Authors:

Linda Pastan Quotes

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

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

Linda Pastan
Eye, Broken, Way

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

Grief is a circular staircase.

Linda Pastan
Grief, Staircases

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

I regret the way pain has taught me nothing.

Linda Pastan
Pain, Regret, Way

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

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.

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

Linda Pastan
Errors, Evil, Empathy

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

Spring is the shortest season.

Linda Pastan
Spring, Seasons

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

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

You May Also Like: