Linda Pastan Quotes

• Poetry is not a code to be broken but a way of seeing with the eyes shut.

  Linda Pastan

  Eye, Broken, Way

  15 Copy quote

• I made a list of things I have
  to remember and a list
  of things I want to forget,
  but I see they are the same list.

  Linda Pastan

  Want, Lists, Remember

  Linda Pastan (2009). “給要離家的女兒”, p.44, 書林出版有限公司

  11 Copy quote

• Grief is a circular staircase.

  Linda Pastan

  Grief, Staircases

  4 Copy quote

• There are poems
  that are never written,
  that simply move across
  the mind
  like skywriting
  on a still day:
  slowly the first word
  drifts west,
  the last letters dissolve
  on the tongue,
  and what is left
  is the pure blue
  of insight, without cloud
  or comfort.

  Linda Pastan

  Moving, Clouds, Blue

  Linda Pastan (2009). “給要離家的女兒”, p.38, 書林出版有限公司

  11 Copy quote

• I regret the way pain has taught me nothing.

  Linda Pastan

  Pain, Regret, Way

  4 Copy quote

• What we want
  is never simple.
  We move among the things
  we thought we wanted:
  a face, a room, an open book
  and these things bear our names -
  now they want us.
  But what we want appears
  in dreams, wearing disguises.
  We fall past,
  holding out our arms
  and in the morning
  our arms ache.
  We don't remember the dream,
  but the dream remembers us.
  It is there all day
  as an animal is there
  under the table,
  as the stars are there.

  Linda Pastan

  Dream, Morning, Stars

  10 Copy quote

• What we want is never simple.

  Linda Pastan

  Inspirational, Adversity, Simple

  "What We Want". Poem by Linda Pastan, as published in her book "Carnival Evening: New and Selected Poems, 1968-1998", 1998.

  6 Copy quote

• Evil is simply
  a grammatical error:
  a failure to leap
  the precipice
  between "he"
  and "I.

  Linda Pastan

  Errors, Evil, Empathy

  6 Copy quote

• Just looking at them I grow greedy, as if they were freshly baked loaves waiting on their shelves to be broken open--that one and that--and I make my choice in a mood of exalted luck, browsing among them like a cow in sweetest pasture. For life is continuous as long as they wait to be read--these inked paths opening into the future, page after page, every book its own receding horizon. And I hold them, one in each hand, a curious ballast weighing me here to earth.

  Linda Pastan

  Book, Hands, Long

  7 Copy quote

• Spring is the shortest season.

  Linda Pastan

  Spring, Seasons

  4 Copy quote

• I have dreamed of our bed as if it were a shore where we would be washed up, not this striped mattress we must cover with sheets. [from "After an Absence"]

  Linda Pastan

  Bed, Would Be, Absence

  6 Copy quote

• I am tired of the litany
  of months, September October
  I am tired of the way the seasons
  keep changing, mimicking
  the seasons of the flesh
  which are real and finite.

  Linda Pastan

  Real, Tired, Flesh

  7 Copy quote

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