metaphor was her native tongue.”
― Martha Ackmann, These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson

“One reminder from Emily [Dickinson]’s life is that one needs nothing more than a small and dedicated space to make significant impact in culture.”
― Makoto Fujimura, Culture Care: Reconnecting with Beauty for Our Common Life

“The soul unto itself Is an imperial friend, — Or the most agonizing spy An enemy could send. Secure against its own, No treason it can fear; Itself its sovereign, of itself The soul should stand in awe.”
― Emily Dickinson, 100 Selected Poems, Emily Dickinson

“Emily sabe algo que los demás no saben. Sabe que nunca amaremos más que a un puñado de personas y que ese puñado puede dispersarse en cualquier momento, como los vilanos del diente de león, por el soplo de la muerte. También sabe que la escritura es el ángel de la resurrección.”
― Christian Bobin

“Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
And Immortality.”
― Emily Dickinson