The Essential Emily Dickinson Quotes

“Had I not seen the sun
I could’ve borne the shade
but light a newer wilderness
my wilderness has made—”
― Emily Dickinson, The Essential Emily Dickinson: A curated selection introduced by Joyce Carol Oates, featuring iconic poems like 'Because I could not stop for Death' on love, nature, and the soul

“The wind took up the Northern things
and piled them in the South—
then gave the East unto the West
and opening his mouth

The four divisions of the Earth
did make as to devour
while everything to corners slunk
behind the awful power—

The wind—unto his chambers went
and nature ventured out—
her subjects scattered into place
her systems ranged about

Again the smoke from dwellings rose
the day abroad was heard—
how intimate, a tempest past
the transport of the bird—”
― Emily Dickinson, The Essential Emily Dickinson: A curated selection introduced by Joyce Carol Oates, featuring iconic poems like 'Because I could not stop for Death' on love, nature, and the soul

“She dealt her pretty words like blades—
how glittering they shone—
and every one unbared a nerve
or wantoned with a bone—

She never deemed—she hurt—
that—is not steel’s affair—
a vulgar grimace in the flesh—
how ill the creatures bear—

To ache is human—not polite—
the film upon the eye
mortality’s old custom—
just locking up—to die.”
― Emily Dickinson, The Essential Emily Dickinson: A curated selection introduced by Joyce Carol Oates, featuring iconic poems like 'Because I could not stop for Death' on love, nature, and the soul

“Great streets of silence led away
to neighbourhood of pause—
here was no notice—no dissent
no universe—no laws—

By clocks, ’twas morning, and for night
the bells at distance called—
but epoch had no basis here
for period exhaled.”
― Emily Dickinson, The Essential Emily Dickinson: A curated selection introduced by Joyce Carol Oates, featuring iconic poems like 'Because I could not stop for Death' on love, nature, and the soul

“The heart has narrow banks
it measures like the sea
in mighty—unremitting bass
and blue monotony

Till hurricane bisect
and as itself discerns
it’s sufficient area
the heart convulsive learns

That calm is but a wall
of unattempted gauze
an instant’s push demolishes
a questioning—dissolves.”
― Emily Dickinson, The Essential Emily Dickinson: A curated selection introduced by Joyce Carol Oates, featuring iconic poems like 'Because I could not stop for Death' on love, nature, and the soul

“To whom the mornings stand for nights,
what must the midnights—be!”
― Emily Dickinson, The Essential Emily Dickinson: A curated selection introduced by Joyce Carol Oates, featuring iconic poems like 'Because I could not stop for Death' on love, nature, and the soul

“This was in the white of the year—
that—was in the green—
drifts were as difficult then to think
as daisies now to be seen—

Looking back is best that is left
or if it be—before—
retrospection is prospect’s half,
sometimes, almost more.”
― Emily Dickinson, The Essential Emily Dickinson: A curated selection introduced by Joyce Carol Oates, featuring iconic poems like 'Because I could not stop for Death' on love, nature, and the soul

“My life closed twice before its close—
it yet remains to see
if immortality unveil
a third event to me.

So huge, so hopeless to conceive
as these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven,
and all we need of hell.”
― Emily Dickinson, The Essential Emily Dickinson: A curated selection introduced by Joyce Carol Oates, featuring iconic poems like 'Because I could not stop for Death' on love, nature, and the soul

“Have you got a brook in your little heart,
where bashful flowers blow,
and blushful birds go down to drink,
and shadows tremble so—
and nobody knows, so still it flows,
that any brook is there,
and yet your little draught of life
is daily drunken there.”
― Emily Dickinson, The Essential Emily Dickinson: A curated selection introduced by Joyce Carol Oates, featuring iconic poems like 'Because I could not stop for Death' on love, nature, and the soul