power-of-words

Writing has nothing to do with meaning. It has to do with landsurveying and cartography, including the mapping of countries yet to come.

I wasn__ reading poetry because my aim was to work my way through English Literature in Prose A__.But this was different.I started to cry.(_)The unfamiliar and beautiful play made things bearable that day, and the things it made bearable were another failed family__he first one was not my fault, but all adopted children blame themselves. The second failure was definitely my fault.I was confused about sex and sexuality, and upset about the straightforward practical problems of where to live, what to eat, and how to do my A levels.I had no one to help me, but the T.S. Eliot helped me.So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn__ be read at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language__nd that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers__ language powerful enough to say how it is.It isn__ a hiding place. It is a finding place.

We may feel bitterly how little our poems can do in the face of seemingly out of control technological power and seemingly limitless corporate greed, yet it has always been true that poetry can break isolation, show us to ourselves when we are outlawed or made invisible, remind us of beauty where no beauty seems possible, remind us kinship where all is represented as separation.", The Nation, October 7, 1996)

There is nothing at all that can be talked about adequately, and the whole art of poetry is to say what can't be said.

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?

The books brought brilliance to my life, and they brought an understanding: Life is a story. Everything that has happened and will happen to me is all part of the story of this enchanted place - all the dreams and visions and understandings that come to me in my dungeon cell. The books helped me see the truth is not in the touch of the stone but in what the stone tells you.

Life has no remote....get up and change it yourself!

Men still have everything to say about their sexuality, and everything to write. For what they have said so far, for the most part, stems from the opposition activity/passivity, from the power relation between a fantasized obligatory virility meantto invade, to colonize, and the consequential phantasm of woman as a __arkcontinent_ to penetrate and to __acify._ (We know what __acify_ means in terms ofscotomizing the other and misrecognizing the self.) Conquering her, they__e madehaste to depart from her borders, to get out of sight, out of body. The way man hasof getting out of himself and into her whom he takes not for the other but for hisown, deprives him, he knows, of his own bodily territory. One can understandhow man, confusing himself with his penis and rushing in for the attack, mightfeel resentment and fear of being __aken_ by the woman, of being lost in her,absorbed, or alone.

Words provide a voice to our deepest feelings. I tell you, words have started and stopped wars. Words have built and lost fortunes. Words have saved and taken lives. Words have won and lost great kingdoms. Even Buddha said, 'Whatever words we utter should be chosen with care, for people will hear them and be influenced by them for good or ill.

There exists, for everyone, a sentence - a series of words - that has the power to destroy you. Another sentence exists, another series of words, that could heal you. If you're lucky you will get the second, but you can be certain of getting the first.

Reading and writing dangerous books lets me be who I can't be and say what I can't say in everyday life.

What avail is honour or a sword against a pen?

There is just too much cruelty, selfishness and corruption in the world not to want to crush the poisonous will of those who cause it by writing about it as powerfully as I can.

That was originally what I had loved him for: that at a period when our native land was nude and crude and provincial, when the famous 'atmosphere' it is supposed to lack was not even missed, when literature was lonely there and art and form akmost impossible, he had found the means to live and write like one of the first; to be free and general and not at all afraid; to feel, understand, and express everything.

Make a promise to yourself right now, that you will choose your thoughts and words wisely, that you will no longer use disempowered language about yourself, and nor will you ever negatively define yourself by what has occurred in your past.

of all the weapons of destruction that man could invent, the most terrible-and the most powerful-was the word. Daggers and spears left traces of blood; arrows could be seen at a distance. Poisons were detected in the end and avoided. But the word managed to destroy without leaving clues.

The monuments of wit survive the monuments of power.

God answers all prayers, but sometimes his answer is 'no'! And you may become upset because he said no. But open up your eyes and look around at the things he said yes to.